If You Don't Take It, You're Going to Be Left Behind

Responding to: The Self-Destructive Opposition to Data Centers — The Editors · 2026-08-24

What the Piece Argues

The National Review editors argue that the rapid spread of anti-data-center sentiment across red, purple, and blue states has hardened into a moral panic, with Governor Kathy Hochul signing New York’s moratorium on hyperscaler builds, Governor Josh Shapiro reversing his position in Pennsylvania, and Governor Greg Abbott halting approvals in Texas pending an audit — all in an election year. They contend that most of the specific public concerns (water usage, electricity prices, noise, and pollution) are unfounded and that data centers are “astonishingly clean” compared with other industrial projects. The editors cast President Trump as the only politician unmoved by the panic and endorse his warning that rejecting the AI build-out means ceding it to China or other competitors. They close with a historical claim that Americans have never benefited from rejecting a transformative technology and urge the country to build the AI infrastructure at home.

Receipts

The piece frames bipartisan data-center opposition as a moral panic while treating every economic promise from hyperscaler developers as self-evident truth.

• What the framing wants you to believe: Local opposition is irrational and historically unprecedented; data centers are clean, quiet, and economically miraculous; the only serious position is to welcome them and shame the towns that won’t.
• What’s really going on: Hyperscale campuses draw genuinely large loads of water and electricity, and their siting decisions are documented drivers of utility-rate increases in host communities — concerns the editorial dismisses as “nonsense” without engaging the underlying data. Loudoun County alone hosts roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic through about 200 data centers, and Dominion Energy’s December 2024 Integrated Resource Plan raised its data-center demand forecast by 17% in a single filing — adding 7 GW to a grid that residential ratepayers underwrite. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission has since approved a separate Dominion rate class for large-scale users, the policy mechanism by which data-center load growth becomes a residential bill.
• Who benefits: The hyperscaler developers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and the AI-lab compute arms of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI) plus their construction and chip vendors (Nvidia, Bechtel, DPR, Turner, Whiting-Turner), and the politicians and localities that have already locked in subsidies, industrial revenue bonds, and tax abatements.
• The mechanism: Patriotism laundering — the editorial transposes a local water-and-rate fight onto a Cold War frame (“In America, by Americans” vs. “In China, by the Chinese”) so that any NIMBY homeowner becomes, by implication, an accessory of Beijing. Trump’s quoted line does the heavy lifting: “if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”
• The omitted fact: The piece concedes in passing that “there is no reason that taxpayers should provide subsidies to the corporations that are building data centers, or that eminent domain should be used” — and never returns to it. That concession is the entire reason the ratepayers in Loudoun, Prince William, Phoenix, The Dalles, Quincy, and the new Pennsylvania and Texas fights are organized. The “enormous” tax revenues the editors tout are, in the deals actually on the table, largely captured by the developers through multi-decade abatements.
• Anchor citation: “the vast majority of the sensationalist claims that are made about data centers are nonsense. They do not use a notable amount of water. They do not tend to increase the cost of electricity. They are not unusually noisy. Indeed, compared with almost any other industrial project, they are astonishingly clean.” — National Review editors, “The Self-Destructive Opposition to Data Centers” (2026).

The Response Ladder

Polite Reframe

When to use: A measured-but-firm counter at a town-hall forum, op-ed page, or neighborhood association meeting where the other side expects to win on civility points.

You’ve quoted the editors’ line that there are “no historical examples of Americans rejecting a new development and benefiting from that rejection.” That’s a sweeping claim about a very specific local fight. The historical cases they parade — autos, radio, aviation, the internet — were largely market-driven with diffuse costs and willing buyers. A 300-megawatt hyperscale campus sited on a rural sole-source aquifer, drawing down the local grid and shifting rate increases onto households that never consented, is a different category of object. The piece itself concedes that subsidies and eminent domain are legitimate concerns, and then never returns to them — which is precisely the part of the deal the voters in Pennsylvania and Texas are reacting to. “Build it here, by Americans, for Americans” sounds patriotic until you read the tax abatement schedule and notice who the “for” is. The 7 percent strong-favor Gallup number isn’t a moral panic. It is the measured response of communities asked to underwrite a server farm for a billion-dollar AI lab and deciding to read the contract first.

Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: When someone posts the editorial unironically in a group chat and you want to wound it without getting yourself moderated.

Oh good — the National Review editors have weighed in on whether your township should host a 300-megawatt compute shed. Surely the people who have never once attended your zoning board are the right folks to lecture you about your moral panic over the water table. They have compared your local data-center fight to the Luddites, the anti-nuclear movement, and the 5G conspiracists in the same paragraph, which is what you do when you cannot actually answer a utility-rate question. “There are no historical examples of Americans rejecting a new development and benefiting from that rejection.” Cool. Name one historical example of a town that lost its aquifer to a hyperscaler and was glad about it. The editors call the concerns “nonsense” the same way a developer calls a moratorium “extreme” — by deciding in advance that nothing the locals say counts. Seven percent. That’s the number the editorial’s own citation produces, and the editorial treats it like an asterisk. The piece isn’t arguing with the polls. The piece is begging you to ignore them.

Nuclear Satire

When to use: When you want the response itself to be the receipt — satire that converts the undecided by making the editors’ framing sound exactly as unhinged as it is.

Welcome to the official editorial position of National Review: seven percent of Americans “strongly favor” the construction of a data center in their area, and the other ninety-three percent are a moral panic. The historical-examples paragraph is the masterpiece. The automobile was a market product bought by consumers. Radio was a market product bought by advertisers. Aviation, integrated circuits, GPS, the internet, smartphones — all market products whose costs were diffused across willing buyers. None of them arrived with a tax abatement, a 30-year exemption, and an eminent-domain lawyer. None of them required your county to issue industrial revenue bonds so a hyperscaler could pump a million gallons a day out of a sole-source aquifer to cool ChatGPT inference for a coast that isn’t yours. The editors’ comparison class is everything. Their actual subject is the one case where the comparison doesn’t fit. They know this. That’s why the historical list is a paragraph long and the utility-rate analysis is zero paragraphs long.

And the roll-call is so clean it squeaks. The automobile, the airplane, the integrated circuit, the lunar landing, the internet, the smartphone — every American innovation that scaled pure and untouched, no regulation required. What a coincidence that Love Canal, 1978, doesn’t make the list. What a coincidence that Three Mile Island, 1979, doesn’t make the list. What a coincidence that Flint, 2014, doesn’t make the list. Three American innovations that needed to be regulated into not killing people, and three American innovations the editorial cannot remember.

“Build it in America, by Americans, for Americans” — beautiful. Now tell us how many of those Americans got to vote on the water contract. The piece calls voter opposition a “moral panic,” concedes that subsidies and eminent domain are legitimate grievances, and then drops both on the floor. That’s not an argument. That’s a fundraising email with a think piece stapled to it.

Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: When the “moral panic” framing has been deployed against your community, your electric bill, your water rights, or your zoning authority — and you have decided that civility has paid for itself and you are done being polite about it.

Let’s be fucking clear about what the “moral panic” framing is for. It is not an argument. It is a silencing device. It exists so that when a county commissioner asks a hyperscaler to pay for the substation upgrade, a columnist can write a long piece calling her a Chicken Little. It exists so that when a governor pauses approvals for an audit, the same columnist can put her on a list with anti-vaxxers and 5G truthers. It exists so that the phrase “data center” gets the same treatment as “fracking” or “GMO” — not because the technology is the same, but because the companies are the same and the playbook is the same.

The playbook is: take a real industrial project with real costs, frame any opposition as irrational, demand patriotic surrender, and collect public subsidies, eminent domain land grabs, cheap power, and water rights as the price of being called a serious grown-up. Anyone who has lived near a corporate feedlot, a copper mine, a pipeline easement, or a frac-well has seen this fucking movie before. The only thing new is that the props are servers instead of smokestacks.

And the historical roll-call, my God. The piece name-drops the automobile, the airplane, the integrated circuit, the lunar landing, the internet, and the smartphone — every American innovation that scaled clean and pure, no harm, no regulation, no asbestos, no lead, no tobacco, no opioid marketing, no subprime mortgage fraud, no Love Canal, no Three Mile Island, no Flint. What a coincidence. What a fucking coincidence that every American innovation the piece can remember is the kind that worked, and every American innovation that needed to be regulated into not killing people is conveniently absent from the roll-call.

The 7% number — the only “data point” in the whole piece — is itself a Gallup poll on a question that the piece does not quote. The piece does not tell you what the question was. It does not tell you what “strongly favor” means. It does not tell you whether respondents were answering about a hypothetical data center in their community or a data center somewhere else, or whether the question even mentioned AI. The 7% is the load-bearing beam of the entire moral-panic argument, and the piece treats it as a fact about as casually verified as the speed of light.

And then there is the Trump bit. The piece cannot find a single politician besides Trump willing to defend the technology — because the piece is correct. Every governor mentioned in the piece is responding to documented constituent pressure about real infrastructure costs. The piece needs Trump to be the sane one because if Trump is the lone voice, then anyone who disagrees with Trump is, by definition, the moral panic. That is not a policy argument. That is a rhetorical trick built on the world’s most polarizing politician, deployed to defend the world’s most powerful tech monopolies.

So no. No, the answer is not “In America, built by Americans, for Americans, with the jobs, economic benefits, and tax revenues benefiting Americans.” The answer is: in America, built by the corporations that capture the profits, subsidized by the taxpayers that don’t, powered by the ratepayers that absorb the grid costs, watered by the aquifers that get drained, sited by the eminent domain that takes the land, and defended by the writers who call every objection a moral panic.

The data center is going to get built. Somewhere. The question — the actual question, the question the piece is trying to make unaskable — is whether the people hosting it get a seat at the table, or whether the table is reserved for the corporations and the writers who keep insisting that asking for one is un-American.