The Thing It's About Is Not Really What It's About

Responding to: What the Data Center Revolt Is Really About — Joshua S. Treviño · 2026-09-15

What the Piece Argues

A September 2026 essay by Joshua S. Treviño in National Review argues that opposition to AI and data centers among rural and conservative Americans is not really about the material concerns its opponents raise — water consumption, electricity strain, environmental degradation — but about a deeper cultural anxiety about the loss of “Americanness” and the imposition of an alienating elite consensus. Invoking Shelby Foote’s Civil War interview of a Confederate soldier fighting “because you’re here,” the piece argues opposition persists regardless of any empirical answer to material questions, conceding only that some opposition is astroturfed and that material questions are “empirically answerable.” The essay closes by validating the cultural grievance as legitimate dignity-seeking and arguing that “Americans who remember what America means” should resist AI’s “final passage” into the irrelevance of man.

Receipts

The framing’s core move is relocating the entire debate from material harms to an unfalsifiable cultural grievance — which is exactly the move the data center industry would write if it were commissioning the column itself.

• The framing wants you to believe that community opposition to data centers is really about dignity and identity, and that resource concerns (water, electricity, grid strain) are secondary — “empirically answerable” questions that miss the point entirely.

• The framing wants you to believe that resolving the material objections would not reduce opposition, making further negotiation or concession pointless.

• The framing wants you to believe that this opposition is a coherent populist expression of cultural preservation, comparable to a soldier defending his home.

• What’s really going on is that data centers impose documented material costs on the communities that host them — costs the framing declines to engage on the merits by declaring them “not really what it’s about.” That move is a gift to every utility ratepayer-funded transmission upgrade, every rural water district about to be asked to subsidize hyperscale cooling, and every county government that just signed a multi-decade tax abatement for an industry whose profits flow to concentrated coastal capital.

• What’s really going on is that declaring a policy debate unfalsifiable is the most effective way to prevent the industry from ever having to pay the actual cost of what it builds. If the grievance is “dignity,” there is no dollar figure that resolves it — and no regulatory demand that sticks to it. The material costs, by contrast, are quantifiable, negotiable, and legally actionable. The framing moves the argument off the field where communities have leverage and onto a field where they have none.

• What’s really going on is that the framing concedes opposition is partly “astroturfed” and “generated by competing interests” but then pivots to a narrative that makes every material objection look like a proxy for something nobody can fix — which is the single most useful conclusion the industry could hope to land.

Anchor: The U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have both tracked data center electricity consumption rising sharply, with utilities including Dominion Energy in Virginia and Alliant Energy in Iowa filing integrated resource plans that document transmission and generation upgrades driven primarily by data center load. Rural water districts in Iowa, Nebraska, and Virginia have raised documented concerns about cooling-water draw from the same aquifers serving residential users, and long-term property-tax abatements — sometimes running two or three decades — have been standard in deals with hyperscale operators across these states.

The Response Ladder

Polite Reframe

When to use: a persuadable family member or neighbor who’s read the piece and is taken by the cultural-anxiety frame; you want to keep the relationship intact while restoring the material questions they were taught to dismiss.

There is a community outside a small town — let’s call her Sandra, runs a cattle operation her family has had since before her grandfather was born. Three years ago a developer approached the county commissioners about siting a hyperscale data center on what had been crop ground. Sandra asked the planner how many gallons of water the facility would draw per day. The planner said the company had not finalized the figure. Sandra asked how it would affect the aquifer her cattle depend on. The planner said the study was forthcoming. Sandra asked whether the electricity-rate increase her neighbors had been warned about would be offset. The planner said he did not have that.

Joshua S. Treviño’s September 2026 essay in National Review, “What the Data Center Revolt Is Really About,” advances a clean argument: opposition to AI and data centers is not really about the material concerns — water, electricity, environmental degradation — that the opposition names. “The thing it’s about is not really what it’s about.” That sentence is the move that protects the buildout. It says to Sandra: the water in your aquifer is a question with an answer; the answers will not change your mind, because your mind is set somewhere else — on dignity, on Americanness, on a Calvin Coolidge speech in 1926. The real-estate developer, the utility, the AI hyperscaler get to proceed without having to publish the numbers, because the numbers are now incidental.

The conservative tradition Treviño reaches for is real, and it can be honored here. Coolidge, quoted in the essay, said that “the things of the spirit come first.” Fine. Here is a thing of the spirit, from the same conservative tradition he claims: the freedom of a community to govern the siting of an industrial facility that draws from its aquifer and runs up its electricity bills. That tradition would require the developer to answer Sandra’s questions. The piece’s frame inverts this tradition. It converts an opposition with answers into an opposition without answers, and therefore without policy recourse. That is the operation the cultural-anxiety frame performs for the AI capital class: it neutralizes the only opposition the buildout actually has to fear.

If your family member has come home from a conservative outlet persuaded that the data-center opposition is really about Americanness, this is what they were taught to dismiss: the drinking water of their neighbors. The actual conservatism would not teach them to dismiss it. The actual conservatism, like Coolidge’s conservatism, would teach them to defend the dignity of the citizen against the indifference of the corporation.

Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: a Twitter reply or comment thread where the piece is being cited to neutralize local opposition; use to perform for the bystander while showing the voter they are being used.

The mind-reading is impressive, I have to admit. Joshua S. Treviño, writing in National Review this September, knows — he knows, mind you, without having met a single one of the people he is talking about — that the women and men showing up to county commissioner meetings about data centers in their towns are not really showing up about the data centers. They are showing up about Americanness. About Coolidge. About a Confederate soldier Shelby Foote interviewed in 1958. About a “false anthropology of AI.” About the irrelevance of man. The data center, the water, the electricity, the noise, the diesel generators, the property values — these are all just set dressing. The real show is the one Treviño is writing about in his head.

He has got the receipts for the water question: the question is “empirically answerable.” He has got the receipts for the electricity question: ditto. He has got the receipts for the property-value question: also empirically answerable. So all those empirically answerable questions, in his telling, are not what the meetings are about. They are the costume the meetings are wearing while the meetings are about something else entirely, which is — and this is where the analysis becomes impressive — a feeling of cultural displacement that Treviño has decided on behalf of the people having the meetings, without consulting them.

And the punchline, the clean kill shot, the rhetorical closer: “The thing it’s about is not really what it’s about.”

You have to admire the elegance. A piece that names no AI company, no data-center developer, no utility, no water-rights holder, no transmission-line operator, no county commissioner who voted for the rezoning — but does explain, at length, what is going on in the hearts of the people who showed up to oppose all of the above. The beneficiaries of the data-center buildout are completely absent from the essay, and the people being harmed by the data-center buildout are presented as not really being harmed, they are being displaced — spiritually, culturally, existentially. The aquifer is fine. The electricity bill is fine. The diesel backup generators running at 2 a.m. are fine. What is not fine is the feeling.

This is, by some distance, the most considerate framing of concentrated capital’s interests that I have read this year. It tells the rank-and-file voter that his concerns are real, that his dignity is real, that his Americanness is real — and that his concerns about the actual data center are not what his concerns are about. He can go on feeling dignified. The data center can go on drawing water. Everybody wins. Well — everybody except the people whose concerns just got translated, in real time, into a form that has no policy lever.

The voters being told their concerns are really about their feelings are the voters whose concerns are not being met. The water is still being drawn. The electricity rates are still being raised. The aquifer is still dropping. The inversion from material question to cultural grievance performs the operation the AI capital class benefits from: it converts opposition with answers into opposition without answers, and proceeds.

Treviño’s essay is, if you set it down and look at the architecture, a public-relations instrument for the data-center buildout, written in the cadence of cultural conservative sympathy. It does its job. The job is not to dismiss the voters’ feelings. The job is to make sure the voters’ questions never get answered. That is the operation. Read it again with that in mind and the whole thing turns over like a glove.

Nuclear Satire

When to use: a Substack reply or long social thread where the audience already understands the structural critique and wants the receipts deployed with maximal force; use to name the AI capital class, expose the cultural-anxiety frame as a power-protection operation, and make the grotesquerie of the framing visible.

Look at the operation. Just look at it.

Joshua S. Treviño, in National Review, September 2026, has produced what may be the most efficient piece of industrial advocacy ever published in the conservative intellectual press. It runs about 1,400 words. It names no AI company. It names no data-center developer. It names no utility. It names no commissioner who voted for the rezoning. It names no consulting firm that wrote the environmental impact statement. It names no water-rights holder whose aquifer is being depleted. It names no transmission-line operator whose build-out is being added to the rate base. It names, by my count, exactly one outside institution — Shelby Foote, dead since 2005 — and it names him to make a literary analogy. The literal antagonist of the data-center buildout is absent from this essay. The literal beneficiary of the data-center buildout is absent from this essay. The essay is, structurally, a story about Americans with no Americans, an industry with no industry, and an opposition with no opposition. There is only the feeling.

The structure of the argument is what makes it work. A small, polite concession — “material questions are empirically answerable” — sits at the front of the essay and costs the writer nothing. Behind it, advanced by the framing as a whole, is an enormous claim: opposition is really about cultural anxiety, and material concessions are irrelevant, and therefore the buildout proceeds unconstrained. The polite concession is a paragraph. The undefended claim is the entire AI capex pipeline of the United States. The structure holds only if you do not look at what it actually concedes: it concedes that the questions are answerable, and then announces that the answers do not matter. That is a permission slip.

Then there is the recategorization. Treviño writes as if a community’s question about a data center’s water draw can be settled with a number on a page. But that is not the question the community is asking. The community is asking: who bears the cost of this draw, by what mechanism, and at whose benefit? That is a distributional question, and it is not answerable with a number — it is answerable only with a siting decision, a water-rights adjudication, a community-benefit agreement, an environmental impact statement that names specific affected parties. Treviño has answered none of these questions in his essay because none of these questions would survive his framing if he did. So the questions are recategorized out of existence, and the material opposition is recategorized as cultural grievance.

Then there is the category itself. A new category is created — “cultural anxiety about Americanness” — that has no policy mechanism, no public-interest standing, no administrative lever. Concerns that have no mechanism cannot constrain a buildout. The buildout proceeds. The aquifer is drawn down. The electricity rate rises. The community is told their concerns are “really” about their feelings. They are left with their feelings and the data center.

Let me name for you the absent beneficiaries of this framing, since the essay will not: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, Anthropic — the AI hyperscalers building the largest concentrated capital expenditure in the United States since the railroad boom. Equinix, Digital Realty, CyrusOne — the data-center REITs that own the buildings. Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Georgia Power, Arizona Public Service — the utilities whose rate bases are growing because the data centers are growing. The major general-contracting firms that build the shells. BlackRock, KKR, Brookfield — the financing. The list is long. The list is named nowhere in the essay. The list is the customer the essay is written for.

The community — let’s keep her — Sandra, with the cattle operation and the dropping aquifer — is told her unease is “really” about Coolidge’s 1926 speech and Shelby Foote’s 1958 interview. Sandra’s grandfather is not in the essay. Sandra’s aquifer is not in the essay. The diesel generator cycling on at 2 a.m. is not in the essay. The transmission-line easement crossing her family’s crop ground is not in the essay. The electricity-rate increase her neighbor got notified of in August is not in the essay. Sandra is in the essay as a feeling, not as a citizen with standing to question her county commission.

The conservative tradition Treviño reaches for — Calvin Coolidge, the Founders, the American way of life — has a vocabulary for this moment, and it is not the vocabulary he is using. That tradition, taken seriously, says the citizen has standing to question concentrated capital, the local community has authority over its own land, the small operator has a claim against the consolidated enterprise. That tradition does not tell the citizen her concerns are really about her dignity. That tradition tells the corporation to answer the citizen’s questions. Treviño has stood that tradition on its head to write, in polished prose, a defense of the apparatus that tradition was built to oppose.

The piece is brilliant. The piece is exactly the apparatus the AI capital class needs: a sympathetic, literate, dignified framing of the cultural anxiety that the buildout produces — so that the buildout can proceed without ever having to publish the numbers, answer the questions, or sit in the county commission meeting past midnight with the citizens it is dispossessing. The piece’s customer is not the voter who is feeling. The piece’s customer is the customer of the voter who is feeling.

Read it again with that in mind and watch the whole thing rotate.

Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: when the voter you’re talking to is exhausted, the conversation has been had, and the catharsis is what they need to actually move from cultural-anxiety frame to material politics; this is the release valve. Use sparingly and where it lands.

Here is what Joshua S. Treviño’s September 2026 essay in National Review is, in plain English, with the bullshit stripped off and the receipts on the table:

It is a fucking press release for the largest concentrated capital expenditure in the United States, written in the cadence of cultural conservative sympathy, for an audience that wants to feel dignified while it gets fucked.

Read it again. I’ll wait.

The essay names no AI company. Names no data-center developer. Names no utility. Names no water-rights holder. Names no commissioner. Names no rate-case. Names no transmission-line easement. Names no environmental impact statement. Names one dead historian — Shelby Foote — to make a literary analogy. That is it. The literal industry is absent. The literal opposition is absent. The literal harm is absent. The literal beneficiary is absent. The essay is a story about an industry with no industry, an opposition with no opposition, and a harm with no harm, in which the only thing happening is a feeling.

The feeling is real. The feeling is being deliberately deployed.

“The thing it’s about is not really what it’s about.”

That is the fucking line. It says to the woman at the county commission meeting, the man at the public hearing, the family whose electricity bill just jumped, the farmer whose aquifer just dropped a foot — your concerns are not what your concerns are about. The water is not about the water. The electricity is not about the electricity. The diesel generators at 2 a.m. are not about the diesel generators at 2 a.m. They are about Coolidge in 1926. They are about a Confederate soldier interviewed in 1958. They are about your Americanness. Your concerns are real, the essay says. Just not about what you think.

That is not sympathy. That is the most elegant dismissal of material opposition ever written by a conservative intellectual outlet. It says: we hear you. We respect you. You are dignified. Your dignity has nothing to do with the data center. The data center is proceeding.

Let me name for you, since the essay won’t, the fucking customer. Microsoft. Amazon. Google. Meta. Oracle. OpenAI. Anthropic. Equinix. Digital Realty. CyrusOne. Dominion. Duke. Georgia Power. APS. BlackRock. KKR. Brookfield. The major general-contracting firms that build the shells. Every one of them with a hyperscale data center in a small American town, with a water draw, with an electricity draw, with a diesel backup, with a transmission-line easement, with a rate case, with an environmental impact statement written by a consultant they paid for. Every one of them has a customer — the cultural-conservative intellectual press — whose job is to translate the community’s opposition into a form the buildout can ignore.

The structure of the argument is the spine of the operation. A small, polite concession — “material questions are empirically answerable” — sits at the front of the essay and costs the writer nothing. Behind it, advanced by the framing as a whole, is an enormous claim: opposition is really about cultural anxiety, and material concessions are irrelevant, and the buildout proceeds unconstrained. The polite concession is a paragraph. The undefended claim is the entire AI capex pipeline of the United States. The community gets the paragraph. The pipeline gets the rest.

The recategorization is the empirical settler. Treviño writes as if the community’s question is settled by a number. It is not. It is a distributional question — who bears the cost, by what mechanism, at whose benefit. That is settled by a siting decision, a water-rights adjudication, a community-benefit agreement, an environmental review. None of which Treviño names, because none of which would survive his framing.

The new category does the work. “Cultural anxiety about Americanness” has no policy mechanism, no public-interest standing, no administrative lever. Concerns with no mechanism cannot constrain a buildout. The buildout proceeds.

The named beneficiary is invisible by construction. The community is presented as a feeling. The aquifer is presented as a feeling. The electricity rate is presented as a feeling. The diesel generator is presented as a feeling. The data center is real. The capital behind the data center is real. The community’s “feelings” are what get explained, sympathetically, by an essay that names not a single one of the actors actually producing the harm.

On Narkina 5, in the show, Cassian told Kino Loy — looking at the Empire’s escalation — “Power doesn’t panic.” Power doesn’t panic, because power has the press release already written. Power doesn’t panic, because power has the sympathetic essay already drafted by the time the rate case is filed. Power doesn’t panic, because power has the framework already in place that says the community’s concerns are not what the community’s concerns are about. The press release is for the people feeling the harm. The press release validates the feeling. The press release instructs the feeling. The press release does not address the harm.

The harm is happening. The water is being drawn. The aquifer is dropping. The electricity rate is rising. The diesel generators are cycling on at 2 a.m. The transmission-line easements are being negotiated in private. The community-benefit agreements are being negotiated in private. The rate cases are being filed in state utility commissions. The environmental impact statements are being drafted by consultants the developer paid for. All of it is happening. None of it is in the essay.

What is in the essay is the feeling, dignified, validated, and rendered powerless.

Frederick Douglass, addressing a Rochester audience in 1852, made the point that the Fourth of July was not the slave’s holiday — it was the master’s celebration of his own freedom and the slave’s continued bondage. The slave’s grievance was not cultural. It was material. It was the whip, the auction block, the family sold south. The master had a press release for that grievance too. It told the slave his grievance was really about his own character, his own piety, his own moral failing. Douglass saw through the press release in real time and named it for what it was.

The essay in National Review is the press release. Douglass saw the press release a hundred and seventy-three years ago and it looked just like this. The vocabulary has been updated. The mechanics have not.

Here is what the opposition to AI and data centers is really about, in case anyone is still wondering: it is about the water. It is about the electricity. It is about the diesel generators. It is about the transmission-line easements. It is about the rate cases. It is about the environmental impact statements. It is about the property values. It is about the small town being asked to subsidize the largest concentrated capital expenditure in the country so that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and their financiers can train their models and rent out their compute and book the returns. It is about who pays and who gets paid. That is what it is about. The essay says it is about something else. The essay is wrong. The essay is the press release.

The data center is being built. The community is being told its concerns are about its Americanness. The aquifer is being drawn. The press release is being reprinted in the cultural-conservative press. The community is being told to feel dignified about it. The community is being told its dignity is what the meeting was about.

The community’s water was what the meeting was about.

The fucking water.