Data Centers are emerging as a wedge issue this year, and politicians are feeling the heat. A Wall Street Journal headline this morning: “Politicians Who Once Championed Data Centers Are Now Bashing Them.”
State governors, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, “are slowing development of the facilities as anger over AI spreads,” according to the story. The issue is gathering momentum:
A growing voter outcry over data centers that strain resources and fuel a technology capable of putting Americans out of work is becoming a mounting liability for Republicans and some Democrats in this fall’s elections. Abbott’s opponent in his bid for a fourth term, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, has hammered him on the issue while climbing within a few percentage points in recent polls.
“The data-center issue is the latest example of a governor who has been doing the bidding of moneyed interests instead of the people of Texas,” Hinojosa said in an interview.
Democrats around the country are deploying the same playbook. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive running for Senate in Michigan, has claimed his opponent, former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, wants to put the centers in the backyards of voters in the state. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said at a July campaign event.
A Washington Post editorial also notices the stampeding politicians. National Review calls the response to data centers “hysteria” and is not optimistic that it will stop any time soon. Polling indicates a stunning switch on the once-more popular data centers. Noah Rothman writes:
The staggering 60-point swing on the issue in just six months more than justifies Meyer’s astonishment. It also warrants broader bewilderment over why data centers are as politically radioactive as they have become. Vast quantities of ink have been expended in the effort to address Americans’ concerns about them, some of which are wholly unfounded. None of it seems to matter.
Data centers’ critics say that they consume untold quantities of water and put undue strain on the environment. But the minimally curious should have encountered one of the dozens of fact-checks showing data centers consume about as much water as a golf course or farm, many of which are located in drought-prone or water-stressed areas but do not elicit such passionate opposition. Nor do data centers abrogate the law of conservation of matter or somehow arrest the water cycle. Those molecules will reconvene in the atmosphere just as they always have. Nevertheless, the objection persists.
A July City Journal report on the furor surrounding data centers is still very much worth a read. Data centers confer many advantages but are a target for radical groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America.
Terror averted (this time). A burqa-clad convert to Islam managed to purchase bomb parts from Home Depot, allegedly to blow up New York’s state Capitol. The suspect, Jessica Bowie, 35, was arrested and charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, according to the complaint. Bowie had pledged allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI:
“Blowing kafirs [non-Muslims] brains out is beautiful,” she told someone who turned out to be an FBI informant, the complaint said.
Bowie, who converted to Islam five years ago and was going by the Islamic name “Aisha Saif,” also allegedly tracked the Capitol building for weeks, taking pictures from various vantage points including an “observation hall nearby,” according to the complaint.
Her dream target was the White House, but she thought that would be too difficult, so she settled for the Albany Capitol.
Bowie had hoped to flee to Syria and return to the U.S. later to inflict further damage.
Alaska resident Kimberley Strassel writes this morning about “Alaska’s Ranked Voting Travesty.” Strassel argues that not only is the system confusing, but voters lose:
Alaska’s first two ranked-choice elections were embarrassments, marked by complexity, confusion and delay. But, oh, for the good old days of mere humiliation. This year operatives finally cracked the many devious ways the system can be outright gamed. Alaska is now the poster child for dirty-pool politics.
Alaskans won’t know until the end of August which “final four” candidates for each office will be on their ranked-choice November ballot after this week’s jungle primary. Residents will need that time to recover from the trauma of a monthslong campaign in which they were not valued as “we the people,” but duped and confused, treated as pawns in a seedy game.
Highly Recommended. Does our Constitution “inoculate” us against tyranny? Matthew Continetti proposes that, along with guarantees of rights, the Constitution accomplishes this by means of the separation of powers:
The U.S. Constitution divides power horizontally across the three branches of government, including within the legislature. And the Constitution divides power vertically between the federal government and the states. The First Amendment prohibits both the establishment of religion and laws preventing its free exercise. No wonder contemporary revolutionaries—the American millennial and Gen Z socialists that Sen. John Kennedy calls “Lulu Lenins”—are so eager to revamp the Constitution. It’s the ultimate obstacle to their radical designs.
What kind of “civilization” is forced to print up booklets gently informing immigrants that rape is—you know—not really a custom here? The United Kingdom, of course. “Those illegal migrant ‘rape’ booklets shame the British state” is Hugo Timms’ Spiked Online headline:
‘In the UK, both people must say “yes” to sex’, states a Home Office-produced ‘guide for asylum seekers’. ‘Child abuse is a serious crime in the UK’, explains another booklet, titled ‘Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK’. This one informs illegal migrants that they must not have ‘sex or sexual contact with a child under 16’, ‘physically hurt a child’ or ‘cut or harm a girl’s genitals (female genital mutilation)’. This ‘promotional material’ – to use the Home Office’s unfortunate choice of words – was released on Wednesday.
These revelations ought to shame the government, and discredit the progressives who have supported the complete breakdown of Britain’s borders. The fact that most recent asylum seekers to the UK have not been women and children, but rather young men often hailing from deeply misogynistic countries, has been the source of protests across the nation. These uprisings, we hardly need reminding, were treated by most of the media, the establishment and the police as outbreaks of white nationalism. Yet here we have the government admitting the very thing that citizens from Epping, Nuneaton and Crowborough have been telling them all along. It is a staggering hypocrisy.
Here’s a good question: “Why are we allowing people into Britain who need to be told rape is bad?“
The defense in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the mother who killed her three children, has endeavored to paint a sympathetic portrait of Clancy, who they contend was not responsible for the murders because of mental illness. “How has Lindsay Clancy become a more compelling victim than her three children who she brutally killed?” asks Bethany Mandel:
Some of Clancy’s supporters aren’t coming to rally for her alone; they’re bringing their own kids along.
Those children look at their mothers the way children always have: as the person charged above all others with loving, protecting and caring for them.
The last image Cora, Dawson and Callan saw was that person violently taking their lives.
Whatever Clancy’s mental state, that is the horror at the center of this case.
Yet somehow the three dead children have receded into the background — while an online community obsesses over the suffering of the woman who killed them.
There are serious questions to ask about postpartum psychosis, psychiatric medication and the medical care Clancy received before the murders.
Her mental state is central to the criminal case, and a jury will decide whether it absolves her of legal responsibility.
But compassion for mental illness does not require turning a woman who killed three children into a folk hero.
Two for the Road. They’re Going to Need a Bigger Tent: “‘Democratic Party’ and ‘DSA’ Are Now Officially Synonymous” at Issues & Insights. … “New York Isn’t the Same for Jews” is the headline of Tevi Troy’s WSJ op-ed. “The term ‘hate crime’ didn’t exist when I was growing up in Queens in the 1970s,” Troy says.
