GOP: Data centers becoming a "sleeper issue" in election | Hour 2

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to dpetcleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. So continuing on with the discussion about data centers specifically, there was a letter that was written and sent out two interested parties. I believe this went out to actually a lot of tech industry leadership. The letter was sent by the NRSC. That is the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This is the committ. This is the organization that you know run advertisements and stuff and polling for Republican Senate candidates. Okay, And the subject line on this memo is Ohio Data Center Risk. The letter is dated from two days ago, August eighteenth. It has now been leaked out and I have it. John Houstead, who is the Republican running for Senate. I think he's already. I think he's the incumbent and Shared Brown. He's the Democrat for I think he's the former senator from Ohio and he's running again. So the memo begins. John Housted and Shared Brown are in a dead heat. Private polling has been consistent when voters here Brown's positions and his record, Houston pulls away. That is still the path in this race. The new ingredient and the new problem is, yes, you guessed it, data centers, Yah, computing power okay. Ohio is one of the leaders in building these AI factories. Brown, Okay, I don't know if I would call it an AI factory, because if you call it an AI factory, then people, if they have negative impressions of what AI is or what it could do and fears about it, now you've just you know, now, you've just given it more sort of dead weight. So just just call them data centers, okay, or you want to call them like computing factories. I mean that's really what they are, right, computing factories. So Brown has made his opposition to data centers the centerpiece of his campaign against Houston. Brown is using it because it works more than any other thing in this race. Data centers are the anger hanging around Housteed's neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice and they will not go near the next one. Right, So what is the message here? The message from the Republican Senatorial Committee to the tech companies is you guys better defend yourselves. You have to make better arguments. You have to do better because if this messaging works in this race and others, if this messaging works and people buy into this dumb assery, then you're not going to be able to build anything because all the politicians running for office, they're going to see what happened in Ohio and other races. They're going to see that and they're going to say I'm against data centers too, And then you have a bipartisan opposition. It will harden and you will never be able to build your data centers and the country will suffer. I've got some economic data on the data centers, like this is what was a blazing saddles where the sheriff, the new sheriff in town, takes himself hostage. That's the image I keep coming up with on this issue. Data centers are the centerpiece in the case that shared Brown is litigating, he has made them his de facto opponent, and nobody is correcting the record, says our polling indicates that this messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts as it introduces new information in a highly relevant emerging topic. This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle. Coincidentally, I'm sure I've talked about this for several months now. I've tracked for you where the money for these quote unquote grassroots organizations. They're almost all on the left. Where the money is coming from ties back to China. Right. This anti data center psychological warfare that is being waged online with the use of data centers. By the way, there is a geopolitical reason for this. There's a reason I keep telling people. When you go onto the Internet, you are entering an informational battle space. Okay, our geopolitical enemies are all in that battle space, and they are seeking to win your mind, your heart. They want you to believe certain things, and they will run through all sorts of methods to make that happen. This is part of the demoralization campaign. Make you think your country is terrible, make you think the things that will help us. Actually hurt us. Right, they'll convince you that no, no, no, you don't want to build any more power generation facilities. Meanwhile, they race forward building a new coal fired power plant in China, like one a day or something. It's crazy. We you no, no, no, Americans, you need to care about climate change. Meanwhile, we're going to take every last freaking fish out of every last ocean, and we're going to pollute the skies, and we're going to you know, burn the coal, and we're going to race forward with our own data center construction. We're going to employ slave labor, like, we're going to do all of this stuff. But you shouldn't do that. And look, we have a grassroots organization that's making the case why you shouldn't do these things. And don't you feel morally superior to your fellow Americans? And you get to call them evil and mean for wanting to have energy? Aha. Meanwhile they do all of the stuff that they're telling us not to. Why is that Why would you think that would be the case? I mean, to me, it's very logical, it's very clear. But to a lot of other people it's not. For some reason, maybe they've not been exposed to this information. Campaigns from the memo here, campaigns or party committees cannot fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy. The companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans Okay, Ohioans really OHIOI ohianhi like? How about ohiits Ohights Ohii Okay, that's not that's Ohian Ohians whatever. You guys need to figure out a better term for yourselves. Anyway. The companies that need these projects built have to fix how residents of Ohio see them, who benefits, who pays, why a community should want one. Until that happens, the issue will continue to dominate this race. If it is still this potent in November, which I don't see any signs of it letting up, Elected officials everywhere will treat Ohio as their reason to work against data centers in the future. If voters perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio. While the perceptions of data centers are weak, the American people are with us by overwhelming margins. The American people prefer a Republican candidate who wants to only let data centers be built in communities that approve them by a local vote of the people and that pay for their own power, water, and other utilities, versus a Democrat candidate who wants to stop data center construction altogether, which will cause America to lose the AI race to China. Right, this is what I have said when we were talking about the Charlotte moratorium one hundred and fifty day moratorium. I said, if this is a moratorium that is designed to get us to a sort of regulatory framework for future approvals or denials of these projects, then I understand. However, if the goal is to ban data centers from ever being constructed anywhere in the Charlotte city limits, that I'm a post because that's just stupid. That it is. Stupid, it is ignorant. But that is what the left is pushing for, which is very much on brand. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create a Video, great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS, tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Creative Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult groups, sports teams, I mean, really, any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. Group Travel Videos gives your traveling pack a private app where everyone can share photos during the trip, send messages, share schedules and important documents, even a traveler safety locator feature that works only during the trip, and family members and friends back home can follow along and enjoy the experience in real time. No social media, no ads, It's totally private. No emails, phone numbers, account setups or hassles. With group travel Videos, you'll capture today's moments on your special trip while they're happening. Then after the trip we're gathering, they'll professionally turn your shared moments into a beautiful storytelling video that your whole group can stream and download and treasure for years. Check out Group travel videos dot com. That's group travel Videos dot com or call seven oh four eight four six seventy seventy extension two O six. And when you do that ask for Katie, but Pete, can I just email? Well, yes you can. You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. Matthew suggests the name Ohaitians. They're eating the cats. Okay, all right, So final part of this memo from the NRSC. They drafted this two days ago, sent it out to you know, industry leaders and such, basically saying, look, guys, Shared Brown, democrat running for US Senate in Ohio, is making opposition to data centers the focal point of his campaign. That's the boogeyman, that's the enemy. And if data centers takes the blame for John Husted losing to Brown, other politicians will take note and they will then also be opposed to data centers for completely stupid reasons. But they will take note, and they will then. Become opponents, and then you will not get any data centers built. They go on to say, the federal government has already set the standard to ensure. Certain things happen. Under Trump's rate payer protection pledge, all new energies supply for data centers is new power. No burden on existing customers. Data centers pay their own way on generation and infrastructure. I've said that too. I support all of this so far. Right, build your own power centers if you're going to use so much of it, right, new power data center because I also see that as a way to get more newnuclear online, the small modular reactors and such. But also generate your own power. Whatever's left over you could sell back to the grid and we have more, then we have more load capacity. Data centers pay their own way, right, So no subsidies, no tax breaks for these things, right, they are cash cows. There's no reason why they should be subsidized. No higher costs on families or rate payers, which, by the way, doesn't really happen. I've gone over some of the stories in these places where data centers come online and it actually generates millions of dollars in tax revenue for the local government that they did not have. They're paving their roads, they're funding their schools, right, they're building new parks. Power rates actually. Go down. Or the power bills go down. So yeah, there is just a lot of misinformation, disinformation. Dare I say, a propaganda that is surrounding this issue that people are buying into because they don't know. They just see you know, land being cleared and like what's going in there? You're like, Oh, it's a data center. I don't want one near me. I'm gonna hear the hum all the time. You know. As I have said repeatedly, these issues. When it comes to proximity to neighborhoods, that is a zoning issue. Okay, that's a zoning thing. You want buffering, you want it located a certain amount of you know, feet or yardage away from homes. All of that is the local government, which spoiler alert, you actually have the most amount of control over that. Look at Charlotte's Moratorium. You get you know, forty or fifty people dressed in the same T shirt with signs, and you too can influence zoning policy, so you have the ability to help direct the regulatory framework for this stuff. They need to be treated as the equivalent of an industrial facility or a manufacturing facility. Right. You wouldn't want an industrial building built right next to a neighborhood, so you want there to be a distance and buffering between the two uses. That's zoning. People kept talking about, we want to bring manufacturing home. What if the manufacturing is this we're built. I mean, think about all of the construction jobs, all of the power generation and the construction of those new facilities. Right this is like, this is now representing about a third of our GDP, the building of data centers. This is an economic boon to our economy. And you have a portion, a portion of the population that is pushing for us to murder it. They want it dead, I would submit, they don't. Most of the people that are so adamant about it, if they're not ignorant about it, they want America to fail because they don't like America and this is just another way to harm it. There are a lot of other people that are just ignorant about it, and they just believe and buy into you know, oh, the five G towers. Are killing all the birds, right, you always had. Whenever there's this new technology, there are always people that fear it. I remember the story when radio was invented and they started putting them in cars, and there was this backlash. People were like, don't put them in the cars. They're gonna people are gonna get distracted by listening to something in the car. When sears catalog came around towns would collect all the sears catalogs, bring them to the center of town. And burn them. How dare you get a house shipped to you that you build yourself? How dare you be able to buy things in a catalog? And we look back on that now and like that idea is crazy, But that's what people did. These are like sort of mask psychoses or social contagions, right, These ideas spread. It's like the poppies, or sorry, the tulips in Holland right where people are like selling their homes and all their possessions for tulip seeds because they thought this was the status of wealth. And then all of a sudden people wake up and realize, hey, I can't live in a tulip, and then the whole thing collapses. Governor Greg Abbott from Texas Republican he is touting his data center directive, touting the fact that he halted up to one thousand, eight hundred data center projects. Now. Something to keep in mind here also is that when you see these maps and they're like, here are all the proposed data centers, that does not mean that those things are getting built. A company will go and they will cite. You know, they'll put in. Like rezoning requests or whatever, and they're like they'll mark all like a whole bunch of potential sites and then abandon them and they won't build something. So you've got to be careful with when you're looking at these maps, Like, just because these are potential sites for data centers, doesn't mean that these things are getting built everywhere, because once they get approvals to build in one location, they may say, Okay, well now we're not going to build in these four or five other places that we had highlighted. Okay, so just be aware of that. Sometimes it creates noise in the data. So he says I established So he's touting the fact that he blocked data centers, right, So politically that's the message, I block data centers. But then he says, I established guidelines and guardrails to protect Texas communities. Okay, so he blocked them, but he's not blocking them. If data centers must not take water needed by local communities, okay, well, so build your closed loops sent systems, right, so the water you take in is recirculated and that sort of thing. And I'll get to the water thing in a Second, they must not take power needed by the Texas Power Grid. Okay, that's in line with Trump's rate payer protection pledge. Also, they must lower the cost of electricity, which they tend to do. They must not disrupt neighborhoods or rural communities. And this one, to me is a little too vague, because of course there's going to be disruption when you are building, especially if you're building one of the hyper scale facilities. But data centers come in all sizes. Some of them are not the big hyper scale ones that people are opposed to, right because they're so large and everything else. There are smaller ones. We have about We got like three dozen of them in Charlotte, and nobody knows, nobody cares, nobody has cared. They've been all over the place. They're in office buildings in center city, nobody cares. Didn't even know it was there. Probably, So that one's a little vague for me, especially when it comes to rural communities. The disruption to a rural community. Yes, I mean, if you're building a massive, multimillion dollar project, there's going to be disruption, but it's not permanent. So I don't know what you know. I don't know what the details on that are, but this might be the way for Republicans to speak about this issue is to say, no, we're not going to allow data centers to be built willy nilly anywhere. Here are the criteria they have to hit, right, you got to be self sufficient, No tax subsidies or tax breaks for these companies. And part of the problem has also been that a lot of local governments have been entering into these NDAs. Non disclosure agreements. I understand why, because some of the technology may be very sensitive, some of the plans may be sent because this is infrastructure, this is national security infrastructure. So you don't want to be publishing blueprints of like here's the you know the weak spot, here's the whole that if you just shoot the photon being in there, it blows up the whole death star. Like you don't want that those weaknesses to be public information because then you have, you know, some people that come into the country that want to do us harm, or people who are from America that want to do us harm, and they they sabotage these facilities. So I don't, like, I understand why you would enter into an NDA for that kind of a thing. However, if you put the whole process behind some curtain and nobody gets to see anything until boom it's approved, that creates the backlash too. Regarding the water, this is interesting from. To do. This is APPO structure building flight at List Space at List Venture at List Spaceflight Tech and Economics. Okay, and they did. A comparison on AI water use in context water consumption. Okay, So all of these numbers I'm gonna give you right now, and numbers are always difficult on radio, but this is all cubic kilometers per year of water. Okay, AI uses point five. By comparison smartphones the building of smartphones they use let's see here one point five, so triple the amount of AI. All right. Next up we have cigarettes two. Again, AI is at point five, so half of one cubic kilometer. Cigarettes use two cubic kilometers. Avocados use two point three, coffee uses four almonds, uses five point six alcohol, uses eight olive oil, thirteen steel, twenty one, eggs, twenty two beef, forty two milk and cheese. I gotta stop this video. Hang on milk and cheese eighty five cubic kilometers. Sugar one hundred and seven clothing, one hundred eight wheat two O six. All water use about one thousand cubic kilometers per year. All water use including rain seven thousand, seven hundred twenty four and then renewable fresh water forty three thousand cubic kilometers. Okay, AI point five wheat, but that's food peede two six. So keep that in context. This idea that AI is draining all the water is absurd. It's just absurd. Okay, it is a lie. It has been propaganda from the text line. Gary says, the Rutherford County Facebook data center just looks like a massive warehouse. It looks no different than an Amazon hub without the semi trucks. There's also a state one near it that most people have no idea is there. That Facebook data center is probably the highest single source of tax income for the county too. Yeah, that's why I said data centers are a boon to the local tax coffers. They generate millions and millions of dollars. You had, like Loudon County up in Virginia, they went on a building binge of data centers and their property tax rates dropped. So and now they're like, oh, I don't know if we need any more of these things, Like, yeah, because you guys already got all of the benefits and now you're trying to shut it all down for everybody else. Right, As I mentioned last week, I think it was we went over where are these things actually getting built? And it's now more in the Red States. The Blue states are locking the doors on all of this. Let them, let them and let the Red States enjoy the building boom Bob says that property tax revenue is racist. That's racist, Pete, I don't know if it's racist. But add in all of the miles of fiber optic cable built to connect everywhere, I don't know what that means. Seven oh four number James says, you do realize they're not data centers. They are spy centers peed Okay, they are neutral whatever they're going to be used for, like, for example, banking, like online banking. That's one of the uses of the like basically, it's the Internet. It's everything online. Anything that you do uses the data centers that are already built. Everything. You want to start up a business, it's an online business. You want to file with the Secretary of State's office, right, you want to build a website, You want to set up an email account for the website, like you want to jump on a zoom call. You want to stream videos, you want to watch movies like, everything is through the data centers. DA says, absolutely. Oh, hang on a second, I think there was something else here. Otherwise, DA says, if a large tract of land is going to be sold near you, do you want a massive multi use development with thousands of people coming and going living there, needing all the services needed that people need and all the taxes that have to be spent to accommodate the growth, or a clean data center providing the critical information we all need every day and paying loads and loads of taxes without all the burden on the communities. Data centers recycle their water just like your cat's cooling system. It's closed. I don't know what a cat's cooling system. But they also are providing their own power, putting in massive gas turbines on site. They may actually add power to the grid. Right. That's another benefit here is that when if the data centers are putting in their own electricity generation, they can actually supplement the grid absolutely manufactured, economically regressive hysteria all just to decap our economy. Oh cars recycled air system, a cooling system like our cars, not cats cars. There you go from da Yeah, I mean that's the thing. Like again, you know the use of the land and it's proximity to neighborhoods and all of that. Those are zoning issues. People targeting data centers just because they're data centers. And again you've got to separate out the use like the spy center argument. Oh, the flock cameras and all this, those are all downstream. Those are uses that individual vendors then create. Yes, they are using the Internet for their services, but so does everybody else. So okay, so we can't cure cancer because you're afraid of flock cameras. Well, why don't you just focus on the flock. Cameras and let the data centers get built so the AI can cure cancer. As I went over in the first hour, nine eight zero number says, placement of data centers is a zoning issue. Yes, Remember Charlotte City Council has declared zoning regulations and requirements to be inherently racist. Oh that's a yeah, that's a city council issue. All right, Dave says, I can't imagine a data center being rejected if it's properly located and it addresses all five of these items, can you? Yes, absolutely, Dave. Absolutely, people will oppose these things because, like we saw it with the moratorium vote, the city council chamber was packed with members of the PSL, the People for Socialism and Liberation right, and this who has these are the people who have the ear of the Democrat politicians. So yeah, they want a ban on all data centers if they are in office buildings downtown. How do they recycle the water? They have closed loop systems, Steve, It's all in house. The water comes in and then it runs through, it cools, and then goes to a collection point inside the building and then gets recycled. There's a humongous data center going in York County between Clover and rock Hill, near Kataba Nuclear Station. It's nine buildings and will have three power substations just to run the center. Two of them are visible from Highway two seventy four hands Mill Road. Now, look, I've got one going in about a mile and a half from my house in West Mecklenburg. I am totally fine. With it if it's a good idea. The data centers can't get government assistants or subsidies, have to be self sufficient. Why not treat all businesses and individuals the same way, including sports franchises, says Stanley. Carolyn says when I first moved here, I lived at the Chimney Rock or Chimney Apartments, located beside a railroad track, and never heard the train after the first few days, just like I never hear the planes flying over my home. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.