Taxation & Transformation Without Representation | Monologue Monday

Across America, people who agree on nothing else are suddenly finding themselves on the same side.

Ranchers.

Environmentalists.

Homeowners.

Factory owners.

Conservatives.

Progressives.

Why?

This episode explores the growing backlash against AI data centers and the deeper question underneath the fight.

Can America still grow without sacrificing the people who have to live with the consequences?

From Texas and Wyoming to Oregon and Virginia, Chad Law examines the rise of what may become one of the most important local political battles of the next decade.

00:00 The Story Of OG In West Texas

07:55 Why Americans Are Suddenly Uniting

14:12 The Nationwide Data Center Backlash

24:37 What People Are Really Fighting About

34:26 America's History Of "Trust Us Later"

45:58 The Third Option Nobody Discusses

54:11 The Common Sense Scorecard

01:06:07 Rule #1 No Tax Abatements

01:10:03 Rule #2 Self-Sustaining Energy

01:13:38 Rule #3 Local Jobs First

01:15:58 Rule #4 Guaranteed Job Commitments

01:19:18 Rule #5 Protect Existing Landowners

01:22:30 Rule #6 Environmental Review

01:25:53 Rule #7 Public Notice & Participation

01:29:02 Rule #8 No Eminent Domain

01:34:05 Taxation & Transformation Without Representation

01:42:14 Reagan Reminder

01:47:20 Closing Thoughts

#AI
#DataCenters
#Politics
#PropertyRights
#Technology

Transcript

Chad: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight I want to start in West Texas, out past Abilene, where the land goes flat and the sky does that thing it does out there. Or basically the sunrise and the sunset are the whole show and nobody charges admission. There's a woman out there named Omaria Garcia. Everyone calls her OG. And OG and her husband didn't end up in West Texas because they threw a dart at a map. They ended up there because they served. The military moved them out to that part of the country the way it moves a lot of families, drops you somewhere you didn't pick, and says, All right, make a life here. And they did. They got there, they looked around at all that flat West Texas nothing, and somewhere in it they fell in love. So they did the thing. The thing we tell everyone to do, the thing that's supposed to work. They saved their money, they looked, and they didn't just grab the first lot with a sign stuck in it. It took them over a year. A whole year of driving out, walking the dirt, standing there, looking at the horizon, going, is this one it? Is this the one? Until they finally found it. The views, the quiet sunrise on one side, sunset on the other, and right in the middle of it, her words, not mine, their own little piece of happiness. Now hold that picture, because here's the part where I'm supposed to tell you what happened next. And I want you to notice I can't quite do it, because they couldn't either. In 2025, the ground right next to them opens up. Construction. And not a guy adding a garage. Big construction. Trucks, lights, dust rolling across the property line of the place they spent a year of their lives finding. And like any human being alive, OG goes, okay, what is that? What are you building 40 feet from my house? It's a reasonable question, right? The kind you figure comes with an answer. She couldn't get one. Turns out the folks who maybe could have told her had signed paperwork that legally meant they weren't allowed to. They were forced to keep it quiet. Don't tell the neighbors. So OG is standing on the slice of heaven, it took her a year to find, eating dust, watching something enormous go up over the fence, and she can't find out what it is. In America, on her own land next to her own house. And I want to be real careful because it'd be real easy for me to turn this into a villain story, and that's not what tonight is. Nobody dragged OG out of her home, nobody broke a law that I'm aware of. On paper, everything next door is fine. It's permitted it's legal, it's by the book. And she still can't sleep. She kills still can't sell the place easy, still can't unsee it, and still to this day couldn't get a straight answer about the thing that rearranged her whole life, all of it. And here's why I'm starting with OG. Not because it's sad, though it is. Not because she's a veteran's wife, though she is, and you'd think that buys you at least a phone call before someone flattens the lot next door. I started with her because when I first heard it, I had the exact reaction you're probably having right now, which is, man, rough break for one Texas family, right? ⁓ and then I start reading. Because what if it wasn't one family in Texas? What if OG isn't The story? What if OG is the trailer? What if there are versions of this exact thing? The dust, the silence, the what are we even building? Happening to people who have nothing in common with OG and nothing in common with each other all over the country, all at once, right now. That's the part that got me out of my chair. So let's talk about it. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality. Walking contradiction your professors warned you about, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters, the red, white, and blue rainbow. Restoring common sense in the American household one conversation at a time. And this, this is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts so you don't have to ruin another Thanksgiving. The show for the other eighty percent of Americans. The people busy raising families, building businesses, paying taxes, coaching little leagues, serving their communities. And wondering when common sense became controversial. While cable news, political consultants, professional activists, and social media outrage merchants spend all day arguing about the loudest 20% of the population, we focus on the people who actually keep America running. This is the big tent. The shelter for the politically homeless, the politically exhausted, the politically independent, and everybody else tired of being told that they have to choose between two bad ideas. Here, reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters. And common sense matters. Welcome home. So I went looking. And what I found is honestly one of the strangest things I've seen in American life in a long, long time. Picture a room: County Commission meeting, folding chairs, bad coffee, somebody's slideshow that won't load. Do you have that adapter? And in that room, you've got a cattle rancher in a feed store cap. Sitting next to him, a woman with a green piece tote bag. Behind them, a guy in a MAGA hat. And next to him, somebody who's got a Bernie sticker on the Subaru out in the lot. These people agree on nothing. These people would not survive one Thanksgiving in the same house. You could not get this group to agree on pizza toppings. And there they all are, same room, same side, same fight. Out in Wyoming, Laramie County, outside Cheyenne, there's been a group of landowners who've been organized since 2015. Ranchers, property folks. The most leave me alone people in the most leave me alone state in the Union. And they are packing meetings because a few hours away in Jackson, there was a closed door summit. Closed door. I love that. Pitching Wyoming is the next great destination for all of this. And nothing builds trust like a meeting you're not allowed to walk into. Go North, Montana. There's a state legislator up there who became the first guy in Montana to stand up and formally ask for a four year pause. Not a ban, a pause. His actual argument, and I'm barely paraphrasing, was Maybe we understand the thing before we green light 14 of them? Wild-eyed radical, this guy. Texas, and OG's got plenty of company down near Granbury. There's a whole community at war with a Bitcoin mine. Different machine than what's next to OG. I know, we'll sort that out, but same roar, same fans going 24-7 a day, people filing lawsuits over the noise, only to find out their county can't even legally enforce a noise ordinance on this business. Cool, great. Love that for them. Virginia might be the craziest one on the board. There's a county down there, Prince William, with something like 90 of these things. 90. One county, half a million people living in and around what they actually out loud call data center alley, which sounds like a ride at a theme park and is in fact the opposite of fun. And there's Oregon, my neck of the woods. Out there, the fight is water, and it's your electrical bill. Plain as that. And it just keeps going. Maine's about the to become the first state to flat out hit paws statewide. Pennsylvania, and this one's spicy. The backlash is now spooking incumbents in real 2026 races, which is the exact moment a thing stops being a hobby and becomes a problem. Ohio, Georgia, Arizona were one city starting a tax arrangement that quietly runs them 12 million bucks a year every year. Now here's the number that made me sit up straight. Gallop this past March. 70% of Americans say they don't want one of these built near them. 70. I mean, again, you can't get Americans to agree 70% on anything. Can't get 70% of Americans to agree what day of the week it is. And of the politicians actually out there fighting these projects, roughly 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. That's not a movement with a party. That's not a left thing or a right thing. That's just an enormous pile of people coming from every direction, looking at the same object and going, wait, hold on a sec. And I need to be straight with you because it would be easy to assume where I'm headed. I'm not up here to tell you those 70% are right. I'm also not up here to tell you they're wrong. I'm genuinely not doing either one of those. Some of these projects are probably terrific. Some of them this country may flat out need. That's a real conversation, and we're gonna have it, an honest one. But you have to stop and notice the thing first: the rancher and the environmentalist, the MAGA hat and the Bernie sticker. The veteran's wife in Texas who can't find out what's behind her own fence, the landowners in Wyoming locked out of the room, the guy in Montana begging for a timeout, your power bill in Oregon. Every one of these people lives in a different America. They watch different channels. They would fight about everything. And every single one of them walked into the same fight at the same moment through a completely different door. But why? What is it? What did all these people see without anybody calling a meeting, without a single national leader telling them to that lined them all up on the same side? See, most people think this fight is about data centers. I don't think it is in that. That's right about where it starts to get interesting. So after OG, I did something I do when a story gets its hooks in me. I started a list, an actual list. A guy, a legal pad, and a growing pile of wait, that's weird too. And I'm gonna walk you through that list tonight because somewhere around state number four, I stopped going, huh? and started going, okay, what is going on here? Let me set the table with the big one. Local opposition creates roadblocks for AI boom. From Axios. Here's what Axios is sitting on. A research outfit called Data Center Watch went out and counted, as of their tracking from early 2023 through March of 2025. Regular people, not senators, not a super PAC, just people in folding chairs, had blocked or delayed about $64 billion worth of these projects. Then they kept counting, and by a later window, they're up over a hundred and fifty billion in projects delayed or killed across 2025 alone. Forty-eight separate projects. That's not a couple of cranky neighbors, that's a number with a gravitational pull. And put this next to it, Gallup, this past spring. Again, quote, Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, 70%. I said it earlier, and I'm gonna keep saying it because I want it to bother you the way it bothers me. can't get 70% of this country to agree on anything. And somehow they all looked up and said, ⁓ no AI data center next to my house, pal. Now that's the wide shot. Let's get on the ground because the ground is where it gets good. Quote: residents near Granbury file a lawsuit against Bitcoin Mining Company. That was reported from Fox for Dallas Fort Worth, and the follow-up from Time this past January. Inside the nightmare, health crisis of a Texas Bitcoin town. Now, quick honesty, because I promised you honesty. The thing next to OG is an AI data center, the Granberry is a Bitcoin mine. Technically a different beast doing different math. But to the human ear standing in the backyard, identical. It's the same wall of industrial fans running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, because the computers inside cook themselves if they stop, so the fans never stop, so the noise never stops. There's a guy down there named Daniel Lakey, 55 years old. Bought eight acres, the spot where he and his wife were gonna retire. They've got cattle, open land, the whole West Texas postcard. And he describes standing outside at 10 at night, hand on his own truck, and the only thing he can hear is the hum. His neighbor Cheryl says it rattles the windows, permeates the house, calls it her word, being a prisoner. So they sue. Reasonable, right? You go to the law. And here's the punchline that isn't funny. They find out the county legally can't enforce a noise ordinance, doesn't have the power. So you've got American citizens who own their land, on their land, who cannot make the noise stop because nobody at that level seems to actually be holding the steering wheel. Put that on the board. Board entry number one, Texas. A retired couple and a wall of fans and the government going, sorry, we've got nothing. Now watch how fast we leave Texas, because here's the thing the list taught me: it's not one state. Virginia Groups oppose proposed mega data center. Planet Forward from February of 26th, and right alongside of it from Virginia Mercury, halfway through the twenty twenty sixth legislative season, there's still no consensus on data center bills in Virginia. Virginia, folks. Virginia might be patient zero on this whole thing. Because they have a county there I told you about earlier, Prince William County, that has something like 90 data centers. 90. Half a million people. And they call the place Data Center Alley, which I have to tell you sounds like the saddest possible ride at an amusement park. Step right up to Data Center Alley. And then there's the part that put a little gleam in my eye. There's a homeowner group down there, Oak Valley, 12 households, regular people in Gainesville, and a developer pushed through a rezoning for a 2100-acre project. 2100 acres. And these 12 homeowners go to court and they win. And they don't win on some giant philosophical crusade. They win because the public hearing notice, the legal notice that's supposed to tell the neighbors what's coming, didn't actually comply with the law. A judge looked at it and voided the rezoning. Twelve people on a technicality about whether anyone was properly told. Add it to the pile and hold on to that idea. Somebody not getting told, we're gonna trip over it again. Here's where I want you to start noticing the company in the room. Because in Virginia, who's mad? Suburban homeowner. Rural landowners, environmental folks worried about the water, and fiscal conservatives looking at the electric bill. That's not a coalition. That's a hostage situation where everybody happens to be in the same building and nobody planned it. I mean, let's go to my backyard. Oregon's data center explosion, who benefits and who bears the costs? From KLCC and from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Said utility watchdogs accused PGE of skirting new law meant to make data centers pay for rising demand. This one's personal because this one is in my state. Out in the Dalles, very near my property, Google's been running data centers for years. And at this point, the reporting says Google's using something like 40% of the city's water. 40% of a town's water for one company's building. Meanwhile, residential electric rates at the big utility, PGE, went up around. Фіфті процент і фав єрс. Five. While regular people's actual usage barely moved. So your usage is flat and your bills up by half and you do the math on who the new big customer on the grid might be. There you go. I mean Oregon's so deep in it the state had to pass a law just to try to make these companies pay for their own power lines instead of mailing the bill to grandma. Put it on the board, State three, same fight, different weather. Another one, Ohio Manufacturers Association challenges new utility building data centers. Ohio Capital Journal, backed up by ABC6 in February with maybe the cleanest headline of the whole pile. Manufacturers or utilities, who should pay for the Ohio data center? Boom. Ohio's a great one because Ohio adds a brand new character to the cast. Angry factory owners. Think about it, out near New Albany, you've got Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, the whole gang building enormous campuses. And the utility says it's got 50 plus of these in the queue, wanting something like 30,000 megawatts of power. And the Ohio Manufacturers Association, these are not tree huggers. These are guys who run factories, who like industry, whose entire existence is build things. They stand up and basically said, hold on. We think you're inflating those demand numbers, and you're about to stick our factories and every homeowner in the state with the bill for the power lines we don't even need yet. So they're mad. They took it to the Ohio Supreme Court. I mean, just sit with that whole anomaly for a second. The factory lobby, the homeowner, and the environmentalist. Same fight. And you gotta understand where I'm standing here, because by reflex, I'm with the factory. I like builders. I sold a company. Yes, on Growth Guy, that's my whole deal. So when build it people start getting nervous, that's when I lean in. Cause in a normal week, the factory lobby and the environmentalists, those two are mortal enemies. They just send each other Christmas cards that say no. And here they are. Same side. That's strange. We're in four states already. Let me speed up because the board's getting crowded and that's the whole point. Quote, why there's a growing opposition to data centers across rural America. It's from the Cowboy State Daily, Wyoming. Now, this one I love. Outside Cheyenne and Laramie County, there's a coalition of people, ranch owners, property people, they've been organized since 2015. Twenty-some folks. And I want you to understand who these people are because Wyoming is the most leave me alone state in the Union. These are people who moved to Wyoming specifically so they would never have to attend another meeting about anything. And they're packing meetings. Why? Because a few hours away up in Jackson, there was a closed door summit, closed door. I just can't get over that. Pitching Wyoming is the next great gold rush destination for all this AI nonsense. And nothing soothes rancher's nerves quite like a meeting about his county's future that he's specifically not invited to. Then, right next door, a strategy to address data centers in Montana. That was from the Montana Free Press in May on a packed University of Montana panel where hundreds of people showed up just to ask questions. And Montana's got a state legislator who became the first guy up there to formally stand up and ask for a pause for four years. And his whole pitch, I'm barely phrasing this. Maybe we can understand what things these things actually do to our water and our power and our county before we green light fourteen of them. And for that, for asking to read the menu before ordering 14 entrees, he's the wild man. Put Montana on the board. That's five states. Five. And here's where it stops being a rural conspiracy and turns into a political problem, which is a very different animal. AI data center backlash threatens Pennsylvania GOP incumbents in 2026 election. Now we're talking. Pennsylvania has a hundred-plus data centers and a $20 billion Amazon build-out. And the backlash has gotten loud enough that it is now threatening sitting Republicans and competitive house races. That's the moment, folks. That is the exact moment a thing stops being a hobby for cranks with legal pads, present company included, and becomes a thing that ends political careers. And up in Maine, Maine's about to become the first state to just slam the brakes statewide, a full pause. A whole state going, Time out, we need to think. Okay, deep breath, because I want to do a lightning round and I want you to feel the board fill up because the volume is the story. Georgia, Coeta County, a project called SAIL, 800 plus acres near Noonan. And the locals organized themselves into a Citizens for Rural Coetta. And the commission rammed the rezoning through three to two anyway on the board. Arizona, Tucson, a project literally codenamed Project Blue, and over a hundred people showed up at the state capitol to protest. Chandler killed one, and Phoenix did an audit and found a tax exemption on these things quietly cost the city $12 million a year. Every year on the board. Indiana. Chesterton's town board flat out rejected $1.3 billion complex. Meanwhile, the state of Indiana, in a different mood, handed Amazon what be the may be the single largest data center subsidy package in the country. Over $8 billion. So Indiana can't decide if it loves these things or hates them, which is honestly probably the most relatable state on the list on the board. New Jersey, another article. Neighbors filed lawsuit against Vineland AI data center over the noise. That's press of Atlantic City. A thousand households within a mile of one facility, hauling it into federal court on the board. Wisconsin and this one's almost poetry. Microsoft's building an AI data center on the exact land that was assembled for Foxconn. You remember Foxconn? The 13,000 jobs miracle that delivered roughly a rounding error. So we built a monument to a broken jobs promise and then we put a data center on top of it. Put that one on the board. Now stop. Look or feel the board for a second. Texas, Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Wyoming, Montana, Pennsylvania, Maine, Georgia, Arizona, Indiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin. Red states, blue states, purple states. States that haven't agreed with each other on a single thing since the Eisenhower administration. And look who's standing in these rooms. Cattle ranchers, Greenpeace volunteers. Factory owners, suburban moms, veterans, property rights guys who think the government should do almost nothing. Environmentalists who think the government should do almost everything. MAGA hats, Bernie stickers. People who would not agree on the color of the sky standing in the same room, the same petition, suing the same company, begging the same county for the same pause. ⁓ And I keep coming back to the same question, folks, and I genuinely can't let it go. Why? Why are people who agree on nothing suddenly agreeing on this? When the ranchers and the environmentalists link arms, something's up. When the factory lobby and the Sierra Clubs and the same email, either the apocalypse is on the schedule, or there's something real here that's bigger than any one team's talking points. And here's the thing that's been gnawing at me. thing I almost don't want to say out loud yet because I'm not even sure I've got it all the way nailed down. The more of these stories I read, and I read a lot of them, the less I think this fight is actually about data centers. I mean, obviously, I think these people are reacting to something, something they all feel, even the ones who'd never use the same words for it. Something that's showing up in West Texas and rural Wyoming and suburban Virginia at the same time by accident, with no national leader and no organizing meeting. And it took me an embarrassingly long time in a legal pad full of states to start seeing what it actually might be. Because when you ask these people straight up what they're mad about, you get a stack of perfectly good, reasonable answers. Think about it the water, the power bill, the noise that never stops, the land, the secrecy, China. And every single one of those is real. I'm not waving any of it away. But here's the thing that nags at me as a pattern guy. If this were really specifically about artificial intelligence, About the actual technology, the coalition makes no sense. The rancher outside of Cheyenne is not lying awake furious about large language models. Daniel Lakey and his wife in Granbury, Texas, could not pick up a graphics chip out of a police lineup. These people aren't reaching or reacting to what's in the building. So what are they reacting to? Same thing at the same time from opposite ends of the country with no memo going out You've actually got to watch how America actually argues about this stuff. And right now, the entire country only knows how to have this fight two ways. Just two. Door number one. The build it crowd. And I'm going to give them the real version, the strong version, not some because this isn't a straw man show. And honestly, normally this is my crowd. I'm a build it guy. That's my factory setting. I've built things my whole life. I sold a company. I vote yes on growth nine times out of ten. So when I make this case, I'm not playing a character up here. Here's the case. AI's not a gadget. It's not the next phone. It's it's the whole ball game. The new oil, the new electricity, the thing that in the next hundred years gets stacked on top of, and whoever owns it sets the terms for everyone else. Everybody. And there's a country on the other side of the planet, you know the one, wants it every bit as bad, throwing a national fortune at it, and they are not holding public hearings about it. Nobody in Beijing's filing a permit by rule. They don't have a folding chair, so every month we burn fighting about a noise ordinance that's a month we just hand them. A head start in the economy. And you follow that thread far enough on the government battlefield, and the government basically agrees. There's executive orders on the books right now whose entire job is to treat slowing down like it's the enemy and clear the runway. And I gotta be straight with you, because this is the part my own side loves to wave off. That argument is not dumb. The cost of losing this thing could be real, could be enormous. Anybody shrugging that off is selling you something. That's BS. But then there's door number two. The stop it crowd. Also, their best shot. They look at all this and they say, enough. These are the richest corporations in the history of money. They're taking our water and our power and our quiet and our land, and they're not even telling us what they're building. And we're supposed to roll over and call it progress? No. Pump the brakes. Moratorium, reject it. Protect what we've got before it's gone, because once the dust settles and the fans turn on, it's gone for good. And that's argument's not stupid either. Ask OG. So that's the menu. Build it all right now, get out of the way, or stop it all right now, hold the line. And the whole country's been told to pick a team and start yelling. But here's what got me. Stare at those two doors long enough, and you notice they're both answering the exact same question. Both of them. The build it crowd and the stop it crowd are both standing there screaming about whether we should do this. Yes, no, yes, no. And almost nobody, I mean, almost nobody is asking the other question. The question underneath, which isn't whether, it's how. The question was never what, the question is how. And I think, I think that how is the thing, all these mismatched. Never agree on anything people are actually circling. They're not all anti-technology. The ranchers got a smartphone, the environmentalists has got a Tesla. They're reacting to something about the way it's being done to them. Fast from the outside with a trust us stapled to the front and a bill stapled to the back. And that phrase, trust us, we'll figure it out later. Once it was in my head, I started seeing it everywhere. Not just there, everywhere. Because America has run this exact play before a bunch of times. And I want to walk through a few fast because they're not the point, they're the evidence. But start with your refrigerator. Back in the 70s, the experts, the official guidance, the government itself all lined up and told America, the enemy was fat. Get the fat out. Butter's trying to kill you. And the food industry, being helpful, went, No problem. And replaced it partially. With hydrogenated oil, trans fat, which they put in everything, and sold it as a heart-healthy choice, the smart choice, the modern choice. And we ate it for 30 years. Then, turns out trans fat was quietly wrecking people's hearts the whole time to the point where in 2018 the FDA didn't regulate it, it banned it. Outright gone. The thing they told your grandmother was the healthy choice is now illegal to put in food. Now, was that evil? No. Was everybody lying? No. It's worse than that in a way. They were sincere. They just moved faster than they actually knew things. Urgency outran diligence. And if you're OG standing in the dust of West Texas being told, trust us, this giant thing next door is fine. We'll sort out the water and the power and the noise as we go. You've heard that voice before. Sounds exactly like a guy in 1977 handing you a tub of margarine. Wanna fast for one? We handed every twelve-year-old in America a supercomputer, wired it straight into the most sophisticated attention harvesting machines ever built, and called it connecting for years. And the whole time the experts said it was fine. It's just connection. It's just the future. Get on board now, stupid parents. And now, now we've got a Surgeon General, advisories, and a stack of research, and my favorite part, a completely bipartisan stampede to get the phones back out of the schools we shoved them into. We ran the experiment on the kids first and read the results second. Trust us, we'll figure it out later. Same voice, and it's the same move these companies are making with the towns. Roll it out at scale now. Study what it did to the neighbors afterward. And let me do one I actually live because I'm not gonna sit up here and pretend I'm above this. The electric car. Here's the thing about the EV push, and I want to be careful because this is not me telling you electric cars are bad. I'm the wrong guy for that sermon. I love electric cars. The cars are great. The problem was never the car. The problem was the order of operations. See, we wrote the mandates. Buy these by this year, no more of those by that year. But we wrote them before the chargers existed, before the grid could take the load, before the readiness caught up to the deadline. We led with the outcome and figured the how would sort itself out. We said go loud before anyone finished building the how. And that, that exact move, is the data center story with the serial numbers filed off. The go is roaring. The how is a guy in a folding chair nobody invited. Okay. Now I don't want you walking away thinking the lesson is all change is a trap, hide under the bed, growth bad. That's the stop at door, and I already told you I don't live there. So let me give you the other kind of story, the one where America actually got this right, and I use this story all the time. If you're under a certain age, you genuinely cannot picture how bad it was in Los Angeles. We're talking air you could see, air that hurt. Kids kept inside at recess because the sky was a problem. And here's the move America could have made the two doors. Door one, do nothing. Don't you dare touch Detroit. Cars are growth. Get out of the way. Door two, ban the cars, kill the industry, save the lungs. Yes or no, build or stop. And we did neither. Instead, government did something genuinely gutsy. It set a hard standard. Your cars have to be clean by this date, and it set it before the technology to do it even existed. And the car companies came absolutely unglued. Ford marched into Congress and basically said, This is impossible. You've doomed us. We will not be able to build a single car after 1975. And Congress, to its eternal credit, looked at Ford and said, figure it out. It's your problem. That standard stands. Guess what happened? They figured it out. The industry that swore it couldn't be done invented the catalytic converter. And today the air in LA is staggeringly cleaner. Cars are something like 99% cleaner than they were in 1970. And here's the part: the stop it crowd never expects. The car industry didn't die, it got bigger, it thrived. Clean air and a booming industry in the same city at the same time. Growth and guardrails holding hands. So it's not a choice between getting it and protecting people. That's the lie buried in bolt doors. There's a third thing. There's a way to say yes, build, and no, not like that in the same breath. We've done it. We just seem to have forgotten we did it. And that right there, that's my actual answer to the China people. And I'm giving it as one of them. You don't beat them by becoming them. You don't win the future by deciding American citizens don't get a say. Cause the mission's too important. That's the Chinese move. The not doing, that is the whole thing that's supposed to make us the better country. You beat ⁓ the way we've beat every impossible deadline we ever set ourselves. You point American ingenuity at a hard line and you get the heck out of the way. They swore the clean car rule would kill ⁓ too, remember? We didn't slow down to hit it. We invented our way clean through it and lapped the planet. Build faster and build right. That was never a contradiction. That's the trick. That's the one thing they can't steal off us. The people in those folding chairs, they're not asking to lose to Beijing. They're asking us not to hand Beijing the satisfaction of watching us turn into Beijing. That's important. And here's the little insight that fell out of all this for me, and I'm only gonna spend a minute on it because it's an observation, not a religion. I've noticed conservatives, my team a lot of the time, fall in love with the outcome. I'm the same way. The result, the win, the build. Did it get done? Did we beat the other guy? What's the score? And I've noticed on the other side, progressives fall in love with the process, the procedure, the review, the meeting about the meeting about the meeting. Did everyone get heard? Did we follow every step? And both of those by themselves are half a brain. Outcome with no process is how you steamroll a veteran's wife in West Texas and call it winning. Process with no outcome is how you hold 17 public hearings about a park bench and die of old age before anyone sits on it. You need both. The whole machine only works with both. And what's happening with these data centers, all over that board back there, is one side running pure outcome. Go, build, beat China, move. The process dial cranked all the way down to zero. And the people in the folding chairs are what zero feels like. So come back to OG with me in West Texas and the ranchers and the factory guys in Ohio and the 12 homeowners in Virginia. I don't think they're the stop it crowd. Most of them aren't asking anybody to ban anything. And they're sure not the build anything anywhere crowd. They're standing in that third spot, the one nobody put on the menu asking the question nobody's asking. Not should this exist, not is AI good or bad, something quieter and a lot harder. How do we know this is being done right? Is there even a way to tell? Could you look at one of these projects, OGs, or one coming to your county next year, because there's probably one coming to your county next year, and actually say that one's being done responsibly? ⁓ and that one's the smash and grab. Before the dust shows up over the fence, before the bill shows up in the mail? Because if there were a way to tell, some kind of scorecard, some set of questions you could hold any project up against, yours, mine, anyone's, well, that would change the entire fight, wouldn't it? So let's build one. That's what I thought. But before I hand you a single rule, I already know exactly what's coming because it always comes. The second anybody writes down rules for these projects, you get the same reflex instantly every time. Woo! That'll stop development. That'll make these impossible to build. That's anti-growth, Chad. That's anti-business. That's anti-America. You're gonna hand the whole thing to China, Chad. Okay. So let me make you a deal. I'm gonna read you eight rules that I put together. And the only thing I want from you, the only thing is for you to find me the crazy one. Point at it, say its name out loud. Is it the rule that says a company oughta tell the neighbors what it's building before the bulldozers show up? Is that the radical one? Is it the rule that says measure the water and the noise before you pour the foundation instead of after? Is that the jackpot on the throat of freedom? Is it the one that says you can't take a man's land by force to pat a private company's profits? Which of these eight is the growth killer? Because here's the thing. These rules go too far is the easiest sentence in the English language to yell. Rule six specifically is unreasonable, and here is exactly why. That one's a lot harder to say with a straight face. So as we go tonight, your job is to find me the tyranny. I'll wait. And I want one idea running underneath all of these eight the whole way through, so hold on to it. If a project only works after you strip away every single safeguard, if the only way the math comes out is if nobody's allowed to look at it, nobody gets told, nobody measures anything, and somebody's loses their land, then maybe the project doesn't actually work. Maybe what you've got isn't a great deal being strangled by red tape. Maybe what you've got is a bad deal that can only breathe in the dark. Because a project that's truly valuable can survive a little daylight. It can survive a hearing. It can take a water study to the chin and keep standing. And if it can't survive scrutiny, it was never ready. Write that on your hand. We're coming back to it. All right. Get a pen, score your own county as we go, because there's a real chance your county's about to be on this list. Common Sense AI Data Center Rule One: No tax abatements. Here's the whole rule. These companies pay the same taxes as everybody else. That's it. That's the rule. And watch how fast people lose their minds over it. Because right now, the standard move is a town rolls out the red carpet, waives the property taxes, waves the sales taxes, sometimes for 10, 20, 30 years. And six states get this, the exemptions can run basically forever. Forever. We gave a tax holiday with no expiration date to companies run by the richest men who have ever drawn breath on this planet. And here's my one question, the only one that matters on Rule One. And I'm asking it as a guy who's been on the other side of this table. I have, in my business life, walked into a town hat in hand and asked for incentives. It's not a sin, everyone does it. But if the project's so spectacularly valuable, if it's such a gift to the community, Then why does it need a handout just to show up? I mean, Indiana wrote Amazon a subsidy package worth eight billion dollars. Up in New York, there's a deal that pencils out to something like six point four million dollars of public money per job. Per job. For six point four million a job, I'll personally come do the job. I'll move into the data center. I mean, Phoenix did an audit and found one tax exemption quietly costs the city twelve million bucks a year every year. And over in Virginia, they've got reports showing these things are pulling millions straight out of the school budgets. So your kids in a trailer classroom so a trillion dollar company can save on its taxes. Cool system, guys. If the deal's that good, it can pay its light bill like the rest of us. If it can only survive tax-free, it's not ready. Rule two. Self-sustaining energy. Solve your own power problem before you make it the community's problem. You want to build a thing that eats the electricity of a mid-sized city? Fantastic. Bring your own. Don't show up, plug into a grid built for families and small businesses and mail the upgrade bill to the grandma. Because that's what's happening. In my Oregon, residential power rates jumped around 50% in five years while regular people's usage barely budged. And meanwhile, in the Dallas, Google's pulling something like 40% of the town's water. In Virginia, the transmission build-out for these things is running into the tens of billions, and somewhere around 40 million Americans got hit with data center-related rate hikes last year, and most of them have no idea that's even why. Folks, the principle's simple. The project solves the energy problem before the community inherits it, not after. Not we'll figure it out. We've heard we'll figure it out before tonight, haven't we? Rule three: local jobs first only. If your town is gonna eat the noise, the dust, the truck traffic, the water, and the strain on the grid, your town should get first crack at the work. Local hiring only. Local contractors, the electricians and pipe fitters and welders who actually live there, not a convoy of out-of-state crews who roll in, build it, and roll out, leaving you with the hum and the bill and wave goodbye. The question answers itself. If a community carries all the costs, shouldn't it get at least some of the benefit? That's not socialism. That's not a handout. That's just you broke it, you bought it. Except it's you burdened it, you hire from it. Rule four. Guaranteed job commitments. And this is where it gets fun. Every one of these projects shows up waving the same flyer. Jobs, thousands of jobs, good jobs, transform, transformative jobs. And here's my rule: great. Put it in writing and put money behind it. A lockbox. You promise a thousand permanent jobs, you post a bond, and if the jobs don't materialize, the community keeps the money. Simple. And watch how the energy in the room changes the instant you say guarantee. Because we have receipts on this. Remember Foxconn, The 13,000 job miracle in Wisconsin that delivered a tiny sliver of that. and we built a whole tax district around the promise. ⁓ There's now a data center on that exact land, a monument built on a broken jobs promise. And it's not just these. Look at the big solar project out in Ohio. Promised something like 3,000 construction jobs, and there's been 63 permanent ones. 63. These places run on automation. The whole point of them is that they don't need many humans. So if the jobs are real, guaranteeing them costs you nothing. The only people afraid of the lockbox are the people who already know the flyer's a lie. If the promise can't survive a guarantee, it was never a promise, it was a pickup line. Rule five, protect existing landowners. You see, when one of these things, these AI centers, lands next door, property assessments around it can spike. And suddenly the family that's owned forty acres for three generations is getting a tax bill calculated off of what the land's worth now, there's a billion dollar facility on the next parcel. And they didn't sell, they didn't cash out, they didn't want any of it. But now they're getting taxed like they did, and if they can't cover it, they lose the land. Think about that. We let a development show up, wreck the quiet, tank your enjoyment of your home, and then tax you off the land for the privilege. The rule's just this development doesn't get to tax people off ground they already own. You should not lose your grandfather's farm because a server farm moved in across the road and improved the neighborhood. Some improvement, maybe, who knows? Rule six: mandatory environmental review. I can't believe I just heard myself say that. But you have to measure first, build second. Before the foundation, you study it. The noise, the water draw, the traffic, the emissions of the gas turbines, the actual measurable impact on the actual people who actually live there. And I know, I know. Chad, that's the green tape stuff. That's how the activists kill everything. Not really. Measuring is not banning. A review with a firm deadline is the opposite of an endless lawsuit. This is just doing the homework before the test instead of after. And here's why it matters. Let me take you back to OG in West Texas. Remember, she couldn't even find out what was going up next door. And here's the part I saved. That Stargate project got its early green light through something called a permit by rule. You know what else gets a permit by rule? An auto-body shop, a dry cleaner. They waved through a facility that can draw the power of hundreds of thousands of homes on the same paperwork you'd use to open a Tuesday morning dry cleaner. That's not review. That's a rubber stamp wearing a lab coat. And down in Granbury, the noise that's rattling Daniel Lakey's windows, nobody measured that before it got built. Because nobody had to. We poured the concrete and then went, hmm, wonder if it's too loud. Measure first, build second. If a project can't survive somebody checking the water, what exactly is it hiding in the water? Rule seven, public notice and participation. The neighbors have to get told, the neighbors get heard. Real notice, real healings, and plain daylight, and this might be the one nobody can argue with because the line writes itself. If the project is good, it should not be afraid of the public, right? If it's such a win, gather the town, tell them what's coming, take the questions. The only reason to hide a project from the people it lands on is if you suspect that the people it lands on, once they understand it, will say no. And we've watched both versions tonight. OG couldn't get an answer because folks were under NDAs. Keep it quiet, don't tell the neighbors. Out in Wyoming, they pitched the whole state's future at a summit in Jackson with the door closed. Close door. And then the flip side, the hope. 12 homeowners in Virginia, Oak Valley beat a 2,100-acre project in court for one reason. The public notice didn't actually count. The system was supposed to tell the neighbors and it didn't, and a judge said that matters. It does. It does. We have spent 250 years creating these regulatory rules, and whether or not you agree with all of them, they are there for a reason. And to blow past them in an emergency or a race against China or whatever the excuses is how we always end up on the wrong side of the coin. Take a step back. Measure it, then build it. If a project can't survive being explained to the people who have to live next to it, that tells you everything you need to know. And the final rule, rule eight, no eminent domain for private development. This is the one that should unite every single person watching, left, right, and everyone who's tired of both. You do not get to take an American's land by force so a private company can run its line across it. Now, I'll be honest because I'm always honest with you. Real public infrastructure sometimes needs right of way. That's a genuine thing. But there's a world of difference between a public good and what one advocate down in Virginia called the customer's extension court, a transmission line that exists for one private data center and runs straight through your property whether you like it or not. In Virginia, the rules are written so residents can shoulder more than half the cost of those lines and have their land taken to build them. So you pay for the extension cord and it goes through your backyard. That's not a deal. That's a mugging with a permit. Voluntary sales only. If a project needs to seize land from people who told it no, it isn't ready. It isn't even polite. Okay, look at your scorecard. Here's what I need you to see. Now that all eight are on the table. Go back through them. Not one of these rules says no. Not one of them says stop AI, not one of them says ban data centers or beat the technology back into the sea or freeze the future. Tell the neighbors, measure the water, pay your taxes, bring your own power, hire local, keep your promises, don't tax a family off its land, don't take a man's property by force. That's the whole list. That is the entire radical growth-killing China-winning agenda. A list your grandmother would call manners. ⁓ And let me just say the quiet part out loud, because I don't want you mishearing me an hour deep into this. I want this built. I do. I want America to win this thing. I'm a build it guy, boots to hat. I just want it built so we're not embarrassed later about how we did it. These rules aren't anti-AI. They're not anti-growth. They're not anti-business or anti-anything. Every one of them is pro. Pro the project actually being good. Pro the deal actually being real. Pro the people who were already standing on that land before anyone showed up with a server. They're built to answer one question. The question those mismatched folks in the folding chairs have been asking all along without the words for it. How do we grow? And we should grow without sacrificing the people who have to live with what we built. A good project can pass this test. A good project welcomes this test. And the only project that fears all eight of these is the one that was never planning to play fair in the first place. If it can't survive scrutiny, it isn't ready and needs to be canceled. And that brings me to the one thing I've been chewing on all night. The reason these eight rules stopped feeling like policy to me somewhere around Rule 4 and started feeling like something older, something every American already knows in their bones, because we have fought this exact fight before, right at the very beginning. We all learned the phrase in fourth grade: taxation without representation. The whole thing. The tea in the harbor, the muskets, the American origin story starts with a grievance that's actually pretty simple. They were taking the colonists' money, and the colonists didn't get a vote on it. No say, no seat at the table, just the bill in the mail. And Americans, being Americans, lost their minds about it. Correctly, and will went and built an entire country on the idea that you don't get to reach into another man's pocket if that man doesn't get a voice. That's not a footnote, that's the foundation. But come back to OG with me in West Texas one more time, and Granbury, and those 12 families outside Gainesville, and the ranchers locked out of the room up in Jackson, Wyoming, because what's happening to them isn't quite taxation without representation, it's a cousin of it. It rhymes with it, but it cuts deeper. They're not just being taxed without a say. They're being transformed without a say. And that's the thing I could not stop turning over all week. It's not taxation without representation anymore. It's taxation and transformation without representation. Nobody just sent OG a bill. They changed her life. They changed the exact view she spent a year of her life driving around West Texas to find. They changed the air and the sound and the water and the entire character of the one piece of ground she picked on purpose, saved for, and earned. They didn't just ask her to pay. They asked her to absorb, to wake up every single morning inside a transformation she never voted for, never agreed to, and for the longest time couldn't even get a human being to explain to her. You can argue about a tax. A tax is a number. But the transformation of the one patch of earth that was supposed to be yours, the place that was supposed to be home, that goes somewhere a tax can't reach. That's not your wallet. That's your life. And that's why I keep refusing both sides of the door they keep trying to shove me through. Because the country wants me to pick. Build everything, bulldoze anything, grow at any cost, get out of the way, or stop. Everything, freeze it all, hide under the bed, progress is the enemy. And I reject both flatly because both are lazy and both leave somebody like OG holding the bag in the bill. Growth is necessary. I mean that. And you know I mean it, because I've spent my whole life building stuff, selling stuff, betting on the future, taking the side of the people who actually make things. We should build, we should innovate, we should win, we should put up the things that make this the kind of country people are still trying to sneak into. But property rights are necessary too. So is transparency. So is letting a community speak before its character is rewritten. So is accountability when the flyer set a thousand jobs and delivered a parking lot. So is the old, unglamorous, deeply American idea of stewardship. That the people who were here first, who built the place, who'll be here long after the developer flips the asset and moves on, are owed something more than dust and a rate hike. And look, I said it earlier and I'll say it once more because it matters. One side of our politics falls in love with the win, and the other falls in love with the procedure, and a healthy country needs both halves of that brain working at the same time. the build and the homework. we forgot that for about 20 minutes, and OG is what the forgetting looks like up close. ⁓ So where all of it lands ⁓ after stories and the states and the scorecard and the whole long road. This was never really sh a show about data centers. The data center is just the thing standing in the doorway this particular year. The real question, the one underneath OG and underneath every folding chair and every county on that board, is bigger and older, and it's not going anywhere. Can America still grow without growing cruel? Can we still build big things and still be decent to the small number of people who happen to live where we build them? Can we do both at once the way we used to know how? I think we can. I think we have to. And I think it comes down to one sentence. So let me say it plain. America needs a process that produces growth. without sacrificing the people who have to live with the consequences. That's it. That's the whole thing. Not stop, not surrender, not hand it to China. Just grow like a country that remembers the people standing on the land or the reason we're building in the first place. Which brings me, like it usually does, to Reagan, and not the Reagan you're expecting. Go back to 1969. Reagan's the governor of California, and the Army Corps of Engineers has a plan, and it's a big plan, the kind of plan a growth guy is supposed to love. They want to build a dam up on the Il River, a place called Dos Rios, 730 feet tall, enormous, and the water behind it would go south. To the lawns and the swimming pools and the new subdivisions of Southern California, and out to the farms of the Central Valley. Growth, development, progress, everything Reagan's supposed to stand up and salute. There was just one problem with the plan. To build it, you had to drown a valley. Round Valley. The reservoir would have flooded the town of Covello and the Round Valley Indian Reservation and the ranches and the farms and the ancestral burial grounds of native families who had already once before been pushed onto that exact land by the government. So the plan was: take the homes in the history of the people who actually lived here, put them under a hundred and ten thousand acres of water. And send the benefit a few hundred miles south to people who'd never set foot in the place. And here's a growth governor, a build-it Republican, the guy you'd bet money would sign that thing in a heartbeat. He wouldn't do it. He withheld his approval. He killed it. And the reason he gave is the reason I'm telling you this tonight. Reagan was furious that the Corps had shown up with one giant plan, no alternatives, no other options, no homework, just a railroad. And he would not steamroll the people on that land for it, he said, and you can look it up, that enough treaties had already been broken with the Indians. A man who loved growth as much as any American who ever lived looked at a massive project that benefited somebody else by sacrificing the people who lived there, and he said no. Not no to the growth, not to that. He understood fifty-seven years ago exactly what OG is trying to get somebody to understand right now. That you can be the most optimistic, build the future, shining s city on a hill person in America, With your whole chest that the people standing on the land get a say before you change their world. That's not a contradiction, that's the whole job. That's your Reagan reminder. Even Reagan stopped growth when it presented as irresponsible. So here's your homework, and I'm dead serious about it. There's a decent chance one of these projects is coming to your county. Maybe it's already on an agenda you haven't read yet. Pull out those eight rules, score it. See how it does. And if your county fails the test, you don't need me, and you don't need a moratorium, and you don't need to hate technology. You just need to show up to the meeting they're hoping you skip. That's the most American thing there is. OG didn't get that chance. You might! If you've got a project near you or a story, or you just scored your county and the number scared you, text me, 252-Chad Law. That's 252 Chad Law. I read them. And the good ones end up on this show. And do me the usual favor, because this one's not corporate, this one's just us. Hit that like button, subscribe so the algorithm can't quietly disappear us. And share this with the one person in your life who's about to have a server farm for a neighbor and doesn't know it yet. We don't have sponsors, we've got you. That's the whole operation. Stick around on Rumble right now. We're going to after hours where I actually get to answer you. And some of the questions that came in during tonight. And boy, do you always make me work for it. I'm Chadlaw. This has been Common Sense, and I'll see you on the other side of the paywall for the people who still have questions. Allow us ten seconds or less while we reset the studio.