Republicans Should Just Say No To Josh Hawley’s Crusade Against Data Centers

By Booker Lightman | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

The Data center boom is creating a political conundrum for Republicans, or so Politico would have you believe. For while President Trump and the large majority of Republican elected officials are in favor of data centers, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie stand in opposition to the Trump administration. 

These are the same names that are always being praised by the media for their “bravery” in “standing up” to Trump. It’s not hard to see why. 

Most Congresspeople get little attention outside their districts, but if a Republican Congressman speaks out against Trump, suddenly he or she is the darling of a mainstream media apparatus that would love nothing more than to set the Right into Civil War.

President Trump, along with most Congressional Republicans, support data centers because they understand that artificial intelligence is absolutely vital if America is to remain a world power in the twenty-first century. They understand that data centers are good for the economy and provide jobs, particularly construction jobs for working-class Americans.

Hawley and the complainers will tell you that data centers drive up electricity prices. This is based on illogical, zero-sum assumptions about how economics that ignore economies of scale in electricity production. It also contradicts what conservatives have long believed about energy and economics more broadly. 

The solution to high energy prices is not to consume less energy; that’s a left-wing, poverty mindset. The solution is to produce more energy.

That means repealing “green” regulations and mandates that are the actual cause of higher electricity prices. That means an all-of-the-above energy policy, oil and gas, nuclear, solar and wind. Indeed, it’s supremely ironic that even wind and solar energy is being held back by burdensome environmental regulations like the National Environmental Policy Act.

Voters have heard of the Democrats’ plans for “net zero,” a “phase-out” of oil and gas production. And they’re smart enough to grasp the connection between that and higher energy bills, as much as the Democrats and mainstream media try to obscure it. 

This is a winning issue for Republicans, but it won’t be if they let themselves be detoured into scapegoating ChatGPT.

Opposition to data centers is bad for our nation’s security, it’s bad economics, and it’s bad politics, too. It’s the kind of “populism” that appeals to the consultant class, not actual working-class Americans, who use AI and want it to continue to be available. 

The environmental lobby has long proclaimed they’re against “Big Oil.” The voters aren’t fooled; understanding that such policies mean they will pay higher prices at the pump. 

The voters, likewise, will see that Hawley’s crusade against AI companies will actually mean taking AI tools out of the hands of everyday people, reserving them for the elite.

Republicans should just say no to Hawley, Greene, and Massie, and any other purveyors of this degrowth poverty slopulism.

Booker Lightman is a Denver resident active in the local GOP.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.