Big Tech colonization is real — zoning laws are the last line of defense



How much of America’s rural landscape, power, water, quality of life, and heritage will be wiped out by one industry — AI data centers? Big Tech firms won’t say. Evidently, it’s as much as we’re willing to tolerate.

David Sacks and his Silicon Valley allies know the stakes. They tried to slip a provision into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to block all zoning and regulation of AI facilities. Why? Because the only way to cover the country with thousands of hyperscale data centers is to turn rural America into one giant industrial park — with no transparent public plan, no limits on power or water use, and no end in sight.

Zoning remains one of the few tools citizens can use to say no — not just to data centers, but to the entire agenda of unaccountable technocracy.

Before Mark Zuckerberg’s Manhattan-sized complexes even break ground, the United States is already on track for these facilities to consume more energy annually than Poland — a nation of 36.6 million people — used in 2023. That’s not a tech “footprint.” That’s a tech crater.

But a counterrevolution is building.

Loudoun County: The canary in the coal mine

If you want to see America’s future under digital colonization, look at Loudoun County, Virginia. The growth of hyperscale data centers there is so unnatural that some neighborhoods now want to rezone themselves as industrial just to escape.

Patricia Cave says life in her Arcola neighborhood has become impossible, as she and her neighbors have become essentially barricaded by server farms.

“Living on Hiddenwood Lane is no longer an option,” Cave told the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors last year. “We can’t be victims again to political winds that are bigger than us — and we can’t be a human buffer.” The only way she and her neighbors can sell their homes — at pennies on the dollar — is to convert them to industrial property.

Just 10 years ago, Cave’s neighborhood was ringed by rural farmland. Now, with 200 data centers covering roughly 49 million square feet in what’s known as Data Center Alley, you can’t escape their reach. About one-third of Loudoun County’s data centers now sit near residential areas.

Frederick County: Drawing a line

In Frederick County, Maryland, officials saw the writing on the wall and set a hard limit: No more than 1% of the county’s landmass can be used for data centers. It’s a rare example of local government acting to protect the character, environment, and livability of their communities before the tech giants could hollow them out.

Monroe County: Fighting for their ground

In Monroe County, Georgia, residents fought off a proposed rezoning that would have put a massive data center next to homes and farms. The company behind it claimed it would bring jobs. Locals pointed out the reality: a handful of maintenance workers, huge power demands — 1.1 gigawatts, more than the daily usage of a million households — and a future of noise and light pollution.

Residents won — for now.

The pattern is clear

Local victories are more the exception than the rule. The reality is that Big Tech companies are expanding across America with little or no resistance.

Tech companies claim these facilities are the backbone of the future. In reality, they’re engines of resource consumption — each one sucking up hundreds of millions of gallons of water and enough electricity to power the equivalent of large cities in counties with populations in the low five figures.

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Photo by blackdovfx via Getty Images

Meta, for example, wants to drop a 1.2-gigawatt behemoth in tiny Cheyenne, Wyoming — enough juice for 1 million homes. In drought-stricken Texas, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others are pushing the Stargate project, a cluster of hyperscale data centers around Abilene that would guzzle the power of millions of homes and drain staggering amounts of water. Smaller facilities in Texas have already consumed 463 million gallons in 2023 and 2024.

The profits leave town. The costs — environmental, economic, and social — stay behind.

But the real danger is Washington overriding local efforts to preserve local residents' way of life. If Congress strips away zoning authority in the name of “progress,” the only “progress” will be toward an industrialized, unlivable countryside.

Why zoning matters

Public zoning meetings are the last places where ordinary citizens can stop these projects. Federalizing control would silence local voices. In court, zoning remains one of the few tools citizens can use to say no — not just to data centers, but to the entire agenda of unaccountable technocracy.

For once, the stakes are obvious: if we lose local control, we lose the fight. Loudoun County shows what surrender looks like. Frederick County and Monroe County show what resistance can achieve.

It’s time to choose.

Don’t let rural America become the next New York City



Elect strong conservative leaders in your state — or watch it go the way of New York City. That’s the unmistakable warning conservatives should take from New York voters nominating a Hamas sympathizer and self-proclaimed socialist for mayor.

How could this happen just one generation after 9/11? How does the city that suffered most from jihadist terrorism now embrace a foreign-born Islamist who wants to “globalize the intifada”?

When Trump calls for more farm labor from the third world — so long as the workers aren’t 'murderers' — he misses the deeper issue. Violent crime isn’t the only threat.

Several factors explain the city’s decline, but one stands out: immigration. Forty percent of New York City’s population now consists of foreign-born residents — not including the children of immigrants. Mass immigration on that scale, especially from Islamic and third world countries, doesn’t just change the labor market. It imports foreign values and embeds them in the culture.

Trump should think twice about demanding more foreign agricultural workers for red-state America. His arguments about labor shortages miss the larger picture. This isn’t just about harvesting crops — it’s about reshaping schools, neighborhoods, and eventually, the ballot box.

In 2022, the Center for Immigration Studies mapped 2,351 Census Bureau-defined Public Use Microdata Areas to show the percentage of schoolchildren from immigrant households. No surprise: Urban districts in places like New York and Los Angeles show overwhelming majorities of immigrant families.

But that trend now stretches deep into red states. Cities and even rural counties are seeing shockingly high proportions of students from immigrant families.

In southeast Nashville, 65% of public-school students come from immigrant families. Iraq ranks as the second-largest country of origin. In Dallas, all 20 school districts report at least one-third of students from immigrant households. In most of those districts, a majority of families are foreign-born.

This trend extends well beyond major cities. In southwest Oklahoma City, 43% of students come from immigrant families. Greenville, South Carolina, stands at 35%. Birmingham and Chattanooga each hover around 20%.

Red-state cities and midsize towns now reflect immigration levels once limited to coastal urban hubs. That leaves rural America as the last holdout — and even that is changing.

The so-called farm labor trade has transformed heartland communities. These public school districts report the following immigrant family enrollment rates:

  • Texas Panhandle (outside Potter and Randall Counties): 31%
  • Oklahoma Panhandle: 21%
  • Southwest Kansas (Dodge City, Garden City, Liberal City): 55%
  • Central Nebraska: 27%
  • Canyon and Owyhee Counties, Idaho (Caldwell and Nampa): 30%
  • Whitfield County, Georgia: 43%
  • Woodbury and Plymouth Counties, Iowa (Sioux City): 26%
  • Washington County, Arkansas: 26%
  • Fargo, North Dakota: 23%

Until recently, these areas were overwhelmingly native-born. They maintained a strong continuity of American culture and civic tradition.

What happens when the next generation of these children grows up, votes, and brings in more from similar backgrounds? These red counties may not stay red for long.

Mitt Romney won Washington County, Arkansas, by 16 points in 2012. Just 12 years later, Donald Trump carried it by only six — even as he expanded his statewide margin. What changed? More than a quarter of the local student body now comes from immigrant households.

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Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Trump won rural Sampson County, North Carolina, by a 2-to-1 margin. Yet, by the 2022–23 school year, Hispanic students made up 44.2% of public school enrollment. The district now runs extensive English as a Second Language programs to meet ongoing demand. Even if Hispanic voters shift modestly right, when has such rapid demographic upheaval ever worked to conservatives’ advantage?

The pace of change is impossible to ignore. Importing foreign labor into rural counties inevitably reshapes culture — and, soon after, voting patterns.

Greene County, Iowa, illustrates the point. In 2023, Hispanic residents accounted for just 3.3% of the total population. But that number underrepresents their influence. Iowa State University researchers found Latino populations in rural Iowa tend to skew young, meaning they disproportionately fill the schools even when their overall numbers look small. That imbalance compounds over time.

When Trump calls for more farm labor from the third world — so long as the workers aren’t “murderers” — he misses the deeper issue. Violent crime isn’t the only threat. The more serious loss lies in surrendering the very communities that naturally align with traditional American culture.

As Vice President JD Vance put it during his Republican National Convention acceptance speech: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

That is the nation Trump must promise to defend — not just with words but with sound policy.

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The True ‘Threat To Democracy’ Isn’t White Americans, It’s The Democrat Party

[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-01-at-3.45.01 PM-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-01-at-3.45.01%5Cu202fPM-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]These 'journalists' have their heads so far up their own keisters, they wouldn't know the honest truth if it punched them in the face.

​'White Rural Rage' authors blast 'anti-gay,' 'xenophobic,' 'anti-democratic,' 'pissed off,' uneducated Trump supporters



The authors of "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy" blasted the subjects of their book as "anti-gay," "xenophobic," "anti-democratic," "pissed off," uneducated supporters of former President Donald Trump in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" earlier this week.

What are the details?

The program's smug co-host, Mika Brzezinski, prefaced the segment with authors Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman by wondering why Trump got so much support from rural America when he "became a millionaire at 8 years old and didn't have to serve because he claimed he had bone spurs in his little feet."

The far-left Brzezinski asked with a grin, "Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point? You would think, as we've pointed out, looking at Joe Biden's background and Donald Trump’s, that the opposite would be true.”

Schaller answered that he and Waldman “lay out the fourfold interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country" in their new book and then dropped his first bomb.

“They're the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country," he began. "Second, they're the most conspiracist group: QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism, scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism.”

Schaller added that white rural Americans hold “anti-democratic sentiments.”

“They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re most likely to say the president should be backed unilaterally without any checks from Congress or the courts or the bureaucracy," he said. "They're also the most strongly white nationalist and white Christian nationalist. And fourth, they’re most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

Brzezinski asked in quite the elitist tone why the subjects of their book are "vulnerable."

Waldman replied that it has to do with “problematic education systems,” “poorer infrastructure” and “a lack of economic opportunity," most notably a great loss of manufacturing jobs.

“That kind of left them open to someone like Donald Trump who would come along and tell them something that was true — that there is a system that has not served them well,” Waldman added.

“They're pissed off,” Brzezinski offered off camera.

“They are pissed off,” Waldman affirmed, noting that supporting Trump afforded them a way to "channel their rage and anger" and to "give a big middle finger to Democrats."

Amazingly, know-it-all Brzezinski assumed that what white, rural Americans ultimately want is "to be rich."

Schaller didn't seem so sure that was accurate and noted that "they'd rather channel their rage."

'White Rural Rage' looks at the most likely group to abandon democratic norms youtu.be

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Warning: This government scam would be the 'destruction of rural America'



Another day, another government proposal that will throw a wrench in American citizens' freedom.

The SEC proposal would allow for the creation of a new type of company called a “natural asset company,” which could buy up land to use natural processes — like the generation of fresh air — to write off carbon emissions.

Glenn Beck calls the proposal “horrifying.”

Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks is in agreement, telling Glenn that the proposal will “permanently stop economically essential activities like grazing, mineral extraction, modern agriculture” and “severely curtail recreational access.”

“We’re basically talking about the destruction of rural America,” he adds, noting that the move is simply “an effort to take control of America’s natural resources.”

The proposal is “essentially placing a value on natural processes,” Oaks continues, using “biological systems that provide clear air, water, food” as an example.

To put it simply, Oak calls it “just another scam” that uses “God-given processes” at the expense of our country.

“It represents a massive transfer of wealth,” he adds.

Glenn is aware that all of this has seriously far-reaching implications.

“Our food prices will go through the roof,” Glenn says, “and good luck going to a national park.”

“This is so evil. This is so incredibly evil,” he adds.


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