By Joe Schaller
Guest Columnist
I grew up in a small northwest college town with two-thirds of the community university students and staff. My father was an architect-builder-landlord. I left my hometown impressed with the wisdom and knowledge of the local blue-collar skilled trade workers as well as the realization that most college professors lack “real world” experience. After nearly 50 years in Gallup, I have similar impressions for the college-educated White liberals, aging hippies, and woke outrage mob dominating the dubious local “resistance” to data centers and industry. They seem desperate for attention.
Baizuo (bye-swah) is Chinese for “white left”: It portrays Western educated liberals as naïve, hypocritical, and overly concerned with trendy identity politics or virtue signaling at the expense of real-world stability. Baizuos advocate for social justice, identity DEI, open borders, and the environment only to satisfy their own humanitarian feelings of moral superiority.
In the 1940s, “useful idiots” described people who are easily manipulated into supporting a cause, ideology, or political movement that they do not fully understand—primarily those who blindly cooperated with communist groups. Baizuo is essentially a modern Mandarin equivalent of “useful idiots.”
The baizuo term didn’t become totally mainstream in China until 2016 when the battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was heavily watched by Chinese citizens. Chinese nationalists used baizuo as a weapon to mock American liberals, Clinton supporters, and university students who were devastated by Trump’s victory.
The blind faith of left-wing socialists enables Trump-deranged No-kings, No-data center protesters to be easily manipulated by China’s “bot farms” and their state media’s documented propaganda campaigns that latch onto their rage and frustrations to amplify them, inflame social media opposition, and slow down U.S. artificial intelligence development by suppressing economic liberty. Chi-coms and American communists want to talk us into going full Luddite.
from Luddites literally raging against the machine to “grid anxiety” to “A.I. psychosis” to data center techno-paranoia and Not In My Backyard wars.
A Luddite (LUH-dyte) is a person who opposes new technology, automation, or industrial progress. History shows that the public almost always overestimates the immediate doom of new technology.
Historical American technophobic “Luddite” movements:
The automated loom Luddite movement (1811 to 1817)
High speed steam locomotives (1830s)
The electrical grid “War of the Wires” (1888 to 1892)
Anti-automobile activism (1920 to 1935)
Threshing machine raids (1930s)
The mechanical cotton picker (1936 to 1951)
The “Giant Brains” original A.I. panic of early computers (1950s)
University computer centers (1960s – 1970s)
Fracking (wastewater now used to cool A.I. data centers) (2010s)
Data centers and generative A.I. (2022 – present)
There have also been a dozen climate alarms since the world emerged post-1700 from the brutal Little Ice Age when a warming planet was viewed as a wonderful thing.
The table breaks down the total volume of water lost to evaporation every year.
In semi-arid Gallup we’re talking about one golf course equivalent effluent wastewater consumed by a hyperscale data center plus natural gas power plant.
Gallup Land Partners has the right to purchase one million gallons a day of Gallup’s effluent water that would otherwise flow unused down the Rio Puerco. The city’s treatment plant processes about 2.3 million gallons of wastewater daily (840 million a year).
TeraPlex (now defunct) requested only 110 million gallons of wastewater annually (0.3 million daily) for their data center and power plant combined.
The City of Gallup will be allocated 6.7 million gallons of freshwater *daily* from the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project scheduled for completion by 2030.
As I look over the list of water concerns by resistance protesters—aquifer depletion, NGWSP impact, anti-industry/anti-private enterprise/anti-economic development/anti-energy, and comparisons to Project Jupiter—I can only shake my head in disbelief. None of it holds any water. It appears the manipulation of Gallup’s (and the nation’s) Google-deficient protest leaders has been a huge success for China.
All is not lost. Convalt’s solar manufacturing campus is closer to reality and may breathe some life into our shrinking community and halt the economic death spiral. Who knows, they might even build us a new library. Big Tech has proven to get out the checkbook and go the extra mile with huge benefits for a community. We would be crazy to allow another golden opportunity for industry to slip away and hopefully down the line a golden egg data center is back in play.
