The AI Data Center Moral Panic
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Steve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist, host of the Reasonably Optimistic podcast, and the author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success .
David French is a columnist for the New York Times. He’s a former senior editor of The Dispatch. He’s the author most recently of Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings.
[intro music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the nationwide political battle over data centers. Are voters' concerns valid? Is this a moral panic? Why has the anti-data center campaign been so successful, and can America have a competitive economy without data centers? Then we turn to President Trump's trade war with Canada and what it means for the future of US-Canada relations. And finally, someone who was very much worth our time, the late Dolly Parton. I'm joined today by the Dispatch's Editor-in-Chief, Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch contributor and Washington Post columnist, Megan McArdle, and Advisory Opinions guest host and New York Times columnist, David French. Let's dive right in.
[theme music] I wanna start today with a discussion about the politics of data centers. We have seen over the past several weeks, but in particular over the past week, a spate of articles in virtually every publication, New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, elsewhere,
noting the sort of heightened battles, not even battles, heightened concern about data centers and how it's driving political debates and campaigns in some areas and states and districts that we would expect, and probably some areas and states and campaigns that we wouldn't expect. There's a Politico headline on an article late this week that reads, "Everyone is making a U-turn on data centers as public support craters." Jonah, I'm not sure it's everyone, but it feels pretty close if you're following this story lately. What's going on?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's all one thing. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. I think there's a lot of more generic anxiety about AI and whether people think they have agency is stopping the data centers. If we can stop the data centers, we'll stop AI. They may not even articulate that in their own minds that much, but I, I can't dismiss it as part of, like, the general groundswell thing. I think that in an era where the affordability stuff is real, anything that impinges on people's electricity rates is gonna freak people out, you know? There are just a bunch of those kinds of things that I think are real and they're legitimate, and politicians should do a better job of dealing with them. And then
beyond that, though, I think it's a moral panic.
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