The David Knight Show - Interview: Your Town Pays the Price for Big Tech’s Data Centers

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Silicon Valley wants the land, the water, the electricity—and apparently doesn’t want you asking questions. Iowa Rep. Cindy Golding exposes how massive AI data centers are being pushed into rural communities through secrecy, tax incentives, political pressure, and sweetheart deals, while residents could be left paying for the infrastructure and dealing with the damage long after the construction boom disappears. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Cindy Golding, Golding, and she is a Iowa House Representatives member, and she has had a lot of experience in Iowa pushing back against things like the CO2 pipeline. If you remember, we've talked about that in the past. But right now she's very active in terms of pushing back against data centers, and I assume flock cameras as well. But I wanted to get her to tell us a little bit about her experience, what you can expect to run into when you see it there, why she's opposing this and many other issues.

So joining us now is Cindy Golding. Thank you so much for joining us, Cindy. Well, hi. It's a pleasure to join you, and it's a pleasure to help educate our citizens about what's really going on here. Yes, because this is a national issue, actually an international issue to some degree, I guess, but especially a national issue. This is happening everywhere.

I've been talking about what is happening in Tennessee, but you have exactly the same issues because this is a national rollout that we're seeing. So I represent rural Ling County. Now, just to give you a perspective, my county is the second largest county in the state of Iowa for population. And my district represents farms and small towns, but we surround the second largest city in Iowa, which is Cedar Rapids, Iowa. So about, well, several years ago,

Well, the other thing is we have one nuclear power plant in the state of Iowa. That also happens to be in my district. It's called the Dwayne Arnold Nuclear Power Plant. And they shut it down about 2020 with the excuse that we had this inland torn inland hurricane, a Dorachio. And they said it damaged it, but that was just, they were in the process of shutting it down anyway. So in my district, I have a nuclear power plant that they're trying to bring back online. and then we have the city, the city of Cedar Rapids, which is not my district, but my county,

has proposed multiple data centers. So I became aware of what was going on. So I think we need to educate people a little bit about first, about what a data center is to get this perspective. Data centers cover, it's like a vehicle for its storage. So people will stand up at public meetings and say, we've had data centers for decades. We have. A data center is merely off-site storage of your computer data.

And if you imagine you save it to a hard drive and take the hard drive someplace else, that's data storage. And so we have had data centers for decades. We've had them like my own company. We hired an off-site provider to store our. data 25 years ago. So data centers are small. There are three, there are like five different sizes. So we are being fed a line of baloney about data centers because it's kind of like imagining you've been driving, you know, a golf cart, and pretty soon they're telling you a semi is exactly the same thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So these data centers we're talking about now are

hypercenters. So we need to understand. So we need to understand. understand what the language is as we address the problem. The hyper centers and the AI centers, the AI, what they call AI training centers, and they are high performance computing centers. Those are the ones that consume enormous amounts of electricity, enormous amounts of water, thousands of acres of land. And those are the things that we are concerned about. We're not concerned about off-site stored. Sure. So putting that in perspective.

And, of course, I've been telling everybody to think of them not as a data center, but as a surveillance center. Because that's really what the AI brings to it. You know, the storing data is one thing, but going through and mining it and organizing it and finding the needles in the haystack that you want to find, that is something that is new. That is something that is part of AI. And that's what these hyper centers are bringing, isn't it?

That's exactly it. And that's why when someone stands up, we have public hearings all the time about should we change zoning, how should we do the energy, all that. And we have these people that will stand up and say, well, we've had data centers forever and you've never, you know, you haven't protested those. Like I said, it's like the difference between a golf cart and a semi. We have had data centers. We've had off-site storage, but we have not had the abuse of our resources like we're seeing. seeing in with data centers, with these current AI centers. It's, hang on just a second, I'm just turning off my Bluetooth so it doesn't keep popping up

on here. So we have organized, I filed the bill in our house last year. It's called House File 2690. Because in my county, I became aware of this concern. And my bill is simply about transparency. I want to let people know. I'm not opposed to technology advances. I'm not opposed to appropriate use of our land and our resources.

I'm opposed to the abuse. So my bill was simply about transparency. Tell us how much energy you're going to use. Tell us how that will impact the rate payers. And are you, the data center, Google, meta, Amazon, whoever, are you paying for your infrastructure needs or are we paying for it? Tell us how much water are you going to use? Where is it coming from?

Are you draining our rivers and our aquifers? What are you doing with the wastewater? That's excellent. And of course, what we've seen is that in many cases, they come in and they have the people who are going to be making the decision of the county level or the city council or whatever. they have NDAs where they're not allowed to talk about this kind of stuff.

So a lot of times we've had communities that are totally blindsided by this. They don't even know that something is coming in. They were not, there was no transparency at all. What you're talking about is tell us what you're going to do so we can have a decision about this. Many cases, they don't tell people anything, even that they're going to build one of these things. Well, there's, there's, so we have the water concern. We also have the heat, the heat generated by these. If you remember what it's like, so in our office, we had a little server room.

It was a little closet where our servers, you know, our storage was. We had to have a separate air conditioner for that room. Oh, yeah. Now, imagine what this is like with these massive storage, you know, constant fans. The cooling requirement is enormous. So they're either going to do it with water or they're going to do it with electricity, either one. So then we talk, my bill also asked. what they were doing with the heat generated.

Are they going to recycle this energy, because heat is energy? Are they going to reuse it in their system? Or are they going to let it dissipate in the atmosphere? And we have data that says that can create an ambient increase in temperature up to nine degrees in the surrounding area. And I don't know, depending on the size of this hypercenter, if they are just letting this heat go up in the atmosphere. Yeah.

Isn't it kind of interesting how they were obsessing about global warming for the longest time? And energy usage now is just like, oh, forget about that. We don't even care. And for the longest time, the people I've worked with and I've been involved with, we talked about the fact, hey, you've created these heat islands. And, you know, some of them are just airport tarmac. And you relocated your temperature station to that airport tarmac. And a lot of that is driving this myth of global warming.

So, you know, now they've got the real thing. I guess they can just move all the thermometers to the data centers. And there you go. We've proven global warming right there. Yeah. So my bill didn't require any specific setbacks. It didn't require any. There was no constriction of where you can build, how you build, what you do, where you take your water.

It was simply transparency. It passed through our Commerce Committee unanimously. Bipartisan went through. and then it got held up because Nextera, which is a huge energy company, and Google, both of those in my district, because Next Era owns the nuclear power plant, they rejected it because Google said they did not want to disclose the water consumption. Nextera said that, you know, this is proprietary information. Well, I'm sorry, you are utilizing our land. you're asking for tax breaks, you're asking for all of these special considerations with our tax dollars and our natural resources, we have a right to know.

Yeah, that's amazing that they would say you're not allowed to know how much water we're going to use. That's insane. And so did that bill get held up then by House leadership? Is that what happened? Yes, it was held up by House leadership. And the amazing thing is that when I was talking about this in Des Moines in February and March, the attitude, was basically, well, that's a Lynn County problem. That's Eastern Iowa. You guys are different because there were data centers already located in the city of Des Moines, which is our state capital.

But there are a couple of these hypercenters, but nobody was talking about it. Well, so at the end of the session, so I just got a phone call this morning from one of my peers. She said, she remembered me talking about it during, and none of her constituents cared about it. And two days after we gabbled out, suddenly it was exploding all over the state. And when we have an issue like this, it becomes my responsibility to educate my constituents about what's happening. And so I've been doing that.

I've been, and what we need people to know, and this is pretty standard. across the country is once a project like a data center or a new manufacturing facility, they call it advanced manufacturing, a facility that needs more power than is generally available in the locale. Your utilities commission or your utilities board now has the authority and the responsibility to be sure that that energy is available. That gives them the power of eminent domain. The power to take property, to

condemn property in the location they believe is the most appropriate to put whatever the energy source is. So like here... Or even for power lines, right? Yeah. Well, we start with citing the new gas fire generator

so they can condemn property for the new gas fire generator. They can condemn property for the transmission. lines that go from the generator to the new site, whether it be a manufacturing facility or a data center, they have the power of eminent domain to cite the gas pipeline that is supplying the natural gas to this gas generator. So once that data center, once that is approved by zoning, that can be fought by the citizens. They can go to zoning meetings and they

can do all that. Once it is cited, once it is approved, then the Utilities Commission has the authority and the mandate to bring the power to it. And to raise the rates, if necessary, to pay for all that, right? Right. So if, so what I have encouraged, I have 11 communities, 11 cities in my district. The largest one is 2,000 people. Wow. So the city, Google, So my county, Lynn County, wrote an ordinance to four data centers. And it's about water. It's about electricity. It's about siding.

It's about setbacks. It's not restrictive, but it required disclosure of the water. Google didn't like that. So they rejected Lynn County's ordinance. But the land that they want to build on is right next to the nuclear power plant that happens to be in the rural area. So now they petition the little town of Palo, which has just a little over a thousand people, to annex this property in to Palo.

Because once that property is located within the city limits, the county no longer has authority. Wow. So what's in it for these city officials when they look at the dollar sign, get dollar signs in their eyes? Well, I've heard a variety of stories. They're anecdotal. But I've heard several stories about how Google has promised to upgrade the streets. They've promised to build a new library.

They've promised. I don't know what they've promised because this is all confidential. Yeah, that's right. Not allowed to know. Citizens don't even know. The citizens of payload don't even know. So Palo worked very hard on an ordinance before they would agree to annex this in. And this is another caveat for small towns or big cities.

You cannot retroactively apply an ordinance when a company requests a permit because then they say you did it specifically targeting them. Your ordinance must be in place before the request comes in. Well, that's important. Yeah, that's very important. So people need to be proactive about this and make sure they work with their city council or their county commissioners to make sure they've got these ordinances in place in advance, right? Right, because if they annex the land in and don't have an ordinance in place and then Google, so they annex in 600 acres. and the landowner says, I want to annex my property in for a housing development. And the city council says, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Okay, we'll do that.

They annex the property in. It now gets inside the city limits. But the landowner doesn't put forth a request for a housing development. They put in a request for a data center. Hmm. because those requests for rezoning are not there or the way they deal with, you know, can we get a permit for this, comes after the annexation occurs. Wow.

It's amazing how underhanded and sneaky all this stuff is, whether you're talking about the NDAs or whether you're talking about, let's get them to put us in their town and then they can't regulate us after the fact. It's just amazing how devious these people are, isn't it? Well, the thing we need to keep remembering is that our Midwest, in Tennessee, I can say part of, you know, not really Midwest, but close. Our cost of doing business is considerably less than on the coast. But the businesses that want these data centers are on the coast. Yeah.

So they come and they are abusing our communities. They're abusing, they are extracting, actually extracting our natural resources. Yeah, it really is predatory. And it's like a colonization. It is. We're being colonized by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, I guess, is the way you could look at this. It's kind of a neo-colonialism. But yeah, what other things have you found that are people need to be on look out for or other gotchas that you have found in this process?

Well, so there's a promise about all the jobs they're going to bring, all the revenue they bring and all of that. And we have to stop and look back at what drives this. And I liken it to education. And we needed to increase our graduation rates. So schools started moving children through graduating them. We were not measuring their academic success. We were pushing, we were measuring schools on what is your graduation rate. You need to keep that in mind.

You get what you measure. So all of our states, have an economic development department. They get paid, their job is to bring economic development to your state. Tennessee has one. Iowa has one. And the people that run that department are measured on how many outside or foreign, when I say foreign, I mean out of state.

You know, in industry, you're a foreign entity if you're not located in the state, inside the state line. So they are measured on. how much money they bring into the state. They're not measured on what is the impact on the residents. They're not measured on what is the long-term effect. They're not measured on anything except how many dollars are you bringing in. So that's a lot of stars behind their name.

And of course, a lot of that can just be the cost of the data center. I've seen some figures, and I just talked about this this week, a couple of them back east in Virginia and elsewhere. they say, well, we're going to create jobs. Well, if you look at how few permanent jobs there are, and you look at how much has been put in in terms of state money to incentivize this, you're spending about $13 million in one case and $11 million in another per job to get things in. On the long term.

Yeah, on the long term, yeah. So again, looking at how people get measured. In Lynn County, there's about 8,000 new people from outside of our state who came in to build Now, if you look at our workforce development, that their job is to reduce unemployment to create jobs. So if you have, I'm going to use the number 100,000 unemployed Iowans over our workforce. Now you bring all of these people in. We still have 100,000 unemployed Iowans, but our workforce is now 8,000 bigger. So because those people are reported on our workforce numbers.

So the percentage goes down. Yeah. So you look at the numbers. So when we look at what is being measured here, that is part of what's driving it. Mm-hmm. And we have the unique situation that the union bosses want this and the corporations want this and the people don't. So the unions are driving the Democrat Party. The corporations are driving leadership on our side.

Mm-hmm. And that puts the rest of us in the middle. And we're all together in this. This cuts across, you point out, the people don't want this. And there is a massive bipartisan move. This is rarely do you see a real hot button issue. And this is a hot button issue. You got people are going to jail all the time because they're pushing back against

flock or the data centers or whatever. People are really angry and justifiably so. And it doesn't matter whether they're Democrat or Republican left or right. Everybody sees these problems. There are immediate problems in terms of water, electricity, noise, things like that. But the long-term problems, a lot of people see that as well. It's harder to get people to see what the long-term threat is. But a lot of people are starting to see that as well.

That's why when I look at this, the games that are being played by the people who have the levers of power, whether it's the unions or the corporations or the government's local or federal, they're playing all these different games out there, keeping it quiet, keeping it secret until they can get this put in place. And we've got to blow the whistle on this stuff. The other thing I find very disheartening is some of the local officials that push these things through and then quit their job, which is many times a volunteer position, a city council member. We had a county supervisor who approved thousands and thousands of acres of solar panels on prime farm ground, quit his job and took a job with the energy company. That he just approved all this. We had that decades ago with a mayor who approved condemnation of farm ground for a new factory

and six months later took a job as a vice president of that corporation. So people need to know who their elected officials are and really watch them. You've got to know who you elect. Of course, we've been seeing that for a long time, the revolving door between regulators and industry in so many different ways in Washington. But of course, people need to understand that happens at the state and local level as well in a big way. And I guess really, what do we do about that? Do we have a law that says that you can't you can't go in, can't go to work for the people that you were regulating at some point? That's really

kind of hard to do when you get to the local level because it's so broad. Well, and you can't regulate morality either. You cannot, I don't care how much you legislate. You cannot legislate morality. But I want to point out a couple of other things. This is how I'm bringing my community. around to see that this isn't just happening down there on the southwest side of our county. So the amount of the number of people who have moved into Lynn County has created a problem with apartments. So they have consumed every apartment, every Airbnb, every hotel room. So even as far south, so Lynn County sits next to Johnson County where our university hospitals are. Families who are coming to see their children in the hospital, you know, to stay at the local hotel, there are no hotel rooms

because these data center employees have overwhelmed our local communities. The landfill, you never think of the waste problem. So the landfill here was scheduled. We did some modifications and some recycling and, you know, some other things that encouraged residents to really be conservative. So we expanded our landfill life out to 2039 with what we had done over several years, even considering the floods in Dorado, which has a lot of waste. We had it expanded out to 2039. The latest review, because of all of the debris from these data center construction and all these people, it has reduced the life of the landfill to 2032. Wow. Wow. Because you had, you had, what was it, like 2,000 people said, and now we got 8,000 that have come in? Yeah.

Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, well, we're the second largest county in the state. So we have a couple hundred thousand in our county. Okay. But when you bring these people in for temporary, and they say temporary a year or two, 8,000 new people that are working here and their families and all that. So you look at the employment numbers, you look at all that.

And they're saying, wow, look at, you know, look at the, the, we're in turn on the roads. Yeah. You have this constant construction going on. it's not like we we just built a new big factory for sub-zero here in Cedar Rapids. Big manufacturing facility. I went to their ribbon cutting. They are not putting the pressure on our community and they are providing long-term high-wage jobs. Several hundred long-term high-wage jobs.

That's sub-zero. You know, they make refrigerators and dishwashers. and stuff. So it's a manufacturing facility providing something for people. The data center is, I don't know how many times bigger than that manufacturing facility, and it's going to employ a handful of people. So you got that, yeah, 8,000 people come in and there's this tremendous storm of activity, this boom, and people are trying to adjust to that. You have issues about the road, the landfill, and housing and other things like that. But there's nothing that you can really do to adjust to that because they're all going to be going pretty soon.

So the housing thing is a temporary problem, but of course you're going to have to do something about the landfill and the roads, and that's going to be on the people who lived there before and who are going to still be there, even though there's not going to be any real new jobs coming into the area. That's right. And the other thing that I started talking about last at a forum I was at yesterday, is Iowans need to decide, or Tennesseans,

need to decide what do you want your state to look like? 20 years from now. Because we know the advances in technology. And I want you to think back of in the 70s, we had IBM mainframes. Industry went everybody had an IBM mainframe. Well, then Apple came along with the Apple 2E, the little desktop. But industry stayed with IBM because they had so much invested in the, infrastructure for the IBM mainframes.

And Apple came along and then we get Macs and we get all kinds of other desktops. But it took 20 years to get that to be standard in industry. Then think about phones. We had, you know, landlines. We had AT&T. Then we have iPhones. And how quickly that moved much faster into the new technology than the IBM, than the mainframes to desktops.

to laptops. So the speed of technology advancing is faster and faster and faster. I know that we already have data compression available. So how soon are these data centers going to be obsolete? Exactly. When you look at China, yeah, when you look at China, they're coming up. All this stuff is changing so rapidly. You know, we use a little bit of this for some graphics stuff.

And it is amazing how quickly it is changing and how the lead is changing from one hand to the other. And we have a Chinese company I just talked about today, Deep Seek, and they are charging three cents for what Anthropica is charging three dollars for. So what happens if these people don't make it, if they can't compete with the Chinese? What happens is these data centers? That's what I want our state to seriously think about is do we want to have these massive brownfields? Because the other thing I'm hearing from the industry, is that you build this great big, massive box,

and then it's supposed to house the racks that house all of the pieces, you know, the hard drives. There aren't enough, there's not enough of the, there's not enough supply of the component parts for these data centers. Once they get this great big box built, and we build the energy to supply it, they don't have enough component parts to build it.

It's like trying to build something without enough screws to hold it together. It doesn't matter if you have all your pieces. If you can't put it together and use it, it doesn't matter. So we're going to end up, I think we need to talk to our citizens about what does the future look like if we allow these to happen? And what is our plan B? Are we holding these companies responsible? Are we requiring a bond for decommissioning? What are we doing that protects us when this bubble bursts?

Those are all excellent questions. And those are the things that people need to bring forward to their elected officials in terms of getting them to ask them about. First of all, what are you going to do? Tell us exactly what you're going to do in terms of, as you point out, water usage that Google doesn't want to talk about. If they don't want to do that, that ought to be a big red flag to people. And then as you point out, the rapid pace of technology, these people have. a slogan, move fast and break things. Well, they're going to move fast and they're probably going to break your community in many

different ways, whether you're talking about the roads or the landfill or the housing, and then you're going to wind up with these empty rusting hulks or whatever that are left behind. And as you point out, everybody is moving so quickly and so rapidly because this really is a mania. It's a kind of a bubble. And even the way they finance this stuff, when you look at what NVIDIA is doing in terms of the circular financing, all this stuff is a bit too clever by half.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and all of this stuff. And that ought to be a big warning to everybody. You're talking about the fact they can't get enough components. And they're having to fight to get capacitors, something that is a very ordinary thing. And the price of capacitors are going sky high because all of these different companies are expanding so rapidly. And they're not going to be able to sustain this. That's why you have so many people on Wall Street.

Ray Dalio was just the most recent one saying, this is an incredible bubble that we have created here. Whether you go back and you look at the Internet bubble or many other bubbles, I said this is one of the biggest bubbles out there because everybody is manically piling into the same thing at the same time and you can't have everybody win in that. That's right. The dot-com bubble is what, you know, the Internet bubble. Remember that?

That's right. Yeah, businesses went from, we had clients that were a million dollar a year client dropped to $700 a year just because they had all their money and other things. And so there's a ripple effect of that bubble, not just the data center industry, but on all of the surrounding industries who ramped up to serve them. Yes. And that is going to leave a lot of carcasses laying on the ground. That's right. Because even if we have, even if we have a bond that says if you can't start, that you have provided the resources for us to go back to square one, that's only that company and that land and that resource. It doesn't, all of the surrounding support mechanisms will just collapse.

Yeah, it is very worrying, not only because of the immediate effect for the people that are right around this, but the extended. effect for how they're going to use this. I don't really have a problem with somebody storing their data and using it for their own purposes as long as they don't impinge on the surrounding people. But as you point out, the scale of this makes it an entirely different thing. And the uses that they want for this, when you look at what the government wants, why the federal government is pushing this, we all know where this leads. And it's really not that difficult to understand why they want to put in a massive surveillance network to, uh, to track everything that everybody's doing.

If we go back and think about this, what if they'd had this in place when they did the lockdowns in 2020? That's something to be concerned about. They tried. They tried because in certain areas, if you gathered too many people, they had the cameras that could watch,

you know, somebody's ring camera showed that there were 20 people gathering across the street and they could call the cops on you. So we talk about cameras. So AI and flock cameras. So we tried very hard. We had a bill in 26 in our session to restrict flock cameras. And you know who pushed back?

Who? The police departments, the sheriffs. They wanted it. And, you know, of course, we're a state that back the blue, and that's, you know, one of our, we support our first responders and all that. But now I'm hearing of all the abuse in there. That's right. And when we tried to put restrictions on what they could do with the data, how long they could save it and all that, we got such tremendous pushback from our allies in the police departments.

And they say, well, we can use this, you know, to solve crimes. Well, I'm sorry, there is, when you have freedom, there's certain risks. If you want to have everybody, put everybody in a little styrofoam box and they'll be safe. But is that what we, you know? That's not the purpose of the American government. If you read the Declaration of Independence, the government is there to protect our life and our liberty. But it is not that we make things easy for them.

As a matter of fact, the founders understood that you need to have a lot of obstacles to keep power from being abused. Who watches the watchers? Who polices the police if they abuse this stuff? And we have had one episode after the other of police. And many times it's the sheriff for the police. police chief who are using this to track their ex-wives or girlfriends, or maybe it's somebody that they just met and they start stalking them. We had one of those as well.

Well, it's unfortunate that we're going to have bad actors in any segment of society. That's right. But we need to protect us from those bad actors in ways that protect our freedoms. That's why, you know, and I'm strongly in favor of all of our Second Amendment rights. And we have some people that abuse that. That doesn't mean that the rest of us should lose our rights because of the abusers. And it's the same with the flock cameras. Somebody wants to have, we got pushed back from industry saying we want this for our parking lot. You know, we want to see if somebody's doing sabotage to our vehicles.

fine, put it on your parking lot and not out on the street. It's when they network it together that it becomes dangerous. And that's the way that they've rolled this thing out. Rather than it coming from one particular place, what they're doing is selling this to private individuals one at a time and then connecting it into a network. That's when it becomes dangerous. They're not coming in from the top down, well, we're going to put out a surveillance network for everybody.

They're building it very surreptitiously one private connection at a time. And that's what makes it so dangerous and hard to stop this thing. But, of course, when we look at the law enforcement angle, if we look at Atlanta, they have 5,000 of these there because that's where the headquarters of flock is. And if you look at the FBI statistics, the crime has gotten worse or stayed the same. As a matter of fact, it had no effect whatsoever on vehicle issues. So you would think if we've got stolen cars or we got some kind of kidnapping event or something, I thought you would think that that would be where it would be its primary use and it would be obviously a big win there.

But it didn't even do that. And so that is really a non-issue. They make that argument, but just because they got a shiny new tool doesn't mean that the police are going to get better at what they do. If we look at what AI does for the rest of us, in many cases what AI does is it makes it makes us worse at our job rather than better at our job. And I think the same thing is going to happen with law enforcement. Well, it's interesting. I just got an email yesterday from a very woke university student who has been writing to me since I've been in office for four years. And this individual has written to me about a variety of issues that are on the way left spectrum of what we deal with. But the email yesterday was about AI in the classroom and how her professors, have said this is, this is terrible because it is allowing the students to not have to think. Yes, yes.

And that it was detrimental to the college and to this particular program. And I wrote back to her and I said, we found something we absolutely agree on. Yeah, we're seeing that over and over again. I saw an article. I covered it on the show here. it was some of the Ivy League schools, and they were bragging about the fact that, hey, look, we have the state-of-the-art tools, and we've got, you know, the best AI programs that are out there.

And yet if the kids use them, they get penalized because they're not thinking and because they're not actually creating something. They're using this crutch. So they put them in this really kind of a strange no man's land where it's like, you got this great tool here, but don't use it, you know? And that's what we're doing to law enforcement as well. We've got this great tool, but don't abuse it. Okay.

this is like a nuclear weapon, but, you know, don't push that button. Yeah. So if you have any ideas, I am more than willing to run a bill that helps to restrict. And this is, I am not, I'm not a techie. I am a research chemist. I look at details. So I, I dig down in a little deeper maybe than most. But I am not a techie.

I don't know a lot about the nuts and bolts of computers and AI and all that because my lab work was all hands on. You know, it's mixed this with that and figure out what it does. AI can't do that. You know, AI cannot discern the various outcomes on physical chemistry and physical biology. They think they can. And so if anybody has ideas out there about how we could best write legislation that does not infringe on our freedom of speech and yet protects us from abuse, I'd be more than happy

to run it. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. We've had a couple of different bills that have been introduced in Congress. We had Tim Burchett here in Tennessee, and he introduced a bill to say, we're going to focus on trying to stop the exchange of information. So you will not be allowed to use this with the federal government. If you use this information, it will not be allowed in terms of court convictions and things like that, that doesn't really get to the abuse aspect of it. Thomas Massey went to the money and said, we're going to cut the funding. If you've got a local police department or city that starts getting these flat cameras in, then we're going to cut the funding from the federal government, which everybody gets a lot

of money from the federal government as it is. So to me, I think that would be one of the biggest disincentives. That's going to immediately be felt by these people. And I think that's a good approach to have. But I think another thing that people need to look at, I think we need to start trying to get representatives or elected officials who are going to ban nondisclosure agreements and these kind of secret agreements that they have with people. That needs to be banned at a state level. There's absolutely no defense for that. We should be able to get bipartisan support for that.

Everybody wants transparency like you were talking about. And when they won't talk about even what their water usage is going to be, that ought to be the end of it right there. And so I think there needs to be transparency. and the first place that that would stop is stop making these NDA agreements illegal, that type of thing. But, yeah, there's a few things like that that really need to be done. And I think some of those could be done as a statewide ban. Some of those, you know, you look at it, it's like what is the prerogative of the local government? And, of course, there's different states that have different ways that they cut where that line of authority is between state and local government.

So that would kind of depend on your state when we're looking at that. But yeah, some of those things. And, of course, we want to know whenever you've got some ideas as well, and we'll pass that on to everybody. But the key thing, I think, is the fact that people need to understand that this is not about, as you point out, the data centers are not what we've traditionally had as data centers where people just having a separate offline storage facility. So in case their business burns down, they've got the data somewhere else.

It's not that at all. It is quantitatively and qualitatively different, completely different animal. And this is also not about filming somebody in public. That is also a canard. This is not about taking somebody's picture in public. Nobody worries about that. It's the networking that is the issue. And so the networking is the thing that has to be focused on and prohibited in one way or the other either financial penalties or outright prohibitions.

I prefer financial penalties because that's really what everybody works off of. They don't really care if you've got a prohibition. They'll find some way around it. And usually there's no teeth in it unless there is something financial. So when I look at it, those are the types of things that come to my mind. But you've had a lot more experience than this than I have. And most people have had. And you've seen this coming for quite some time.

That's why I really wanted to get you on and talk about it. Well, thank you. I find my job is to help my constituents understand how it's going to impact them at home, how they live and also help them understand that if they really want local control, if they really don't want the federal government telling them what to do or the state government telling them what to do, they need to be involved. Yeah, that's right. They need to be willing to go to city council meetings.

They need to be willing to serve on their zoning commission or on their soil and water commission or whatever. You know, every city has various boards and commissions that needs volunteers. And if you truly want to impact your local community, that's the place to do it because that has much more direct impact on how you live than what's going on in Washington, D.C. I agree. And I think the points that you made in this interview to recap this, I think if people look at the future effect, and I'm not just talking about the future effect of living in a police surveillance state. We all know what that's going to look like. We've seen that in too many movies and novels.

But I'm talking about even the future effect in terms of kind of kind of. of a rust belt. I guess we could call it a silicon belt. And all this stuff, whenever the particular companies and not all of them are going to make it. Everybody is jumping into this thing. And of course, not everybody's going to win on this. And so what happens to the losers and what does that look like in your community when this thing is just an empty Hulk that is setting there? So what is the future effect on all this stuff? And what is the current effect? As you were pointing out, the burden on housing, the burden on roads, the burden on landfills as they go through this rapid buildout of construction. And I think that's the key thing.

It's just like with the stock market itself, this thing has created a massive bubble. And when things like that happened, we saw that with the dot-com bubble. We all knew that the internet was a real thing. We all knew that was going to be very useful. But the problem was that they built it out too quickly and there was too much hype and mania involved in it, and that's what caused it to go back, blow back in the other direction. And this thing is set up to be a doppelganger for that. And the magnitude of what this could be when it goes is really terrible.

And it could pull down our entire economy globally as well. Well, and the thing that is terrifying to me is that if one of these data centers, these hypercenters, these AI centers, they need to go. gear up for the energy to run the center. And if it collapses, now you have this massive energy structure that the rate payers are going to end up paying for if the company goes down. And you have this massive facility. And you don't reclaim that. You don't, once you have destroyed, and I live in an area that has pristine farm ground. It's where we grow most. of the corn, soybeans, you know, we could grow anything in our fertile soils.

Once these thousands and thousands of acres are destroyed for these data centers and their support, you know, the energy support, you don't get that back. Yeah, that's right. That never goes back into production for agriculture. That's right. And we've seen that with the solar panels and we've seen it with the windmills. I mean, the windmill is not degradable. They create a tremendous landfill issue.

and you look at the farmland that is consumed with these massive solar farms, and that is also the same type of issue. People need to think about the bigger picture here, and the bigger picture is definitely the surveillance state. I call them surveillance centers, but it's also the long-term effects that you've given us some things to think about and to talk about. We do appreciate that.

Those are things that I had not thought about in the past, the burden on the roads and the landfill and the housing and just the surge, the bubble that comes into your community, and then goes away the next day. You know, it's like a gold rush or something. And it is a gold rush for the Silicon Valley people, but we're the ones who get left behind with all the tailings. Well, and, you know, and it drives up the cost,

the local cost for the people that live here. That's right. It drives up the cost of everything because supply and demand. That's how our economy works. But you have somebody who's lived here. and intends to continue living here, and you have this bubble at cost, and it's rare that the prices go back down. That's right.

That's right. And we'll end up with, like you said, the gold rush. I just think of as a kid when we toured all those ghost towns, that were the gold rush, that were people made their fortunes, and they extracted everything from the area and then left. And that's what I see these people extracting things from the area and then leaving. I agree. And that's one of the key things that really needs to be talked about as well.

Thank you so much for pointing that out. And thank you for fighting this fight because this is everybody's fight. As I've said before, you know, we look at what is happening in the immediate area, the people who are suffering with the higher electricity prices and the water shortages and the noise and all the rest of that stuff, that affects them immediately. But all the stuff about the surveillance and even the stuff about the long-term future effects, that continues to spread out and like a ripple effect to the entire. entire country. And so we're all in this together. The surveillance state aspect of this,

if the data center is not in your neighborhood, you're still going to feel the effects of that surveillance center. And even if, you know, you're in the same state and they've got these future effects on costs and the grid and all the rest of the stuff, you're going to feel that type of thing as well. So there's so many negatives. And we're all sitting here scratching our head and saying, where's the positive in any of this stuff? And I don't. think that's why there's so much bipartisan opposition at the grassroots level, because we're going to get mowed down if we don't stand up on this stuff at the grassroots level. The politicians on the top all seem to be in on the game. And so I really do appreciate you

doing your best to try to do something about this at the house level. You certainly are an exception. And I wish we had more people like you. Well, thank you. I do this. I have 21 grandkids. And I want, I'm concerned about their futures. Yes. That's why I do this. Yes, that's right. There's a future for, I want a future for them. That's something to be proud of.

And, you know, that's why I do it. I agree. And I, yeah, I want my kids to read about 1984, not live it. Exactly. As a cautionary tale, not, well, how did this happen? What were, you know, my grandparents were asleep at the wheel when all this stuff happened. So let's, let's not let that happen.

And again, thank you for joining us, Cindy Golding. And is there a place that you have a website or anything that people can find out about you? My website is Cindygolding.com. Good, good. We've got that under your name there. Yes. Yep. And it's very simple.

And I am running for re-election as every house member is, you know, every two years we run for re-election. And when re-elected, I intend to fight this battle as hard as I can fight. Good for you. Good for you. And I certainly hope that you are reelected. I hope they don't come in with some massive amount about out-of-state money. I've seen that happen here in Tennessee with someone that I knew very closely. So thank you so much for doing that. And I hope you stay there and we'll keep an eye on what's going on. And if you come up with some new tactic or you've got some victory that you found out about, please let us know. We'll be happy to pass that on and share your successes as you fight this. Thank you so much. Thank you and have a great day. Thank you. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us.

Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.

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