A popular cause begins to gather steam. Originating from leftist activists, it attacks its target with unremitting focus and ferocity. The movement runs contrary to all available evidence when analyzed rationally, but it attains a sharp emotional resonance. It gains steam from social media algorithms juiced by foreign actors eager to promote division and advance their own preferred policies. It begins to break containment by attracting support in the center and even on parts of the Right. And it suddenly becomes mainstream, turning conventional wisdom on its head.
Sound like the “Free Palestine” movement? Yes, but also the increasingly vicious backlash against data centers. While the turn against Israel — rooted in the libel that early Zionists were ruthless settler-colonialists displacing an indigenous people and, more recently, in the calumny that the Jewish state supposedly committed a genocide in Gaza — has taken years, even decades, to outgrow its origins on the far Left, the resistance to the facilities powering the artificial intelligence revolution has reached escape velocity in record time.
The similarities between the two causes are abundant, even if their respective tempos differ. Repelling both of these false and noxious movements will be as challenging to execute as it is critical to the future of the liberal democratic world.
Opposition to Israel is foundational to the extreme progressive worldview, dating back to Soviet times. As the Cold War intensified, Soviet leaders allied themselves with the Arab world and wielded opposition to the Jewish state as a cudgel against imperialism and capitalism. The Russians even formed the so-called Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public to dissuade citizens from departing the deteriorating USSR for the sunnier climes of Israel. Communist fellow-travelers the world over echoed Moscow’s fervent advocacy against the Jewish state.
The anti-Israel movement entered a dormant phase beginning in the early 1990s with the advent of the peace process that saw the emergence of an autonomous Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. It came roaring back to life in late 2000 after Yasser Arafat spurned Israel’s generous offer of a Palestinian state and instead launched a bloody intifada that claimed the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians. The conflict spawned the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions initiative that germinated on college campuses throughout the country, seeking to equate the Jewish state with apartheid South Africa.
The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists supercharged the movement, shunting aside previous pet progressive causes like racial equity and the “climate crisis.” Perhaps the most pristine example of the reprioritization of leftist activism was illustrated by Greta Thunberg, the environmental crusader who donned a keffiyeh, joined a flotilla to Gaza, and reconstituted herself as an ardent opponent of the Jewish state.
While protests against Israel multiplied on campuses throughout the spring of 2024, it began to stretch outside the ivory tower, powered by social media apps such as TikTok, whose operators in Beijing repeatedly tweaked their algorithm to amplify pro-Palestinian advocacy. As Canadian lawyer and writer Warren Kinsella documented in his excellent recent book The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, a panoply of supposedly independent nongovernmental organizations, funded by enemy states, consistently echoed a hard line against the Jewish state.
“Hamas and its allies had been preparing its campaign for at least two years,” Kinsella wrote in a May essay in the Free Press, “and had a small army of spin doctors, along with ample support from Iran, Qatar, and Russia.”
Troublingly, the anti-Israel animus has broken containment in progressive circles to begin to infect the Right as well, at least on the fringes. Rabid Israel haters in so-called Podcastistan, such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, have for years vociferously railed against the Jewish state, and disturbingly popular neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes have joined the club. Even among mainstream right-wingers, support for Israel has faltered: according to a Tel Aviv University poll, the percentage of young evangelicals favoring Jerusalem’s position plummeted from nearly 70% in 2018 to only 33% in 2021. Even a staunchly pro-Israel politician like former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, locked in a tight Senate contest in Michigan, has quietly rebuffed the America Israel Public Affairs Committee’s proposed spending on behalf of his campaign.
Opposition to data centers has followed a similar trajectory, albeit at an accelerated pace. As I previously explained in these pages, progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) began savagely attacking critical AI infrastructure earlier this year.
In March, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced the “AI Data Center Moratorium Act,” insisting that “we cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity.” In an April op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Sanders argued that AI was “undermining our democracy,” “damaging the environment,” “pos[ing] an existential risk to the human race,” “threaten[ing] our privacy,” and “reshaping how we as human beings relate to one another.”
But, as with the Free Palestine movement, progressive opposition to data centers was turbocharged by external actors. In June, it became clear that China itself had stoked supposedly authentic American concerns with data centers. The tech titan OpenAI released a revealing report, entitled “PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US,” that found actors originating in China “used our models in support of apparent covert influence operations that promoted narratives in an attempt to manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies.” Indeed, in violation of the terms and conditions of OpenAI’s platform, a group of Beijing-based users “generated social media comments and images claiming that data center buildouts for AI were increasing electricity prices for average families.” Meanwhile, another group drafted and distributed content “criticizing US tariffs as attempts to dominate technological competition and specified in their prompts that the content should not include China’s leader Xi Jinping in the output and instead include only President [Donald] Trump.”
And, like ghoulish anti-Israel extremism, the data center backlash had begun to escape its sandbox to gain purchase on the political Right. As I documented in July, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) was, less than a year ago, hailing Google’s landmark $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State, calling it “the epicenter of AI development” and reveling in how the tech company’s commitment “will bring three new data center campuses to the state to power the new era of AI innovation” and “will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas.”
But now that he’s running for reelection, Abbott urged the chairman of the state’s Public Utility Commission to “ensure that data centers’ interconnections will result in reduced residential electrical bills,” to “require data centers to pay for all of their electric infrastructure costs to ensure that no residential ratepayer is burdened by those costs,” and, more generally, to “identify necessary actions that can be taken under those authorities to safeguard Texans, their property, and resources.”
Then, at a July reelection event in East Texas, Abbott vowed to “prohibit [tech companies] from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” which would spell disaster for the future of Texas tech, as the Texas Tribune reckons that up to half of all planned hyperscale facilities in the state were slated to be built in unincorporated areas. And earlier in August, the governor blamed the tech titans for the opposition he himself has stirred, telling ABC’s This Week that “they basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them” and “that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.” Abbott surely is feeling the heat from a closer-than-expected gubernatorial race in the Lone Star State: he leads his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, by a scant 4.4 points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Things are moving extremely fast. An extraordinary recent survey by Puck News found that 62% of respondents somewhat or strongly opposed the construction of a data center in their communities, as opposed to 27% who somewhat or strongly supported the facilities. This two-to-one margin was the mirror image of support for and opposition to the construction of manufacturing plants within the same areas. Respondents even expressed more support for building nuclear reactors in their communities than for erecting data centers. (A Gallup poll revealed similar sentiment.) These results fly in the face of the ample evidence I presented in these pages a few months ago that data centers are associated with “increased electricity generation, lower utility rates, higher employment, and accelerated growth.”
When voters would rather see nuclear smokestacks and pollution-spewing steel smelters in their communities than data centers, something has gone catastrophically wrong. Similarly, when Americans favor the Jewish state in equal measure with the terrorist groups that wish to eradicate it, we’re in for a world of pain.
So what can we do to fight back? How can we ensure that people of good faith in liberal democratic countries like the United States recognize the value of supporting allies like the Jewish state, a sparkling outpost of freedom and human rights in a troubled region, and the importance of expanding the infrastructure that will enable the West to prevail in its race to secure AI dominance over the enemies of freedom?
First, groups like AIPAC and its allies in the pro-Israel community must do a better job making their case for the critical importance of the relationship between Jerusalem and the rest of the West, just as large technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic must more effectively explain the benefits that will flow directly to the residents of communities in which they seek to build data centers. These efforts should take the form not only of public advertising campaigns (including, yes, social media) that raise the salience and visibility of the benefits but also of calm, measured, steady in-person discussions and focus groups with the relevant populations. Pro-Israel activists shouldn’t shy away from attending town-hall meetings in competitive states like Michigan to make their case to swing voters, just as tech titans and their public affairs firms mustn’t hide from planning boards and city councils considering their offers. These are very difficult conversations to conduct, but skilled and impassioned advocates can and must do so effectively.
Second, the Trump administration itself should take steps to stem the tide of public opinion manipulated by algorithms. Here, the White House’s record is mixed. On the plus side, the administration has invested tremendous resources in dispelling the antisemitic and virulently anti-Israel atmosphere still prevalent on college campuses. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have gone out of their way to praise the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces, especially with respect to the Iran war.
Then, too, the president has exhibited impressive leadership in the development of AI, including the construction of data centers. The administration’s AI framework nicely balanced the importance of promoting innovation while installing key guardrails. And in response to Abbott’s populist turn, Trump argued that the governor’s abrupt about-face on data centers was “a mistake,” in part because “there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.”
At the same time, the administration’s approach to social media shenanigans has been problematic, even borderline schizophrenic. Trump unnecessarily dragged out the consummation of the congressionally mandated sale of TikTok to a non-Chinese company and then failed to wall Beijing off completely from control of its algorithm.
Thus, countering the outrageous distortions involved in the Free Palestine and anti-data-center movements will require concerted effort. As Mark Twain supposedly said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can even put on its shoes.” Here’s to slowing down the lies and accelerating the truth, however hard that will be.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.