Trump’s Midterm Gamble, Data Center Backlash & Right-Wing Cancel Culture

Ultimize. Imagine asking ChatGPT to write your speech against data centers. That's asking the cow to design the steakhouse menu. Make it passionate, explain why the building that keeps you alive is an abomination, and give me 3 stronger openings. This one feels lazy. The computer is drafting its own eviction notice, and you're complaining about the tone. Democrats and Republicans have finally found common ground. Unlimited technology, provided the actual equipment is located in a community neither of them has to drive through. I love the cloud. Why does it need a building? Because the cloud is a warehouse, Brenda. They named it after something fluffy so you wouldn't ask why your vacation photos needed an industrial cooling system. I'm a personal development coach. I believe in visualization, but you cannot manifest a server farm into a scented candle. If your plan is unlimited computing with no buildings anywhere, your zoning proposal is a Harry Potter spell. Let's imagine the campaign headquarters for Citizens Against Those Awful Data Centers. ChatGPT writes the speech. Canva makes the poster. Google Docs hosts the petition. Gmail recruits the volunteers. Zoom hosts a strategy meeting. An online fundraiser collects the money. Facebook organizes the rally. Instagram makes opposition look younger. X makes it angrier. At this point, X could radicalize a yogurt. Google Ads use AI bidding to find more opponents. Google Maps live traffic directions get everybody to the protest. YouTube carries the livestream. That's 12 online services helping you fight the infrastructure running online services. The data center is your campaign manager. You're paying it to organize a mob against itself. And if the livestream buffers, suddenly it's, what kind of backward country can't provide adequate digital infrastructure? The sign says, stop the servers. The comment underneath says, link broken, please fix. Now, using technology doesn't mean you surrender your right to oppose a bad project. You can fly on airplanes and still object to a runway through your bathroom. But build responsibly and make the buildings disappear while keeping all my apps are different proposals. One is public policy. The other is a toddler asking where the sun goes and demanding to speak to its manager. Data centers support banking, email, video, cloud storage, and AI. Not all of that is generative AI. Your bank balance didn't become a chatbot just because you wish it would hallucinate a larger number. The concerns are real. The International Energy Agency estimated that a typical AI-focused data center consumes an As much electricity as 100,000 households. That's not something you plug into the spare outlet behind the toaster. Cooling can require substantial water depending on the design and location. Equipment noise, backup generators, grid upgrades, and tax breaks all deserve scrutiny. And when a developer promises jobs, ask how many last after construction. You cannot build a retirement plan around holding one end of a ribbon. But distinguish a bad project from an entire category of infrastructure. We all need sewage treatment. That doesn't entitle someone to put a treatment plant in your dining room. It also doesn't make abolish sewage treatment a promising campaign slogan, especially after lunch. My position: build data centers where the resources and infrastructure can support them and make the companies pay. Pay their full cost. Charge for the electricity and water they use. Require funding for the additional infrastructure they need. Protect households from getting stuck with costs if the company leaves. Measure the noise. Enforce the limits. Put the obligations in contracts. If the water or power isn't available, a billionaire waving a check doesn't magically create it. Choose another site or build the necessary capacity first. Hey, I'm an optimist. Even I know you can't hydrate a town with a vision statement. Want to defend ordinary people? Make this the demand: your chatbot's electric bill should not appear on my electric bill. You have to understand, we're building the future. Wonderful. The future can set up its own autopay. I want to develop agreement with enforceable numbers. Trust us is not a utility tariff. It's what a teenager says before the garage catches fire. Now, for liberals and progressives out there, if the goal is reducing inequality, there are much more direct tools than blocking a computer building. Support a more progressive tax system. Support health coverage that doesn't turn an illness into a financial catastrophe. Strengthen workers' bargaining power. Give a family something more useful than the satisfaction of knowing their rent is still unaffordable, But the nearby servers are somebody else's problem. Consider Social Security. In 2026, the wage tax stops at $184,500. Raise the cap if you want higher earners contributing on more of their wages. And address investment income separately. Elon Musk's gains in stock wealth aren't the same as wages. Raising the payroll cap alone wouldn't tax his entire fortune. The tax code is where that fight belongs. A billionaire can move the computers to another state and remain a billionaire. You haven't redistributed his wealth. You've helped him select a warehouse. I teach positive thinking, but I have manifested a better loading dock in Ohio is a modest victory for economic justice. Now, to conservatives, property rights include your neighbor's rights. Requiring a business to control noise and pay its costs is entirely compatible with capitalism. But if a project meets fair rules and your answer is still, I just like this industry, so government should ban it, explain what happened to government not picking winners and losers. I remember that being one of your big themes. You wanted the invisible hand. Apparently, it was supposed to stay invisible from your patio. Your affirmation: I support private enterprise even when I can see it. And no, None of this requires trusting Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. To me, they're the Joker and the Riddler with quarterly earnings calls. At least a Batman villain tells you he's taking over the city. These guys ask you to accept updated terms. Some of us describe big tech as drug dealers while demanding free home delivery of the drugs. By all means, regulate the dealer. Just acknowledge who's placing the order. Using a service doesn't cancel your right to criticize it, but bill responsibly needs an answer to where and how. If every town's plan is somewhere else, eventually somewhere else would like a word, probably on Zoom. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing, no obligation, you can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. From people campaigning against the computers they depend on, let's move to Republicans campaigning alongside the president who could drag them down. Republicans build a midterm convention around Donald Trump. Finally, an attack ad the Democrats don't have to pay for. Brilliant. An August 31st Reuters/Ipsos poll put Trump's approval rating at a mere 33%. If Democrats want equally shrewd marketing, buy primetime and replay the 2024 Biden-Trump debate, especially the Biden parts. Then put up, remember this? Vote Democratic. Release the debate on a commemorative DVD. Call it, we have learned absolutely nothing. Include a tote bag because apparently both parties need something to carry their baggage in. I understand trying to motivate your supporters, but your convention audience already likes you. The people watching at home are deciding whether to renew the subscription. Trump asked voters to pretend he was running. There are a lot of Democratic strategists out there drooling and rubbing their hands together like this. They love that idea. Some Republican candidates would presumably prefer voters to pretend they'd never met him. As a personal development coach, I encourage visualization, but when voters keep telling you what they dislike, putting it on a giant screen is an unusual path to healing. And Mitt Romney's old complaint about Democrats giving voters gifts finally has a spectacular new illustration. Wrong party. With national debt above $40 trillion and a huge annual deficit, Trump promised adults $5,000 if Republicans kept Congress. Okay. It's a campaign promise, not an approved payment. Congress would have to act. Vance suggested excluding wealthy people. Yeah, right. The full proposal would cost more than $1 trillion. We're calling it a dividend. Usually you earn a surplus before distributing a dividend. Here we're distributing the Affirmation. I am prosperous. I am successful. Please authorize more borrowing. I see this as an attempt to buy affection with public money. Why stop there? Promise every child popularity with dogs, a free pork chop to tie around their necks. Finally, a youth outreach program with measurable results. Borrow the money from the grandchildren. They can inherit the string. Our final story begins with a murder, so let's put the jokes aside for a moment today. It's the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination at Utah Valley University, where memorial plans have divided the campus. His murder was horrific. Nobody should be killed for what they say, but honoring his life doesn't require suspending everyone else's freedom of speech. A professor's post about Charlie Kirk ended up costing a Tennessee university $500,000. Apparently, cancel culture has an undo button. This one cost half a million dollars. For that price, you would hope it also restores your printer's settings. Darren Michael taught theater at Austin, PA State University. After Kirk's killing, he shared an article reporting Kirk's earlier comments about gun deaths and gun rights. The university fired him. Later, it reinstated him and agreed to the settlement, acknowledging it hadn't followed the required tenure termination process. You can consider a post insensitive. You can criticize it. You don't automatically get to turn your hurt feelings into somebody else's unemployment. My personal development exercise for the people demanding firings: take a breath, count to 10, then ask the university's lawyer to count to 500,000. Here's the affirmation. I can defend Charlie Kirk's right to speak without demanding that everyone else lose theirs. The lesson here goes beyond one professor. There are 3 principles worth carrying forward: freedom of speech has to include criticism of people we admire; opposing cancel culture has to mean more than opposing the cancellations that inconvenience our side; and standards about political cruelty can't change with the person uploading the video. Trump has shared an edited wrestling clip showing him punching a figure with the CNN logo over its face. More recently, his posts include a hockey image with Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney cowering on the ice. And last October, he reposted an AI video showing himself flying a jet and dumping brown sludge over No King protesters. A political cartoon is not an assassination, but neither is sharing an article evidence that you endorse murder. We can distinguish all of those things and still ask for consistent standards. If an ordinary person's offensive post demands a conversation with their employer, perhaps the president's posts deserve a conversation with his. That would be us. My affirmation for public officials: today I will hear criticism without calling somebody's boss. Put it on your vision board, and when you upload a picture of that board, remember to thank the data center. I'm TJ Walker. And just final note on this whole Kirkaversary. Folks, it's time to end right-wing political correctness. This idea that you can trash, vilify, mock Martin Luther King Jr., any liberal, any Democrat, talk about how they're despicable beyond belief, and then someone quotes accurately things Charlie Kirk has said, and that's considered a fireable offense. No, that is political— conservative political correctness run amok. It is right-wing wokeness. It is building in steam, and it's the real problem with American culture today. The so-called cancel culture of the left— were there excesses in the past? Maybe, but they're not running the show anymore. I'm TJ Walker. Ultimize.