Ronald Reagan warned Americans that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Now that warning is doing duty in a sales pitch for the biggest corporate building spree in the country.
And the pitch skipped one number that families across 13 states are already paying.
What Ken Blackwell Asked Breitbart Readers to Build
Ken Blackwell, a former US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, published an op-ed at Breitbart tying Reagan to the artificial intelligence race with Communist China.
Blackwell wrote that Reagan warned in 1980 that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. From there the essay heads straight for the server farm.
He pointed to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI’s 2026 AI Index, which counts 5,427 data centers in the United States, more than 10 times the number in any other country. Blackwell called that pile of buildings a strategic foundation and said the country has to keep adding to it.
“Free markets, not government mandates, should drive this development,” Blackwell wrote. He singled out Amazon as one of the companies putting long-term money into American cloud infrastructure.
To his credit, he gave the neighbors a paragraph. “Communities also have every right to ask hard questions about energy and water use, tax arrangements, and the commitments developers make,” he wrote.
The next line took most of it back. “But responsible oversight should not become an obstacle to responsible growth,” Blackwell wrote, before reminding readers that “Capital is mobile” and that the money will go elsewhere if America gets hard to build in.
The $29 Billion Bill That Never Made the Op-Ed
The piece never puts a dollar figure on what ordinary ratepayers cover.
PJM runs the power grid for 13 states and Washington, DC, including Northern Virginia, home to the largest cluster of data centers on earth. PJM’s Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost the grid’s 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly two years, according to NPR.
One estimate NPR cited puts the hit to Maryland households at $168 to $216 a year. And the big facilities pay less per kilowatt hour than the retiree down the road does.
The industry disputes all of it. A study from the consulting firm E3, funded by Amazon, found no sign that homeowners subsidized the company’s data centers, and a Rutgers policy lab analysis found no large effect on local bills through 2024, before the biggest facilities came online. Readers can decide how much weight a study deserves when the company under the microscope paid for it.
Then there are the jobs. Blackwell’s essay is full of electricians, machinists, and construction crews, and those crews do get real work while the concrete is wet.
But a Brookings Institution analysis found a typical county ends up with roughly 100 to 200 jobs once a large data center opens, with local wages unchanged and home prices up 2% to 5%. The Illinois Economic Policy Institute ran the numbers on $57 billion in planned projects and came up with 121,000 jobs, of which just 2,800 are permanent.
A factory in Reagan’s day meant a couple thousand paychecks for thirty years, a union hall, a Little League sponsor. A data center means a fence, a row of cooling fans, and a parking lot with forty cars in it.
And about those free markets. Brookings put the cost of Virginia’s data center sales-tax exemption at an estimated $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2025. A market that needs that kind of help from the taxpayer isn’t doing much of the driving.
Who Owns the Machines Once the Concrete Dries
Blackwell wrote that algorithms alone won’t build the future. Fair enough. But somebody ought to ask what the algorithms do once the building opens.
Dario Amodei runs Anthropic, one of the largest AI companies in the world. He told Axios in 2025 that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10% to 20% within one to five years.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei said.
That is a man who sells the product describing what the product does. So the pitch to rural America amounts to this: pour the slab, wire the racks, pay the higher light bill, and watch the machine inside go after a grandchild’s first office job.
Maybe that forecast turns out too gloomy. Forecasts from tech executives often miss. But an industry insider put it on the record, and a column asking Americans to build faster owed readers at least a mention.
There’s also the matter of who holds the keys. Amazon Web Services pulled the social network Parler off its servers in January 2021, in the days after January 6. Big Tech platforms spent the COVID years taking down posts that questioned lockdowns, mandates, and the 2020 election.
Those same companies now own the computing power behind AI. Conservatives have every reason to worry about what happens when the Left gets its hands on that machinery: speech flagged before anyone posts it, scoring systems that punish people for eating meat or burning gasoline, and tracking tools ready to go the next time a governor declares a health emergency. None of that has happened yet. The servers that would make it possible are going up right now.
Communist China is a real adversary, and nobody serious argues otherwise. But beating Beijing does not require a county commission to hand out tax abatements behind closed doors and send the grid upgrade bill to a widow on a fixed income.
Voters seem to have figured this out ahead of the columnists. A Consumer Reports survey found 78% of Americans are concerned that new data centers will raise their energy bills, and the magazine reported lawmakers in more than 30 states have introduced over 300 data center bills in 2026.
Expect the China argument at every zoning hearing from here on out. Expect Reagan’s name too.
Reagan asked voters in 1980 whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. The folks living next to the cooling fans will have an answer to that question long before Silicon Valley does.
Sources:
Breitbart, “Exclusive: Ken Blackwell: Reagan’s Warning Takes on New Meaning in the AI Age”
Axios, “Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath”
NPR, “AI data centers: How much are ratepayers on the hook for?”
Brookings Institution, “New evidence on data center employment effects”
Consumer Reports, “AI Data Centers: Big Tech’s Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More”
Illinois Economic Policy Institute data center report, as reported by Yahoo News