A few months ago in Mercer County, Kentucky, more than 200 residents packed a planning and zoning commission meeting until every seat was filled, with citizens standing along the walls. Yard signs reading “NO DATA CENTER” lined farm roads from Harrodsburg to Burgin. Diane Floyd’s “We Are Mercer County” had gathered thousands of signatures against a proposed 555-acre hyperscale data center on prime farmland off Handy Road near Burgin, and speaker after speaker rose to be heard.

The frustration was not abstract. It was in the soil, the homes, and the way of life that residents were watching get priced out. One speaker after another said the same thing in different words: “This isn’t development, it’s sacrifice.”

Residents described how the facility would pull millions of gallons of water daily from the same aquifer that irrigates their crops and fills their wells. They talked about the constant low-frequency hum from a sprawling, windowless complex the size of dozens of football fields, the kind of noise that would end the quiet nights that drew horse breeders and retirees to the area. Backup diesel generators the size of shipping containers would sit ready to roar, and similar projects elsewhere had already driven up residential rates while delivering almost none of the promised local tax revenue following massive abatements.

Similar fights have erupted in Oldham County, Kentucky, where residents forced a $6 billion project to be downsized and ultimately withdrawn, and in Coweta County, Georgia, where residents pressed commissioners into a 180-day moratorium. In Festus, Missouri, hundreds packed a high-school gym and confronted their city council over water, power, and the fate of their town. The council approved a $6 billion data center anyway. Days later, every incumbent on the ballot lost his seat.

The fight is still live, and the process feels rigged. This is not simply “progress versus NIMBYs.” It is a warning about extraction. These facilities industrialize the landscape, consume resources that once stayed in the community or might never have been drawn down at all, and ship the value somewhere else.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

Conservatives have seen this pattern before. During the fracking boom, rural communities traded quiet and farmland for temporary prosperity, only for companies to move on, leaving damaged roads, strained water supplies, and hollowed-out towns. The principle is the same with data centers, but the scale is larger and the long-term return smaller.

Yet as David Sacks is fond of putting it, “The economy is not a pie, it’s a garden. Technology is rain.” Technology can fertilize genuine abundance, but gardens require wise stewardship. Data centers demand staggering quantities of the most basic resources: water and power. When server farms become the new company towns—extracting resources, offering little in return, reshaping the landscape in their image—something deep in the conservative conscience stirs. It is the instinct that defends the particular over the abstract, the rooted over the rootless, the human scale over the machine scale. This is not opposition to intelligence or innovation. It is recognition that Mammon has always demanded sacrifice, and that we are being asked to build temples to a new god.

Paul Kingsnorth calls the entire technological project a single, totalizing “Machine,” one that has been uprooting human life since the Industrial Revolution and is accelerating with AI. It replaces what he calls the Four P’s (People, Place, Prayer, and the Past) with the Four S’s (Sex, Science, the Self, and the Screen). The physical grid of data centers is the Machine’s latest and most visible form. In Kingsnorth’s telling, the crisis of our age “is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war.”

It’s akin to the high places in the Old Testament, which God condemned not for their stones but for the worship they housed, for refusing the appointed places of worship, and for the tribute and power that flowed upward while the people below paid. The sin was never the altar. It was the idolatry and the extraction.

In this understanding, today’s data centers are not damned by their silicon. They become high places when they are made into elite-controlled enclaves that draw heavy sacrifice from host communities: prime farmland taken out of production, aquifers drawn down, rural quiet shattered, the promise of jobs for local children yanked away by H-1B hiring—all while directing wealth and power upward and promising national dominance in return. The discomfort ordinary citizens feel is not irrational.

Senator Josh Hawley reached for the same vocabulary in the June issue of First Things. He framed the AI buildout as a test of the moral covenant sworn aboard the Arbella in 1630: a liberty under God that protects the worker, honors the family and the small town, and refuses the license by which the strong gather power into ever fewer hands. Left ungoverned, he warns, AI and its infrastructure will sort the country into the shape of a K, the upper arm of compute barons soaring, while truck drivers, paralegals, and farm families are quietly made redundant. It is the same extraction we watched in Mercer County.

Hawley puts the choice plainly: conservatives can be the party of the donor class and the share price, or the party of the covenant, the worker, and the permanent things.

He is right about the stakes. But naming the test is not the same as meeting it. Conservatives must supply the answer the fusionists never could: technology governed for the permanent things, not the share price. The godly kings did not flee the land or abolish worship—they tore down the high places and had their people worship where the Lord chose. That is the posture we need now: neither libertarian acceleration nor Kingsnorth’s counsel of refusal, but ordered liberty applied to the Machine.

We do not need to smash the servers. We need to tear down the idolatry, rebuff the extraction, and bind the grid to the covenant so that the tribute flows to the people and places that bear its cost. The extractive arrangement is the high place, and it must come down. The data center, rightly ordered, is no high place at all. It is a storehouse.

American AI First

Three principles should guide the work of forming a political economy of the covenant: energetic national authority, putting the American worker first, and genuine community sovereignty.

Federal Leadership

National policy should drive a unified vision that preempts the patchwork of conflicting state and local rules: energetic national authority in the Hamiltonian sense, defeating both the local veto and the progressive administrative guardrail. The cure for tribute sent upward is not a scattering of local vetoes, but authority rightly ordered to the covenant—the very thing no county zoning board can supply. Josiah did not answer the high places with rival altars; he recentered worship where it belonged.

But notice what the reform centralized—and what it left in place. Deuteronomy fixes the place of right worship as non-negotiable and national, while commanding in the same breath that the Levite, the sojourner, and the widow within the gates be provided for locally and by name. The covenant standard is set at the center; the benefit stays rooted in the town. Applied to America, this means that extraction must serve the people, with local hands sharing in the revenue while having their farmland and water protected.

For families in Mercer County facing higher utility bills, that means mandatory community benefit agreements and revenue sharing. The wealth the Machine extracts must return, in part, to the households and towns bearing the costs. A modest, revenue-neutral compute and power levy on hyperscalers—modeled on the severance taxes that endowed resource states like Wyoming and Alaska, whose Permanent Fund still pays a yearly dividend to every resident—can fund household transition dividends paid as direct support, not another bureaucracy.

This is not the monthly check Senator Hawley rightly calls a hollow answer, the kind that severs reward from work and leaves a man idle. It is restitution: not technocratic redistribution but particular justice, a severance royalty returned to the specific families and towns actually bearing the cost in land, water, and grid capacity, so they can keep their farms and their callings intact. It is the reordered tribute: the stones of the storehouse made to serve the people instead of the few, a community wealth fund for the AI age.

President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge offers a strong model: major tech companies must “build, bring, or buy” their own power generation so that residential rates do not rise. Hawley presses the same demand, noting that firms this wealthy can certainly bring their own power and safeguard local water before they break ground. The scale is not abstract: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that American data centers consumed about 4.4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and could reach as high as 12% by 2028.

Complement the pledge by fast-tracking Small Modular Reactors that can be colocated with data centers. As Valar Atomics recently demonstrated—its Ward 250 microreactor reaching criticality and beginning power ascension as the first DOE-authorized reactor to operate outside the national laboratories—hyperscaler demand can supply the anchor revenue certainty to mature these reactors. The technology serves data centers today and residential and rural grids tomorrow. In this framing, the buildout does not blindly consume American energy. It finances the next generation of it.

Federal permitting reform can clear the way while respecting legitimate local input. The concerns of communities like Mercer County are legitimate and reflect prudent stewardship. At the same time, conservatives must distinguish good-faith local resistance from the radical “BANANA” absolutism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) so often amplified by national environmental NGOs. When residents see a compelling vision in which they share the benefits—stable rates, revenue sharing, preserved farmland—they are far more likely to support responsible buildout.

The American Worker First

Tie every federal acceleration perk to strict prioritization of American workers and serious H-1B reform: numerical visa caps tied to verified domestic shortages, mandatory good-faith recruitment with severe penalties for circumvention, and prevailing-wage requirements. Free-market critics will object that this interferes with labor markets, but the alternative is a hollowed-out heartland that cannot sustain the technological race we claim to want. This is how we seize the working-class opportunity in AI while beating China: not by begging capital, but by binding it to the common good. When American families see that the buildout is designed for their children’s future rather than quarterly earnings or imported labor, they will embrace it rather than resent it.

National Leadership Selling the Vision

Normal families do not wake up excited about more server farms. They wake up worried about utility bills and lost farmland. Show a father in rural Kentucky how the dividend helps keep the farm in the family, or a homeschooling mother in the Midwest how AI productivity finally makes single-income life viable again. This is not spin: democratic consent is itself a national-security requirement. A buildout that lacks the sustained support of the American people will collapse politically, and our adversaries will not wait.

Compute is now strategic infrastructure, as essential and as contested as oil once was. American companies want to build here, under our laws and our covenant. But if overregulation or BANANA absolutism drives capital abroad—to Saudi Arabia’s multibillion-dollar hyperscale projects, for instance—we risk manufacturing the very foreign dependencies that become the next pretext for conflict. Better to cultivate these gardens on American soil, under our own laws, than to watch capital flee to foreign sovereigns and return to us dependency, or to let the administrative state fill the vacuum with its own guardrails.

The alternative is the status quo: hyperscalers extract, localities subsidize, and conservatives cheer abstract GDP numbers that no longer match lived reality. The AI age is not optional. The shape it takes—whether it serves the covenant or supplants it—is.