Before we get into what happened in Boulder City, let's name the thing correctly. MAGA SOCIALISM

The federal government took land supposedly owned by the American public, shut that same public out of the decision, and handed the property to a private investment fund out of Texas. Nevada then sweetens the deal with tax abatements for the data center industry, while the local utility prepares to spend billions building new gas turbines to keep the servers running. The hedge fund gets the asset, the technology companies get the electricity, and everyone else gets stuck paying higher utility bills while praying the grid doesn't collapse during the next heat wave.

There is nothing free-market about this arrangement. It is government picking winners, transferring public assets to politically favored private interests, socializing the cost, and privatizing the profit. Conservatives spent the better part of eighty years screaming about that exact model whenever Democrats tried it. Apparently, all it takes to make socialism acceptable is a red hat, an executive order, and a few billionaires promising that the machines will eventually make our lives better.

That is what makes this story so infuriating. Millions of people thought they were voting for limited government, private property rights, local control, energy independence, and an end to Washington bureaucrats deciding what happens in their communities. Instead, they are getting public land deals negotiated behind closed doors for hedge funds and Silicon Valley companies that already have more money and political influence than most countries.

What Actually Happened And Why We are Getting Datacenters in a Desert

There was no new public comment period and no legitimate new environmental review for the data center proposal. There was no serious public discussion about the wisdom of putting a massive, power-hungry industrial facility in the Mojave Desert while the Southwest is already dealing with shrinking reservoirs, stressed electrical infrastructure, and communities being told to conserve water. The federal government simply decided the project needed to move forward and treated everyone living nearby as an inconvenience. THEY GIVE ZERO FUCKS ABOUT YOU!

BLM's Nevada office even prepared a press release announcing the approval. Then somebody inside the agency apparently decided not to publish it. The public only learned about those internal communications because the emails became part of a legal case file obtained by former BLM official Mike Ford and later reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.