Working Americans are watching their power bills climb and their local grids strain while tech giants build sprawling server farms to train AI models — and when they object, industry titans tell them they're too stupid to understand why it's good for them.

Polls now show more than 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their communities, according to the Boston Herald, and the backlash has caught the tech and finance worlds flat-footed. States that once scrambled to lure developers with tax incentives are now pursuing clawbacks of those same breaks. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, nobody's leftist, imposed a moratorium on data center development in the Lone Star State.

The industry's response has been contempt. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted on X that opponents simply fail to grasp basic arithmetic: "The majority of people do not understand simple math." Others in the sector float the theory that Chinese propaganda is manufacturing the grassroots revolt in flyover country.

President Trump amplified that claim on Fox News, telling Laura Ingraham that "a lot of people say it's China" and "a lot of people say that it's a China PR thing" driving the opposition. He offered no specific evidence. He also warned communities they'd lose investment and jobs if they reject what he called "the oil of the next 50 years."

There is a real Chinese influence operation — but it's small and it's riding a wave it didn't create. X's Global Government Affairs team reported uncovering a bot farm of roughly 200,000 suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts, with about 200 of those posting content aimed at the U.S. debate over AI and energy policy. Those accounts pushed claims that data centers raise household electricity prices and strain the grid. OpenAI separately banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts it linked to a private Chinese tech company working for provincial government clients, an operation dubbed "Data Centre Bandwagon." Both platforms said the activity was designed to exploit and amplify existing American concerns — not manufacture them from nothing. OpenAI's threat report found "no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity."

Newsweek noted that congressional Republicans have asked the FBI and the National Science Foundation to investigate foreign influence, and the House Science Committee has demanded information from four progressive environmental groups about possible foreign funding. Those are legitimate lines of inquiry. But they don't explain why seven in ten Americans — across party lines — don't want a data center down the road.

The Herald editorial board, to its credit, laid out the actual reasons: utility bills, white-collar job losses from corporate AI adoption, and the possibility that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are so intent on winning an AI space race that they're cutting corners on safety. Insiders at those firms have issued warnings about their own employers' recklessness.

The tech lobby and its political allies have a choice: answer the legitimate concerns about grid strain, rate hikes, and job displacement, or keep calling the public ignorant. So far, they're choosing the latter.

The question isn't whether Beijing is amplifying American frustration. The question is why Silicon Valley thinks the solution is to insult the people whose power bills are footing the bill.