Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything

I’m not on board with the people who want to repeal the 19th Amendment, and I’m not for any sort of censorship. But one thing which is starting to become pretty obvious is that we have a real crabs-in-a-bucket problem in this country. There are an awful lot of people who have not only embraced full-on envy as a civic virtue, but think the moral thing to do is to retard the growth and development of, well, anything that somebody else might be trying to build.

This isn’t a new problem, but it’s growing, and quickly.

What has brought it especially to mind is a situation I’m seeing not far from where I’m sitting.

1. Starbase Louisiana

On Tuesday, a much-whispered-about possibility came out into the open, which is that SpaceX announced they’re going to spend $100 billion to build a launch complex along the coast of the Gulf of America in Vermilion Parish, a lightly inhabited place in southwestern Louisiana about 45 minutes from Lafayette.

Starbase Louisiana will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day and making it the biggest launch site on Earth!

SpaceX makes sci-fi real. https://t.co/C7Ht0U12ba

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2026

This project is the largest economic development win in Louisiana’s history, and it will convert a 130,000-acre tract formerly owned by ExxonMobil, which is nothing but declining marshland — marshland which the Gulf is gobbling up quite hungrily, such that lamentations over Louisiana’s coastal loss are practically a local pastime — into a massive industrial center supporting as many as 12 launch facilities. They’ll be doing rocket assembly, parts manufacturing, making rocket fuel (Starships run on a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen; Starbase is expected to pipe natural gas directly into its facility from offshore wells) and other things, and the complex is going to include an airport and deepwater seaport as well.

It turns an undeveloped and mostly worthless tract of land likely destined to become open water in a generation or two into one of the most consequential and valuable places on earth. SpaceX is saying the first rocket launched from Starbase Louisiana will come in 2027.

Elon Musk said his first order of business will be to restore the coastline around Starbase, putting a stop to the widespread loss of Vermilion Parish’s marshland.

This project is expected to produce 3,000 direct jobs in an area which has been largely moribund since the offshore oil and gas industry hit the skids a decade ago, with as many as 10,000-15,000 indirect jobs or more (almost certainly more, in fact) produced once Starbase Louisiana is fully up and running and launching rockets 30 times a day.

It’s a revolutionary development. Game-changing.

And yet there is a small but exceptionally loud minority of people howling about the project.

They’re complaining about the negative effects the rockets will have on the bat population in the area. Or the whooping cranes. Or the duck hunting, or the crabbing.

The nearest town is a place called Pecan Island. It’s 6-8 miles away from where the launch pads will be. Pecan Island is a collection of fishing camps along a couple of minor roads; there are 100 or so permanent residents. Most of them are ecstatic about SpaceX, because they’re licking their chops over the Airbnb rentals they’ll be able to charge once those rockets get launched multiple times a day.

You couldn’t possibly ask for a more transformational economic development win than the one SpaceX just announced, and yet there are… detractors.

“SpaceX should not come here at all. Leave us alone.”

Governor Jeff Landry confirmed on Tuesday plans for “Starbase Louisiana,” a $100-billion SpaceX launch facility near Louisiana’s Pecan Island.

“Gator Queen” Liz Choate, former star of “Swamp People,” told BT News she and her… pic.twitter.com/LjhbIIVDvz

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) August 25, 2026

Yes, this was one of the Swamp People. And no, she isn’t representative of the majority.

That said, the minority is loud. It always seems to be.

2. Data Centers

I know there are varying opinions on this topic, but this seems to be somewhat telling…

JUST IN: Support for data centers jumps a net 31 points after voters are told modern facilities can reuse the same cooling water for up to 10 years, new poll finds.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 25, 2026

The narrative everybody has been sold is that because data centers use evaporative cooling for their HVAC systems, they’re massive water-suckers and everybody’s water bill will skyrocket if a data center goes up. Except newer data centers don’t use evaporative cooling; they’re on a closed-loop system that doesn’t use much water at all. (RELATED: Nordic Hydro Solves Europe’s Data Center Dilemma)

They do consume a lot of electric power, but most of the newer data center projects carry their own power plants in conjunction with the local utility. The data center pays up front for the construction of the power plant, and the plant is constructed to provide more power than the data center needs. The community gets the excess juice, which in more cases than not actually lowers everybody’s electric bills.

Not to mention the extra power generation capacity can be sold as a feature when it comes to site selection and economic development competition for the community in question.

So is the opposition to data centers just a Chinese psyop? Well… not so much. The arguments being made against data centers aren’t really about power and water. The Federalist’s Sean Davis hit on another source of Big Tech’s PR troubles…

A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.

If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by… https://t.co/N8Zpeo4OZ3

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2026

Just so.

If you had a Rockefeller or a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt or a Morgan in your town, you might be perturbed at times with rapacious labor policies, less-than-state-of-the-art safety and environmental performance, or anticompetitive trade practices, but at least you could count on getting a museum, a zoo, a theater, libraries, perhaps a college or a park out of the deal. The robber barons were, certainly by modern standards, quite civic-minded. They made the places they lived considerably better.

The so-called robber barons of the 19th century had the same understanding. It’s why they built hospitals and concert halls and train stations, and made the buildings timeless works of art. If you want protection and popularity from the people, you have to pay for it.

Robber… https://t.co/zcNYpDbUpE

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2026

You get very little of that from the tech-bro aristocracy.

I do think there is a great deal of Chinese propaganda driving the anti-data center sentiment. This looks so much like the anti-fracking campaign that Russia and Qatar and Venezuela and whoever else ran in an effort to stop the shale revolution a decade or so ago that it’s impossible to miss. (RELATED: China Inc. Is Winning the AI Race)

BREAKING: 𝕏 reveals it uncovered a Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, including hundreds used to influence U.S. debate over AI data centers & energy policy.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 28, 2026

But that doesn’t change the fact that most of the people in charge of these big tech companies who’ll either own or use those data centers come off like James Bond villains. Sam Altman and Seth Bannon and Bill Gates and Sergey Brin do not inspire confidence as people who will refrain from using the power their companies give them for evil purposes. Quite the contrary. In Gates’ case, he actually wants to sprinkle chemicals in the upper atmosphere in order to put the planet through something akin to a nuclear winter, which would kill hundreds of millions of people and bring on societal collapse in much of the Third World (and likely accelerate migration to the West). How excited are you to give Bill Gates more toys to play with?

Count me as somebody in support of building these things. They’re economic development assets, and we’re going to need a whole hell of a lot more economic development if we’re going to provide good jobs for all these broke youngsters who’ll otherwise vote for DSA communists, or for that matter to dig out from $40 trillion in national debt. That said, Davis is not wrong — if all of this is just to facilitate a Panopticon for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to govern, it’s hard to get too excited. (RELATED: The $40 Trillion National Debt and the ‘Budget Hawk’ Ruse That Led to MAGA)

These guys don’t know much about American history, which isn’t a surprise since they mostly went to schools that gave up teaching it. But if they’d study the robber barons, they’d realize the path to getting the facilities they want runs through making investments here and there without coming off as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Most of them haven’t figured that out. After all, in Zuckerberg’s case, he could have spent $400 million on a cancer center; instead, he spent it on Get-Out-The-Vote for Joe Biden in black neighborhoods in 2020. And he’s surprised that people don’t want to give a tax abatement for his data center.

Especially when Meta just settled a lawsuit for $17 billion over poisoning kids’ minds with addictive social media content, which isn’t all that grand a figure. (RELATED: The Meta Lawsuit Is Pickin’ on the Wrong Chicken)

We do need data centers. But we also need a better tech sector.

3. Arson at Saint-Simon; Complicity at Canadian State Television

This happens again and again and again, particularly in Canada for some reason.

Saint-Simon Church on the Acadian Peninsula, believed to be the largest wooden church in New Brunswick, was destroyed Monday morning in a fire the police deem suspicious.

Firefighters in the area received a call around 3:30 a.m., pointing to a fire alarm going off in the Saint-Simon community.

“Sometimes we have false alarms, but I already had a bad feeling,” Chief Luc Dugas of the Caraquet Fire Department told Radio-Canada in French. “I told myself we never had problems with this alarm.”

No one was hurt in the fire, which is now under investigation by the RCMP and the Office of the Fire Marshal.

Sgt. Sylvain Bergeron told CBC News on Monday afternoon that RCMP are investigating the fire as suspicious.

That comes from the CBC, which somehow struggles to identify terrorism when it stares them in the face. To wit…

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its staff not to refer to the killings on 9/11 as “terrorist attacks” ahead of its coverage of the 25th anniversary, according to an internal memo.

The public broadcaster reaffirmed that it would avoid using words like “terrorist” and “terrorism” when describing events, directing its staffers to follow the longstanding company policy that previously landed them in hot water during their Oct. 7, 2023, coverage.

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks,” the memo read. “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center (WTC in second reference) was destroyed.”

That’s bizarre. How could something like this happen?

I don’t know, but I do have a theory…

The memo was signed, “BB,” which the Toronto Sun, which first published the letter, identified as Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust at CBC News.

I wonder if “BB” was in New Brunswick on Monday night.

Or, for that matter, if he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Wednesday night, where another church mysteriously burned down, just down the street from the local mosque.

4. Gavin Newsom Is an Utter Buffoon; Example 543,219

I know this isn’t all that serious a thing, at least in comparison to the idiotic wealth tax or the assault on investigative journalism he’s pushing, but… really?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom are selling their $7.5 million Sacramento-area residence — yet the governor claims he was barely aware of a detail of one of the home’s key amenities.

At a press conference, the winemaker-turned-pol was put on the spot about whether he even filled the home’s massive 5,000-bottle wine cellar.

“Are you serious? Really?” the Democrat asked, stunned.

“No, I never filled it. I didn’t even know I had that much.”

“I literally didn’t even know,” the governor added, claiming he only found out that 5,000-figure detail about his own home from the news.

“By the way, I put books in there,” Newsom claimed.

“There’s no wine there, it’s books,” he went on, suggesting they were his “only inheritance” from his father, former judge and Gordon Getty consigliere William Newsom.

What a jackass. You want to control the lives of 45 million-odd Californians, not to mention 330 million Americans if we were somehow stupid enough to elect you president, and you don’t even know what’s happening in your own crib?

We’re going to be done with him soon. Not that Xavier Becerra is going to bring additional intellectual capacity to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.

5. The Omars Aren’t a Family, They’re A Crime Wave

Normally I’d close with something fun — and I guess here would be a good place to point out that we’ve now got five of the 10 episodes of The Necessary Men up at The American Spectator, with Episode 6 coming tomorrow, so I guess I’ve done that.

On the other hand, this is sorta fun too, right?

🚨NEW: Multiple law enforcement sources say a search warrant was conducted Tuesday night on the apartment where Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s son lives in Minneapolis. Guns and ammunition were recovered from the scene.

In response to our questions about what took place at the… pic.twitter.com/PrBv82XuRg

— Liz Collin (@lizcollin) August 27, 2026

More fun would be de-naturalizations and deportations. The hits just keep on coming from these people, and it’s pretty safe to call them a cancer. (RELATED: Keeping Up With the Congresswoman)

There was a story earlier this week on indications there’s an active investigation into Ilhan Omar. Will that go anywhere? Sure hope so.