Almost all major public debate is both legit and trumped up, and has nation-state and political entities (both domestic and foreign) working to shape the debate to their ends.

The question to ask is why this one's caught on so strongly and with such unusual demographics. The answer probably has a lot more to do with what aggressive data center buildout represents than who's working behind the scenes to drive the discussion or how the facts in debate today happen to compare.

So what does it represent?

You have a very troubled consumer economy. Inflation is happening at rates most US adults have never seen before. People are struggling to find jobs. Commercial districts are sitting vacant. Small business owners and sales-line workers are struggling to generate the revenue to keep the lights on and make payroll.

And then somebody's coming to town saying "WE have money and we're going to build this $XXXM automated facility that employs almost nobody, siphons resources from your infrastructure, and pays as little as possible in tax while we do it. It doesn't solve any of the problems you're thinking about right now, but we think it will someday. Probably. We're very excited about it. In the meantime, did you know you can ask it to draw a pelican on a bicycle and it can kind of do an okay job? Hah! Isn't that cool?!"

It's not really about water or noise or anything like that, nor about sneaky political agents trying to manipulate people. It's simply about the arrogance of the speculators in the tech community and their strangehold on what little capital is still flowing through the economy.

People are sick of it and this has become their opportunity to drive a stake in the ground and push back against them.