It feels like the data center situation has many people seeing it as a Big Business vs average people fight instead of red vs blue. Even the president's posts about it all being Chinese propaganda are falling a bit flat.

I feel like that was always going to be the outcome with how many of these datacenter projects have been conducted. Shady backroom deals, hearings deliberately arranged to be impractical for residents to attend, residents’ opposition being ignored, no regard for impact on the surrounding area, etc.

The pace may have been a little slower, but I doubt that there’d been a fraction as much backlash had they played nice and more consideration been taken. Nobody really cared about data centers until a few hastily implemented ones made nuisances of themselves.