Honor the Earth is a nonprofit organization co-founded in the 1990s by the Indigo Girls — yes, the girl band — and the Native American activist Winona LaDuke. They spent decades doing environmental activism such as killing pipelines and mining projects, touting these as successful defenses of tribal lands. Now they’re partnering with a group called “Stop Data Colonialism” to kill data center construction.

It doesn’t exactly read as well as Marx and Engels, but Stop Data Colonialism released its own manifesto. It opens with a light-hearted and sweeping denunciation of the entire United States as a “settler-colonial and imperialist project” linked to “technofascism, technocolonialism, and technofeudalism.”

The reason we care about this little-seen “manifesto” with only 540 likes on Instagram is that Stop Data Centers, Honor the Earth, and numerous other activist groups comprise the “death by a thousand cuts” approach to halting AI progress. New York may soon pass a data center moratorium. At least a dozen more states have similar bills pending. The movement produces real consequences.

To be fair to the activists, there have been real, tangible problems with certain data center projects. Household energy prices have shot up in states with high concentrations of data centers. Correlation is not causation, but each data center chewing up a gigawatt or more of power seems to be a likely culprit. Meanwhile, Meta’s giant data center in rural Georgia made the tap water undrinkable or not even available for those in close proximity.

But despite some of the viral TikTok and Instagram videos, data centers don’t actually guzzle exceptional amounts of water and steal from local populations. But these videos act as effective propaganda, swaying hearts and minds. Now, armies of passionate protesters are descending upon public hearings to voice outrage at new projects — Kevin O’Leary’s massive construction project in the Utah desert was notoriously targeted several months ago by throngs of pissed-off dissenters.

As it turns out, the angry masses are majorly funded by left-wing activist organizations and Chinese communists. Environmentalist groups such as Protect PT, which received $400,000 from the progressive Heinz Endowments just two years ago, and dozens of others have led a top-down push that has now produced 155 local moratoriums and 127 proposed bans across 40 states.

The “data colonialist” crowd is actually propped up by billionaire leftists. Tax filings show that Honor the Earth received grants from the leftist Tides Foundation, $63,000 in 2016 and $126,000 in 2021, and Tides itself has taken at least $17.2 million from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Honor the Earth prides itself on its map of proposed data centers, which it says threaten Native land, but the bar for landing on that map is ridiculously low. A project doesn’t need to touch a reservation, or even neighbor one — it just has to fall somewhere within a 30-mile radius.

What Honor the Earth actually wants built is nothing at all. That’s why their Instagram page is filled not just with anti-data center propositions, but anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel expansion as well.

Of course, nobody wants a massive data center next to their home. Seventy-one percent of Americans oppose one in their area, more opposition than even nuclear plants, and that’s a perfectly rational preference. Besides water and electricity concerns, they also emit a sound that can only be described as the war cry of a million angry cyborgs.

Don’t fret. The data centers will be built. They’ll be built because this is a country that laid railroad track across land it had not yet finished taking, that dammed the Colorado River, split the atom, and put a man on the moon.

AMERICA IS HAVING THE WRONG DATA CENTER CONVERSATION — AND ITS SHOOTING US IN THE FOOT

Sure it’s a cliche, but nonetheless one that’s true: We’re in the midst of a new Industrial Revolution. Stop Data Colonialism won’t stop data colonialism because we need data colonialism. It’s America’s new divine mandate, and it can’t be stopped.

The future is coming, good and hard.

Brandon Goldman is the managing editor of Upward News and has been published in various outlets, including the Spectator, the Hill, Compact magazine, and more. He resides in New York.