Conspiracy
Chinese Government Orchestrated Your Cousin's Petition About The Data Center
By Tah Foil, . BSN Network. Satire.
President Donald Trump suggested this week that opposition to American data centers, a movement largely composed of local residents concerned about electricity bills, groundwater, and the persistent industrial hum that follows them everywhere in their own homes, is in fact a coordinated influence campaign run by the People's Republic of China.
Trump made the claim during a September 10 appearance on Fox News, telling host Laura Ingraham: "You know, a lot of people say that it's a China PR thing." He did not name which people, or how many, or what they said after that.
Experts in foreign influence operations reviewed the claim and described it as exaggerated. This finding has not yet reached the people who say it.
The Chinese government, through its embassy in Washington, declined to comment, which is consistent with how the Chinese government responds to questions and also with how a sophisticated actor would respond if they were, in fact, running a data center opposition network through American residential zoning boards and a Facebook group called "Concerned Citizens of Harlow County" that currently has 847 members and a pinned post about a pot luck.
The question now is when the operation began. Early research points to late 2023, when your cousin Debra, 54, of Gainesville, Virginia, began asking questions about a proposed facility near her subdivision. She has described her concerns as related to property values, noise pollution, water usage, and the fact that she can see it from her deck.
Debra told a neighbor she got the idea from an article she read, which she cannot find anymore, which she thinks was in a local paper, or possibly Facebook, or possibly it came up when she was searching for something else entirely.
Chinese officials have so far been unable to confirm or deny awareness of Debra.
Elon Musk, who was present at the White House for an unrelated announcement about tariffs on semiconductors, offered his analysis to reporters on the lawn. "The entire framework of NIMBY opposition," he said, "is a prisoner's dilemma wrapped in a local ordinance. What you're seeing is a distributed adversarial signal operating below the threshold of institutional detection. It's actually quite elegant from an information warfare perspective." He then returned to whatever he was doing before.
Debra's petition currently has 214 signatures. Eleven of them are from people who live more than forty miles away and found the link in a Reddit thread about electromagnetic fields. None of the eleven could locate Harlow County on a map, a capability that, to be fair, the Chinese government has and they do not.
The county planning commission reviewed the petition at its August meeting and tabled it for further discussion. The commission chair noted that several of the concerns raised, including groundwater draw, transformer noise, and heat output, were legitimate engineering questions that the applicant had not fully addressed. He said this in a public building, out loud, on the record, which Chinese intelligence is presumably aware of because the meeting was streamed on YouTube and currently has 61 views.
Fox News has not followed up.
Debra says she is not a Chinese asset. She says she is a retired dental hygienist who would like to sleep past 5 a.m. She says she has never been contacted by any foreign government, though she did receive an email last spring from someone claiming to be a journalist in Shanghai who had seen her petition and wanted to discuss it, which she deleted because it looked like spam, which it probably was, or which is exactly what she would say.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for comment. Debra responded within four minutes and attached a PDF of her original noise complaint, which runs to eleven pages and includes a hand-drawn diagram of the transformer placement relative to her bedroom window.
The diagram is very detailed.
Which, honestly, is the part that makes you think.
The story we are making fun of: https://politifact.com/article/2026/sep/23/china-influence-data-center-opposition/