THE GATEWAY TO THE SILICON HILL COUNTRY
In an age where public officials are clamoring at the opportunity to replace natural beauty with promises of technological utopia, Hood County finds itself at an inflection point. Do we jump at the chance to scalp our land and cover it from corner to corner with data centers, power plants and whatever else becomes “critical” or trendy in the days to come? Do we embrace the short-term mentality of more is always better? Do we encourage the construction of our own human enslavement through digital storage? And do we do all of this at the promise of lower taxes? Or, under the guise that we are in a race against communism? Haven’t we seen all this before?
Obviously, anyone who has not been pricked by the needle of financial enticement would choose to remain steadfast in the protection of our land as a sanctuary county and not offer it up to the internet gods as a sacrificial zone, or a technological gateway to the Silicone Hill Country. Unfortunately, the City of Granbury has chosen a path of secrecy and deceit, by hiding their plans from the public to aggressively pursue and incentivize the developers of Project Patriot. This is a plan to build a Data Center on 2,090 acres of land that the city annexed on January 6th of this year (see full details at RejectAnnex.com).
And while the City of Granbury has a potential data center problem the size of 100 Walmart Super Centers, less than 1 mile from four different schools, a hospital and a nursing home, the county has a problem almost three times that size. Yet rather than continue down the path of confidentiality and deception, the County Commissioners and County Judge have decided to bring all things to the surface including:
Removing an offer of tax abatements to Project Spectrum,
Hosting a special public meeting to discuss data centers and allow public interaction,
Hiring a law firm that specializes in negotiations between government and private businesses,
Reinstating the Hood County Development Commission, to advise the Commissioners on this very topic,
Passing a motion to have a public hearing on a moratorium on February 10th,
Adding an agenda item for January 29th to repeal a letter of support for Project Patriot,
And they have repeatedly suspended their maximum public comment time limits to allow everyone to speak on data center related items.
It is plain to see that it is the County that truly hears the cries of the people and respects the concerns that so many have voiced, such as loss of property value, irreversible effects on water supply, extreme health concerns, constant noise, and poor air quality to name a few.
Sometimes I find myself getting so lost in the intricacies of how to stop these developments, I lose focus on the fact that we simply do not want them here on principle. Hood county does not want to participate in the building of infrastructure that sacrifices irreplaceable beauty and natural resources and ushers in an age of maximum oppression.
In my first speech to the County Commissioners, I asked three questions:
1. Do we think taking thousands of acres of raw land and turning that land into Industrial Ai Data Centers is moving us closer to the original creation or farther away?
2. Do we think negotiating tax breaks with Google, Meta and Amazon closer resembles making a covenant with God or making a deal with the Devil?
3. Do we think that developing enough digital storage space to track our every movement and every purchase brings us closer to Genesis or closer to Revelation?
The answers to these questions are clear to me and others that I interact with on a daily basis. We need to understand that just because something is technological, does not mean it is not spiritual. There will be spiritual implications to replacing beauty with technology as beauty is a conduit for God, and technology is a conduit for evil.
Therefore, we need to resist these developments on principal, on a moral standing. When the citizens of Gonzales refused to return the canon supplied by the Mexican government, they had no legal standing, only a moral one. They said, “we believe we are doing what is right and without force, we will not yield.”
However, in Hood County our resistance doesn’t have to look like a revolution, because we
do have a legal standing in Section 231 Subchapter K of the Texas Local Government Code. It states that,
“without adequate development regulations, the area and the watershed [all of unincorporated Hood County] will be developed in ways that endanger and interfere with the proper use of that area as a place of recreation to the detriment of the public health, safety, morals, and general welfare.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the salvational doctrine of the Hoodites. The written foundation of divine providence upon which a theology can be built to defeat this infection of technology. This is a virus whose symptoms will never slow down. They will only speed up, unless people are willing to adopt a stance of tactical noncompliance based on a moral argument, which Subchapter K endorses.
I do not understand how we can read the entirety of this document and feel powerless. With so much on the line, including the future of our children and subsequent generations, we cannot choose to not engage. We cannot choose cowardice. In fact, the most rebellious act we can perform is to refuse to be afraid. When we deny the enemy our fear, we starve them of their power source.
The following quote is from the mother of Sam Houston. It says:
“My son, take this musket and never disgrace it; for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave, than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and remember, too, that while the door of my cottage is open to brave men, it is eternally shut against cowards.”
These words sound harsh today and almost unbelievable, but they hail from a bygone age where people had to fight to gain and keep their freedom.
Perhaps they were at an advantage because their threats were more obvious, but I tend to think they weren’t. We simply have the unfair vantage point of looking back in time. The people that we read about, like Elizabeth Houston, were grounded in scripture. They had wisdom, discernment and the foresight to know that a small threat or a small compromise leads to something bigger. They understood that according to Revelation 21:8, cowards would be thrown into the Lake of Fire and she did not want that for her sons. As Hoodites, we do not want that for our children. And the only way they are going to see what courage looks like is if we show them.
I’m continually shocked by the lack of empathy shown by these data center developers. In particular, a lady from AWS (Amazon, Project Spectrum), who said she only wanted to attend to a public hearing if we could have an “unemotional” discussion. I told her that I understood that it is not an emotional issue for her, that it is simply a math problem, but for the residents of Hood County, it is the exact opposite.
What she condescendingly mischaracterizes as “emotion,” is the passion, courage and lack of fear that so many residents of Hood County are showing as they enter intimidating chambers and circumstances to voice their opinions on the situation. Outsiders assume that because we wear blue jeans instead of lab coats, we don’t have the ability to decipher information. But their request to have an “unemotional” conversation and potentially not be in attendance at all, shows their fear that we actually do.
We understand the significance of this moment. We understand that once this starts, it never stops. We understand the simple fact that anything that is decided in the dark, without the public’s knowledge is not for the good of the public, but for the good of the decision maker.
For that reason alone, it does not matter how quiet we make these facilities, it doesn’t matter how hidden, it doesn’t matter how clean, I do not want them. Someone could invent a silent, invisible data center that runs off the tears of Google executives and I still would not want them in Hood County.
In closing, it does not matter how many data centers we build to further artificial intelligence. There is still no such thing as artificial wisdom or artificial courage. These are things that come from within, from above.
Our officials must use our powers endowed by the state and by God to do what is right and face the consequences. We did not elect them to make easy decisions; we elected them to make hard ones.
When the next chapter of our history is written, before its digitally erased and replaced, I want my children and grandchildren to learn about the small group of Hoodites that resisted. A group that was not driven by fear or the thought that they were powerless, but that stood on principle and on morals in the face of oppression and came out victorious.
-Matt Long
