A group of Republican lawmakers has written to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche demanding a federal investigation into the people opposing data center construction across the United States, because apparently if you're worried about your electric bill or your local water supply, you might be doing it for Beijing. The letter, led by Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas and reported first by Fox News Digital, names a socialist organizer who testified at a county planning meeting in Maryland as part of what it describes as a sophisticated foreign influence campaign. We have arrived, apparently, at the point where showing up to a zoning hearing makes you a national security threat.
What the Letter Actually Says
Gooden's letter to Blanche argues that foreign-linked organizations, specifically ones connected to China and Russia, are coordinating with American left-wing groups to block data center construction and kneecap the United States in the global AI race. "We believe that the Chinese and also the Russians are colluding and working to make sure that the United States of America is not the leader when it comes to AI policy and development," Gooden told Fox News Digital.
The letter points to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a far-left political organization, as a key actor in this alleged campaign. According to a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute cited in the letter, PSL has organized anti-data center campaigns in at least 14 states, opposing roughly $23.6 billion in AI investments. The letter also references a report from OpenAI, which found that accounts likely originating from China were banned for using its models to promote narratives designed to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies."
So, to be clear: there is real documented Chinese influence activity online around AI policy debates. That part is not invented. The leap the letter makes is from there to the idea that local Americans raising concerns at planning commission meetings are either witting or unwitting participants in that operation.
The Socialist at the Zoning Meeting
The most vivid example Fox News Digital offers is Jack Tensley, described as an organizer for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who testified before the Frederick County Planning Commission in Maryland in January against a data center proposed for construction in Virginia. His testimony, in full: "My really big fear here is the security risk. We have infrastructure attacks and failures, cyberattacks that happen. I want to know if this puts a target on the back of Frederick County."
That's it. That's the foreign influence operation. A guy showed up to a public meeting, said he was worried about cyberattack risk, and left. Tensley did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment, which Fox News Digital noted, presumably because silence is now also suspicious.
The PSL is a real organization with openly stated politics that most Americans would find pretty far out. A Boston-area PSL social media post quoted in the reporting says data centers are controlled by "tech billionaires" and frames opposition to them as part of a workers' movement. They are not hiding the ball here. These are people who call themselves socialists, not sleeper agents dropping coded messages at county board meetings.
Neville Singham, the One Thread That Actually Has Some Meat on It
The person at the center of this story who merits the most scrutiny is Neville Roy Singham, a 72-year-old American who sold his tech company for $785 million in 2017 and now lives in Shanghai. According to Fox News Digital's own prior investigations, Singham has funneled $278 million into a broad network of nonprofits since 2017, many of which promote narratives favorable to the Chinese Communist Party.
Singham is now reportedly the subject of a grand jury investigation in the Southern District of New York, a probe that Blanche himself authorized. He has not been charged with any crime. Fox News Digital says it has reached out to Singham repeatedly for months and received no response.
This is the part of the story that is genuinely worth watching. If a wealthy American living in Shanghai is bankrolling domestic political organizations in ways that benefit Chinese interests and violate foreign agent registration laws, that's a serious problem. House panels have already subpoenaed three left-wing groups in a probe tied to the Singham network. The investigation into Singham is real. The question is how far the evidence actually extends from him to every local activist who ever signed a petition against a power-hungry server farm.
The DOJ Has Not Said a Word
Fox News Digital asked the Justice Department whether it planned to respond to the lawmakers or open a formal investigation. The department did not respond.
Blanche, who was Donald Trump's personal defense attorney before becoming the acting head of the Justice Department, has been willing to follow political directives from the White House in other contexts this year. Whether he picks this one up remains to be seen. The letter gives him a ready-made opportunity to announce a splashy investigation into left-wing groups right before midterm season heats up, so don't rule it out.
What an investigation would actually look like in practice is its own problem. "Investigate the people who oppose data centers" covers an enormous swath of the American public. Utility companies, environmental groups, local homeowners associations, libertarian land-use advocates, and yes, socialist organizers have all raised objections to data center projects in various states. Treating all of that opposition as a unified foreign influence operation because some of them share a policy position with the Chinese government is the kind of logic that could justify investigating almost anyone about almost anything.
Why Data Centers Are Actually Controversial
Here's what gets lost in the China framing: data centers are genuinely controversial for reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics. They are enormous consumers of electricity and water. A single large facility can strain local power grids and drive up utility rates for nearby residents. They create relatively few permanent jobs for the footprint they occupy. Communities have legitimate reasons to scrutinize them carefully before approving construction.
As Fox News Digital itself notes, "communities are weighing new job opportunities against concerns over power, water and local impact." That is a real tension. It's been playing out in Virginia, in Texas, in the rural Midwest, in places with no particular history of socialist organizing. People who live near proposed sites sometimes just don't want them there, for reasons that begin and end with their own backyards.
The GOP letter essentially argues that any organized opposition to data centers should be viewed with suspicion because China benefits from slowing American AI development. By that logic, any policy position that coincidentally aligns with a foreign adversary's interests is presumptively compromised. That's a very, very broad net.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what's happening here. There is a real story buried inside this one: a wealthy American living in Shanghai appears to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a network of domestic political organizations that parrot Chinese Communist Party talking points, and the Justice Department is apparently looking at it. That's worth knowing. That investigation should proceed wherever the evidence leads.
But that story is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a much shakier argument, which is that local opposition to data centers is a Chinese influence operation. The evidence chain goes: Neville Singham funds some left-wing groups, some left-wing groups oppose data centers, therefore opposing data centers is suspicious. That's not an investigation, that's a McCarthyism starter kit. The letter Gooden sent to Blanche is a political document dressed up in national security language, designed to put a federal target on left-wing organizing by associating it with foreign enemies. It's a classic move, and Fox News is running it straight.
The Justice Department should investigate Singham if the evidence warrants it. It should prosecute anyone who is actually acting as an unregistered foreign agent. And it should absolutely not open a fishing expedition into every community group, environmental organization, or socialist loudmouth who ever stood up at a microphone and said they didn't want a data center in their town. One of those things is law enforcement. The other one is using law enforcement as a political weapon, which, at this particular DOJ, is admittedly getting harder to tell apart from the first one.
