Americans say they want to bring back industry.President Donald Trump ran on reindustrialization and won.
But when it comes to actual building, mining, and developing, people too often shut it down.Build, they say, just not in my backyard.Peter Thiel put his finger on this pathology over a decade ago.
"We wanted flying cars," he wrote, "instead we got 140 characters." His point wasn't merely about venture capital timidity.It was about a society that stopped building physical things, retreating into digital abstraction while factories closed, supply chains migrated to China, and infrastructure crumbled.
Now, we are making the same mistake again, in real time, with higher stakes.The clearest early warning is the backlash against AI data centers — the physical infrastructure of the AI revolution.A Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities, opposition now exceeding that of nuclear power plants.
Local activism has already blocked or delayed $64 billion in data center projects between May 2024 and March 2025 alone.NEW WHEELED ROBOT SAYS NO THANKS TO HUMANOID TYPEAI-powered humanoid robot assistants, cancer-curing algorithms, precision farming, and long-term forecasting all sound great — we just don’t want the infrastructure that makes all of this possible.But if Republicans can’t hold the line on data centers–the most visible and economically compelling piece of the reindustrialization puzzle – they won’t hold it on mines, factories, or modern industrial plants either.And the next generation may never forgive them, because NIMBYism is already present across every sector of Trump's reindustrialization agenda.Critical minerals mining, the foundation of every clean energy technology, electronic, and defense system America produces, faces permitting timelines of 7 to 10 years in the United States.
The Resolution Copper Mine in Arizona — sitting on one of the largest copper deposits in the world — spent ...