In April of 2020, San Clemente, Calif., dumped 37 tons of sand into a skate park to keep teenagers out of it. Down the coast, deputies arrested a man for paddleboarding alone in the Pacific Ocean. Towns unbolted basketball rims. The mayor of Los Angeles told Angelenos that snitches get rewards, and, God help us, people snitched. Then Gavin Newsom went to dinner at The French Laundry.

All that explains two fights now burning down county commission meetings, fights that look like they have nothing to do with COVID: data centers and Flock cameras.

In March of 2020, Americans closed their businesses, closed schools, and canceled funerals because they trusted their institutions. Those institutions destroyed the trust Americans placed in them.

The virus came. The data came. The virus mutated. The data changed. The people in charge did not.

We learned early on that children were not meaningful vectors of spread. The teachers' unions kept the doors of schools locked anyway and a generation of students regressed. We learned the virus spread indoors, and California kept filling in skate parks. When Brian Kemp reopened Georgia, The Atlantic called it an experiment in human sacrifice. Georgia recovered first. CNN put Chris Cuomo on the air nightly to interview his brother Andrew, whose nursing home order killed the elderly. Rachel Maddow promised the vaccine would stop the virus, and when it did not, nobody apologized to the people fired for refusing it.

Then the cities burned, and the same experts who called small business owners selfish for wanting to make a mortgage payment decided mass gatherings were a moral necessity. That was the moment millions of Americans concluded none of it had been about science. Officials who denied the lab leak in public believed it in private. Fifty-one intelligence officials signed a letter that throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before an election, and they are still on television telling us what to think.

Now come the data centers and the cameras. I am for both. I am directly impacted by the data center growth. My backyard is about to be dug up for a natural gas pipeline needed to expand power for a data center hundreds of miles away. We need the compute power. If we do not build it, Beijing will, and Beijing will shape the century. Our towns are short of police officers; a friend of mine had a kidnapped child recovered in two hours because of Flock cameras, and there is no expectation of privacy on a public road. You already hand your location to China every time you open TikTok and to your cell phone provider every time you use your phone.

I, however, understand the opposition. Every argument against data centers was made against fracking, which gave us the cheapest energy in the developed world. The difference was never the facts. It was the messengers. The oil men knew their towns and knew the country. The AI executives are West Coast weirdos who live in a bubble and do not really understand their fellow countrymen. They buy the farmland, sign nondisclosure agreements with county commissioners, then go on television to tell us the machines will take our jobs and ruin our children's future, but we will love it.

Our present moment requires AI executives and camera supporters to proceed in ways to earn back trust. Publish the water consumption data on data centers and the power ratepayer numbers. Stop the nondisclosure agreements keeping local elected officials unable to talk to the voters. Put a mandatory minimum prison sentence on any police officer who abuses Flock camera data, make vendors liable for false matches, and ban private facial recognition in public rights-of-way. Our license plates have no right to privacy, but we do. Enforce the laws you passed, especially the ones your own team finds inconvenient.

The politicians, experts, press, and elite need to build back the trust they destroyed. Until then, their credibility sits in a skate park full of sand, on a beach where a man was arrested for floating alone, and under a rimless basketball goal.

To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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