Ben Shapiro

There’s a growing impulse in American politics to blame the free market — and the technologies it produces — for every bout of economic indigestion, as if a shadowy cabal of innovators is deliberately dismantling the middle-class way of life.

That impulse is no longer abstract. It has become physical.

People are now attacking data centers.

On the “All-In Podcast,” investor David Friedberg offered what may be the clearest explanation yet for why these massive, anonymous buildings have suddenly become targets. The data center, he argued, is the modern “temple of the wealthy” — a concrete symbol of elite progress in an age when many Americans feel they have little to show for the economic growth of the last 20 years.

In other words, people don’t hate the building. They hate what they think it represents.

And Friedberg is right. This is precisely how modern economic populism works.

To understand what’s happening, it helps to draw a distinction between two kinds of populism: moral populism and economic populism.

Moral populism has a long American pedigree. William F. Buckley Jr. famously quipped that he “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” The point wasn’t anti-intellectualism for its own sake. It was a statement about character: The average citizen, shaped by church, family and community, often has a more grounded moral compass than the credentialed elite.

But economic populism is something different — and, in many ways, the inverse.

Economic populism assumes that the economy should be centrally controlled by “the people,” usually through a strong government empowered to override markets, capital flows and private decision-making. It treats the dispersed intelligence of millions of individuals as less legitimate than the commands of a centralized authority.

This is the exact opposite of the basic insight of capitalism: that the diffusion of knowledge — the fact that millions of people know different things and make different bets — produces better outcomes than any one planner at the top. Markets are not perfect, but they are adaptive. They process information in ways no bureaucracy can.

Economic populism rejects that. Its logic is blunt: If the market produces something I don’t like, then the market must be illegitimate.

So the target becomes not merely a policy but a symbol.

And today, that symbol is the data center.

Whenever the economy feels unstable — when wages stagnate, inflation rises or housing becomes unaffordable — the political reflex is to attack capitalism itself. Or, at minimum, to attack the people who appear to have benefited most from it.

This is where the oldest and most poisonous lie resurfaces: that rich people are rich because they stole from the poor.

In a free-market system, that is generally false. Wealth is usually created because someone provides goods and services people voluntarily purchase. In the aggregate, people get rich by giving consumers something they want at a price they are willing to pay.

The places where wealth is most often derived from direct theft are not capitalist democracies. They are authoritarian regimes: communist states, kleptocracies and tyrannies where power — not innovation — determines who eats and who starves.

But if you can convince enough people that America’s economy is fundamentally “rigged,” then the next step is obvious: Go after the means of production.

In 2026, that means going after the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

The fundamental delusion behind the anti-AI movement is that AI can be stopped.

It can’t.

If the United States chooses to cripple its own AI industry, AI will not disappear. It will simply migrate elsewhere. And the nation most eager to seize that advantage is China.

If you think China will forgo artificial intelligence development out of ethical concern, you are fooling yourself. They will pursue it aggressively, ruthlessly and without the moral and legal restraints that exist in the West.

This is not an academic debate. It is a strategic race.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about AI. Yes, there are real dangers — social, economic, even existential. But there is also a massive opportunity. And pretending we can opt out of the technological future is not a plan. It is surrender.

A China that dominates AI will dominate productivity. A China that dominates productivity will dominate the global economy. And a China that dominates the global economy will inevitably dominate military capacity.

If China outpaces the United States, they will not merely reshape their own region. They will export their systems — and with them, their influence. Other countries will become dependent on Chinese technology, Chinese platforms, Chinese infrastructure and ultimately Chinese permission.