Are we making
America grating again?

Now that the knights of the semi-circular dais in the southeast corner of our Camelot courthouse have slain the data center dragon, what’s next?

From comments at Monday’s meeting, the next myth our cadre of commissioners seems to want to inflate into a cause célèbre is the totally debunked notion that health care for undocumented migrants is pushing insurance premiums up and rural hospitals’ profit margins down.

Absolutely no credible evidence supports the claim, but it’s yet another of the frequently heard battle cries from those who would prefer to create fear and point fingers rather than actually attempt to solve real problems.

It’s kind of like the proposed election law that would address the non-existent problem on non-citizens voting by making it costly and difficult for real citizens to register.

The chances of Marion County ever being the site of a major data center are as remote as the chances of it becoming a base for nuclear submarines.

Submarine bases need to be near deep water. Major data centers need to be near the broadband backbone of the Internet.

Not only do we have no oceans in Marion County, we harbor absolutely none of the Internet’s backbone cables, which tend to run along the northern and eastern border of the state.

The only way we’d ever be close to a backbone cable would be if someone thought it was necessary to connect from Dallas through Wichita and Manhattan to Omaha, but Wichita is already served from the southeast, and Manhattan is served from the northeast. There’s no need.

There’s a reason Marion County is split into two area codes, was at one time served by three different postal sectional centers, and is on the very edge of two different television markets. We’re in the middle of nowhere — which can be nice for lifestyle but makes such things as major data centers highly unlikely.

Still, county officials have devoted — and will continue to devote — massive amounts of energy into portraying data centers as evil lurking just around the corner and requiring every step we can take to prevent them from entering our county — except, perhaps, in cities’ industrial parks.

It’s yet another example of anti-intellectual bullying. Find something people don’t really understand, making them believe it’s somehow evil, and do nothing but spout slogans against it for weeks on end.

If you think that sounds like a play out of Senator Roger Marshall’s playbook, in which he desperately is trying to portray himself as miniature Donald Trump, you’re absolutely right.

But if you think I and others who might not be the biggest fans of Trump are the people who originated such comments, you’re wrong. One of the first to give them serious voice was J.D. Vance, the 2016 Trump critic who became the 2024 Trump running mate in a political flip-flop even the flimsiest of beach shoes would envy.

With gasoline prices soaring and cost of diesel fuel and fertilizer rising even more rapidly, those who tied their fate to that of our dealAmaker in chief might be wise to think whether their flip to supporting him has turned out to be a flop that will come to roost in November’s midterms.A

Our president’s art of the deal isn’t so much art as it is extortion: bully others into submission by making ever-more ridiculous demands. The strategy hasn’t worked in Ukraine. It didn’t work with Greenland. It seems unlikely to work in Cuba. And it appears to be an abject failure in Iran.

Holding airport security hostage to allowing immigration agents to continue wearing masks and requiring potential voters to do costly searches for their original birth certificates is viciously and without purpose mean-spirited. But it’s behavior that others, like our county commissioners, seem to want to model for fear of being left out of the MAGA revolution.

At some point, probably this November, that revolution is going to revolve to a stop, and a lot of embarrassed people who didn’t really share many of the racist, anti-intellectual leanings of the movement are going to be left without a platform to stand on.

Now is the time, especially for loyal local Republicans, to get back to the essence of what their party stood for and stop playing the reality-show games that we’ve had to endure for a term and a half in the White House.

— ERIC MEYER