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Data Centers and the Push to Regulate AI: Jim Pfaff on The Russ Clark Show | Sep 17, 2026

Published: September 17, 2026
Network: The Russ Clark Show (YouTube)
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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The topic was set before the interview started: AI, and particularly its connection to data centers. On the September 17, 2026 edition of The Russ Clark Show, Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff spent most of a half hour arguing that the campaign against data centers and the sudden wave of AI alarm are the same campaign — a business strategy with a political partner, not a safety finding. The thing it is aimed at, he said, is the free competition already here: open source models from Meta and Google that anyone with the right equipment can run without paying a subscription. Pfaff traced the pattern back to the creation of the FDA, took the noise and water complaints about data centers one at a time, and warned that if a Skynet is ever built, government builds it. Then he gave the hosts the election news they asked for.

Topics Covered

• The Doomerism Push and Its Timing
• Regulatory Capture, from the FDA to the Frontier Labs
• Open Source AI and the Competition Already Here
• If There Is Ever a Skynet, Government Builds It
• Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the Noise and Water Claims
• Rigor, Schools, and the November Outlook
• Key Takeaways

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The Doomerism Push and Its Timing

Pfaff opened with the audience he was aiming at: every conservative and every Christian who has allowed themselves to be convinced — and he said that apparently includes Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — that we are living in the Terminator movie. He does not claim to be a tech expert or an AI expert. He calls himself intermediate, says he uses AI tools all the time, and says he spends a lot of time building systems with his chief technology officer to make The Conservative Caucus more efficient, more effective, and able to punch above its weight.

“This AI doomerism that says there’s a 10% chance in 10 years the AI will kill humanity is the most absurd thing that I’ve ever heard. There’s not even any proof for it.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Then the detail he wanted people to notice: the timing. The really big push arrived right around the GOP midterm convention, which he called very successful at motivating Republicans to do things. That, he said, is not a coincidence. TCC covered the Dallas gathering at length, including our conversation with Chris Saxman on what conservatives actually conserve.

He also put the effort inside the church. Megan Basham, the author of Shepherds for Sale, had documented how much left-wing and even atheist money was flowing into evangelical groups to push them on abortion and gay marriage and to keep Christians out of politics. Pfaff said she recently showed the same pattern on this issue: the Gospel Coalition, an organization with a large website presence and well-known evangelical speakers, is promoting AI doomerism and pushing it almost into Christian eschatology — the end times. He put that alongside the barcodes on right hands and foreheads that Christians were warned about in the 1980s and 1990s, which never played out.

Regulatory Capture, from the FDA to the Frontier Labs

The safeguards people are demanding, Pfaff said, already exist. Tell an AI system you want to develop a chemical weapon to retaliate against someone and it shuts you off; those protections are built in. He cited Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, making the simpler point: if you have a dangerous product, do not release your product. That is basic consumer law, and it is already binding if the normal free market process is allowed to work.

“There is a real desire to protect these — among some of these frontier models, to protect their business and to create a regulatory capture.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

His definition: regulatory capture is when the major players in an industry really run the regulators, and not the regulators running them. The history is long, he said, and it became entrenched in Teddy Roosevelt’s administration with the creation of the FDA. There was a doomerism then too — the warning that health standards were needed because companies were using sodium benzoate to keep products from spoiling. Heinz made what Pfaff called a roughly true but kind of semi-false claim that its ketchup was so much safer than the sodium benzoate producers, and it knocked its small competition out of the market. Other major food players were pushing the same thing, and the founder of Heinz was pushing Roosevelt to create the FDA.

Open Source AI and the Competition Already Here

The thing the frontier labs are responding to, in Pfaff’s reading, is not a risk curve. It is a price collapse. Open source AI models are not only Chinese: Meta has a whole range of them in Llama, and Google has begun releasing models of its own in Gemma. Nobody pays for those models. The only requirement is equipment that can run them.

That is the competition OpenAI and Anthropic can see coming, he said, because it means less revenue from the subscription services behind ChatGPT and Claude. Open source AI models run at very low day-to-day cost with a rational investment in equipment, which puts them in reach of a small or medium-sized business. His organization did exactly that.

“We just made tens of thousands of dollars of investment in equipment so that we can do all of our data work outside of the view of these frontier models in a private way and in an effective way.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The argument coming next, he predicted, is that open source AI turned loose in the wild without regulation will destroy us all. His answer is that the country already ran this experiment, and it is called Linux. Everybody who does anything on the internet is going through Linux somehow.

“Open source is not the problem. It is the business model that’s the problem, and they’re trying to get government to protect their business model.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Asked whether this is about competition or about China, Pfaff said both are in it. China is throwing out open source models to create that competition, and that is part of its plan — though he thinks the nefarious outcome Beijing hopes for will not materialize, and noted China is now starting to put restraints on open source models at home. What open source technology has actually produced is a boom in capability. By his count, at a stretch, maybe 10% of servers on the internet do not run Linux. Every Android phone runs on it every day, and he said a NASA Mars rover ran on it on another planet. It is free; the only expense is managing and implementing it, and that is far less than buying a Microsoft product to do the same job.

If There Is Ever a Skynet, Government Builds It

The people who take the Terminator seriously know what Skynet was, Pfaff said, and the movie claims it emerged from general AI development. He thinks that gets the danger exactly backwards.

“If there is ever a Skynet, assuming that could ever happen at all, it’s going to happen through government means. And these people are pushing for the government entities to control what AI is.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He walked the consequence forward. If government-type institutions end up bureaucratizing and regulating the AI industry and a Democrat becomes president again, the censorship regime people objected to under the Biden administration gets multiplied — 10 times, 100 times, maybe 1,000 times — because AI arrived after that operation and makes it far more effective, now under government hand. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI, have a political agenda in mind, he said, and have tended to support climate hysteria and the misinformation, malinformation and disinformation framework that justified censorship in the first place.

The endpoint he named is China’s social score: fall out of line and you cannot use your bank account, you cannot travel, you might lose your job. One of the hosts added that it extends to smiling, because the authorities only want happy people, and that there are buildings you cannot enter without one. Pfaff’s domestic version of the same logic is the Flock camera network — installed to make you safe, and useful for writing more tickets. It will find bad actors and murderers, he said, but at the risk of all of your other rights. A host closed the exchange with Benjamin Franklin: he who would give up essential liberty for security deserves neither.

Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the Noise and Water Claims

Asked whether AI has become political, Pfaff pointed at the asymmetry: Democrats are running against data centers while President Trump is pushing for them. Elon Musk is building the largest data centers in the world, and one of the largest buildings in the world to hold one. Musk also has a plan to build the largest chip manufacturing facility in the world — on paper right now, Pfaff said, but on his track record probably a better than 50% chance of pulling it off. The margins in this industry, he said, sit in compute and in data centers: Anthropic could not run right now without the servers Musk has built, under a contract Pfaff put at around $500 million a year, because Anthropic owns no data centers of its own, and OpenAI has built more but rents most of its compute.

Then he took the complaints one at a time. The noise and water stories are true in some cases and in some places, he said, but they are presented as universal — all data centers make noise, all data centers use too much water. More than half of industrial buildings make some sort of noise, and data center noise is contained inside the building except for certain cooling processes that other industrial companies use as well. The water cooling is generally self-contained and recycled internally, which again is a general industrial practice and not unique to data centers. He called the noise claim a farce, and pointed out that the technology is decades old — this is not new.

“I would just like someone to tell me, how are data centers harming you? You’re on a freaking data center every day.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He allowed the local point — scale is real, and every local government has to take into account how it affects what they are doing, though he added that he is against zoning. And he put a motive under the whole campaign, which is the line the hosts came back to twice.

“This is happening because Democrats have nothing to run on except to tell you how you’re going to die and we are the only ones that can save you.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

One of the hosts made the sequence explicit: when the doomsday talk started last week, Democrats had already worked out that the data center attack was not helping them, so they needed something else — and the AI founders banding together to get help from government handed it to them. Pfaff agreed, and said it will not work, because every one of these arguments falls quickly when you look at it critically. Polling does show real concern about AI and medicine, he acknowledged, which is why President Trump is right to educate the public on it.

Rigor, Schools, and the November Outlook

A host raised schools: many have barred AI because they cannot tell whether students are doing the work, while recruiters are now looking for AI understanding and experience on resumes. Pfaff, who calls his English degree a waste that nonetheless gave him a leg up here, said the answer is rigor. AI is a filter to facts, not a source of them. He uses it for theology and his staff uses paid Perplexity and Grok subscriptions for research — immigration law and its citations being a case where gathering the code is simply quicker — but he does not take any of it as gospel. He argues with it until it concedes the point.

“In the school setting with young kids, when they’re very young, I think AI is off limits. Like in elementary school, or all or most of elementary school, forget the freaking AI.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Make them read, do their math tables, learn phonics, he said. By high school, work out guidelines that let students use the technology while still undergoing the rigor that made Western thought philosophically, theologically and scientifically rigorous for centuries — knowing the math tables, knowing how to do calculus by hand, with the machine taking over the calculation load once they reach physics.

With time running short, a host asked for good news on the election, listing interest rates and the Iran war as reasons for doubt. Pfaff’s first answer was the same argument he had been making for half an hour: the only thing Democrats have to offer is telling you how you are going to die because people released AI. He added the DSA ick factor, which he says is settling in, and pointed to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan putting out a video on the horrors of 9/11 that he says contradicts everything — well done, from a smart and capable man, but a politician lying to your face, and the job is to show that.

On the economy he set interest rates aside as a non-factor and named gas prices and the lingering Iran war as the real negatives, since people fill the tank once or twice a week and look at the checkbook afterward. The offsetting facts: incomes are rising overall and at least keeping pace, and inflation is far below the annualized 9% he attributes to Biden’s term, running 2.5% to 3% under Trump. Republicans have to tout that, he said — not argue with people about gas prices, but name the areas that are winning.

Forty-seven days out, he said the polling is tightening. He is almost as confident as he was at the start of the year that Republicans will not lose the Senate, after a stretch of wondering. The House is murky, with real opportunities — in Virginia, constitutional amendments to enshrine abortion and transgender transition rights in the state constitution have the Catholic Church speaking out from the parishes every Sunday for the first time ever, with the evangelical church similarly engaged, and he sees a chance at three House seats there that should have gone to Democrats. His closing summary carried both halves, including the verdict on Senate leadership TCC has been pressing all year, as in our call for Senate Republicans to replace their majority leader.

“There are some positive signs. It is by far not decided yet, and Republicans still can lose. And there’s no doubt that John Thune is still working as hard as he can to lose the Senate. Just with everything in him, he’s put all his effort into it.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Key Takeaways

1. The doomerism has no proof and suspicious timing – Pfaff calls the claim of a 10% chance in 10 years that AI kills humanity the most absurd thing he has ever heard, and notes the big push landed right around the GOP midterm convention.
2. The mechanism is regulatory capture – The major players run the regulators. It happened with the FDA under Teddy Roosevelt, when Heinz pushed standards over sodium benzoate that cleared out smaller competitors — and then the cheaper preservatives came back for the big firms.
3. Open source AI is what the frontier labs fear – Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemma models cost nothing to license and run cheaply on owned equipment, which undercuts the subscription revenue behind ChatGPT and Claude.
4. Linux is the precedent – At a stretch, maybe 10% of internet servers do not run Linux. Open source did not destroy the internet; it built it, and Pfaff expects open source AI to do the same for small and medium-sized businesses.
5. The case against data centers falls apart under scrutiny – Noise is contained inside the building except for certain cooling processes other industries use too, the water cooling is generally self-contained and recycled, and the technology is decades old. Pfaff’s question for the critics: how are data centers harming you, when you are on one every day?
6. A Skynet would be a government product – Safeguards already exist in the models and in consumer law. The danger Pfaff names is a regulated AI industry under a future Democrat administration, multiplying the Biden-era censorship regime 10 to 1,000 times, ending at a Chinese-style social score.
7. November: positive signs, not decided – Tightening polls, near his start-of-year confidence on the Senate, a murky House with three Virginia seats in play — and John Thune, in his words, working as hard as he can to lose the Senate.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 17, 2026 on The Russ Clark Show.