On May 9, Senator Rand Paul told the graduating class of Grove City College that the case for the future is a case for optimism, and a good part of that case was about artificial intelligence. He urged a hall full of new graduates not to be afraid of it. I think he was right, and I want to make that same case to my fellow Mississippians.

Two hundred years ago, English textile workers we now call the Luddites began smashing the new power looms, certain the machines would destroy them. They were skilled craftsmen, not fools, and they were still wrong. The looms won. The descendants of the Luddites did not end up poorer than their ancestors. They ended up with shorter workdays, longer lives, and work the loom-smashers could never have pictured. Every wave of technology since has run the same course. The fear is always sincere. The fear is almost always wrong.

Artificial intelligence is going to be part of life in Mississippi whether any one of us votes for it or not. The only question still in our hands is a personal one. Will you treat this thing as a threat to hide from, or as a tool to pick up? The people who get left behind by a new technology are rarely the ones who used it. They are the ones who refused to.

And this is a tool everyday Mississippians can use today. A row-crop farmer in the Delta can use AI to read soil and satellite data, time his planting and harvest, and flag a piece of equipment that is about to fail before it quits in the middle of a field. The owner of a two-person business in Tupelo or Meridian can use it to draft her marketing, answer routine customer emails, and get a plain-English read on a contract before she signs it. A schoolteacher can build lesson plans and write three versions of one assignment for students reading at three different levels. A nurse in a rural clinic can speed up the charting that consumes her shift, so more of her day is spent facing a patient instead of a keyboard. These are not science-fiction examples. People in those jobs are doing this right now.

I want to be honest about the real worry, because Senator Paul was. A world with no meaningful work at all would be its own kind of dystopia. Work is part of how human beings find purpose. But embracing AI does not mean a future with no work. It means less drudgery and more of the work that actually mattered in the first place.

Here is why this matters for Mississippi. Our state has spent most of my lifetime being last. Last to get the factory, last to get the investment, last to catch the wave of prosperity that lifted other states first. This time we do not have to be last. These tools are not locked behind a Silicon Valley zip code. A teacher in Senatobia and a teacher in San Francisco can open the very same AI tool tonight. For once in our history, the playing field is close to level.

The technology is not waiting for our permission. So the question for every Mississippian is the one Senator Paul put to those graduates. Will you meet the future with fear, or with curiosity and a plan? Here is a plan small enough to start this week. Find one task in your work or your home where AI could save you an hour. Just one. Use it. Then do it again next week. That is how you make sure you are not the one left behind. Not by fighting the future, but by deciding to be one of the people who picked up the tool.

Last week I wrote about Walter Hunt, the man who invented the first sewing machine and was talked out of bringing it to market because his daughter worried it would put thousands of seamstresses out of work. The history that followed proved her fears wrong. The industry didn’t shrink. It exploded, and the women who would have been seamstresses found bigger work waiting for them on the other side of the machine.

I’ve been thinking about that story because I lived through a smaller version of it myself.

I started flying the Boeing 727 in 1998. By then the 727 was one of the last commercial airliners that still required a three-person cockpit, and I sat in the flight engineer’s seat — the panel turned sideways behind the captain, a wall of switches and dials for fuel, hydraulics, pressurization, electrical and engine systems. It was real, demanding work. You earned your keep on that panel.

Even then, everyone knew the job was going away. The 757, the 767, the MD-11 — all the newer airplanes had been designed for two pilots from day one. The computers had taken over what I was doing on the panel. The flight engineer’s seat was, in a literal sense, being designed out of the airplane.

When my time on the 727 panel ended, I moved into the right seat of the same airplane as a first officer, and then up into the two-pilot fleet. I have since flown the 757, the MD-11, and the MD-10 — and the MD-10 is the part of this story I think about the most. That airplane started life as a DC-10 with a three-person cockpit. FedEx pulled out the flight engineer’s station and rebuilt the cockpit so it could be flown by two pilots and share a crew rating with the MD-11. They took a perfectly good airplane and surgically removed the job I used to do.

Today I am a captain on the 767. The seat I started my career in does not exist on any airplane I have flown since.

And here is the part worth saying out loud: the industry did not shrink. Aviation has grown almost without interruption for my entire career. There are more pilots flying today than when I started. There are more airplanes, more routes, more freight, more passengers. The flight engineers I trained with became first officers and then captains. The people who would have been flight engineers in a different generation became pilots, dispatchers, instructors, maintenance controllers. The work moved. It did not vanish.

The same thing happened to the railroad fireman a generation before me. The diesel engine didn’t need anyone shoveling coal, and after a long fight the job ended. The trains kept running. The men kept working, most of them as engineers up front.

I tell this story because I am hearing a lot of fear right now about artificial intelligence. It is the same fear Caroline Hunt had about the sewing machine, and the same fear the locomotive firemen had about the diesel engine, and the same fear my own union once had about the two-pilot cockpit. It is an honest fear. It is usually wrong.

I seat I began my career in disappeared, but I gained the seat at the front of the airplane. That is what change has almost always looked like, if you stay in your seat long enough to fly through it.

In Coweta County, Georgia, a young woman named Ansley Brown is watching her family home of more than twenty years get marked for a bulldozer.

Her home is not blocking a flood-control project. It is not standing in the way of a public road. It is in the path of a high-voltage transmission line Georgia Power wants to build to serve a massive private data center campus called Project Sail. Her family was told that if they did not settle on a price, Georgia Power could go to court and let a jury decide the value of the home they never wanted to sell.

Her family is not alone. Dozens of homes may be demolished, and more than 330 private properties are affected.

That is eminent domain in 2026. It is also theft.

If the government can take your land whenever someone more powerful wants it, then ownership is conditional, and conditional ownership is not ownership at all. If you cannot say no, it is not yours.

Some will say this view is too absolute. They will say roads will not be built, schools will not be constructed, and progress will stop if government loses the power to seize private land. That is a lie.

If a project is genuinely valuable, then the people who want to build it should pay enough to convince owners to sell. If they cannot, they should change the route, move the project, wait, or offer more. That is how free people deal with one another.

Walt Disney bought roughly 27,000 acres in Central Florida in the 1960s through voluntary transactions without taking a single acre by force. Private developers still assemble land every day for shopping centers, subdivisions, industrial parks, and major projects without forcing unwilling owners off their property. The claim that nothing can be built without eminent domain is not a fact. It is an excuse to avoid paying the real price.

Mississippi already understood this. In 2011, voters approved Initiative 31 by a landslide, 73 percent to 27 percent. The amendment barred the state and local governments from taking private property and transferring it to another private party for ten years after the seizure. The Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation led the fight. Governor Haley Barbour opposed it. The people won anyway.

But we left a hole.

Initiative 31 included an exception for “common carriers and utilities.” At the time, many voters likely understood “utility” to mean the power company serving the public. They did not imagine a utility using eminent domain to build a high-voltage corridor whose practical purpose is to serve one private data center. That loophole was written for one world. It is now being used in another.

This matters in Mississippi. Entergy and Mississippi Power both have legal authority to use eminent domain for transmission lines. I have seen no public reporting that either has threatened to use that power against a Mississippi landowner for a data center project. But the authority exists, and the pressure is growing. Mississippi is already seeing major data center development, including AWS-related transmission in Madison and Warren counties, Compass Data Centers in Meridian, and xAI in Southaven.

At some point, a utility may be tempted to use eminent domain to clear the way for infrastructure serving a private data center. Whether that happens should not depend on corporate goodwill. The power should not exist.

If Mississippi utilities ever use eminent domain against a farmer or homeowner to build a transmission line for a hyperscale data center, it will be no different in principle from what happened to Susette Kelo in New London or what is happening to Ansley Brown in Georgia. The state will be taking someone’s land for someone else’s profit.

The fix is simple. Mississippi voters should amend the Constitution again. This time, no loopholes. No exceptions. If a road, school, transmission line, or private development cannot be built without taking someone’s land by force, then the project should move, bend, wait, or pay enough to earn a voluntary yes.

A forced sale is not a free transaction.

My land is my land. The State of Mississippi is not my landlord. The Public Service Commission is not my landlord. Entergy is not my landlord. County supervisors are not my landlord.

Pay my price, change your plans, or go around.

But stealing my land is never OK.

My wife loves to sew. It is the hobby she comes back to when the week has worn her out — fabric spread across the table, the hum of the machine, something taking shape under her hands. So when she told me the other night about the man who invented the first sewing machine and then decided not to give it to the world, I listened the way you listen to someone who knows her subject. The story stuck with me, and the more I looked into it, the more I thought other people should hear it too.

In the early 1830s, a New York mechanic named Walter Hunt built something that should have made him rich. It was a small machine with two needles that could sew a lockstitch — clean, fast, and tireless. It was, in every meaningful sense, the first practical sewing machine.

He never patented it.

The reason was his fifteen-year-old daughter, Caroline. When she understood what her father had built, she pleaded with him not to bring it to market. Thousands of seamstresses, she argued, would lose the only work they had. These were women who hunched over fabric by candlelight for pennies a day, ruining their eyes and their backs to feed their families. A machine that could outwork them would take the bread out of their hands.

Hunt listened. He set the invention aside and walked away from a fortune. In 1846, a man named Elias Howe patented something very similar. A few years later, Isaac Singer turned the same idea into one of the most successful businesses of the nineteenth century.

Hunt was not the only one to hesitate. Across the Atlantic, the French tailor Barthélemy Thimonnier had been bolder. He patented a sewing machine in 1830 and opened a Paris workshop with eighty of them, stitching uniforms for the French army. In 1831, a mob of two hundred tailors stormed the building and smashed every machine. Thimonnier escaped with his life. He died bankrupt in England.

The fear that animated Caroline Hunt and the Paris tailors was real and rational. They could see, plainly, that one machine could do the work of many hands. What they could not see was everything else that would come next.

Within a few decades of Howe’s patent, the American garment industry did not shrink. It exploded. Ready-made clothing production grew from forty million dollars in 1850 to seventy million by 1870. By the Civil War, sewing machines were turning out uniforms by the trainload. Factories sprang up, then department stores, then mail-order catalogs. Clothing became affordable for ordinary people for the first time in human history. The number of people employed in making clothes did not collapse. It grew, and kept growing, for the next hundred years.

This is the part Caroline could not have imagined, and it is the part the rioting tailors could not have imagined either. Human beings do not simply absorb a new tool and shed the jobs it touches. We invent new things to do with it. We invent new things, period. A cheaper shirt creates a buyer who never could afford one. A faster stitch frees a designer to try something that would have been ruinous before. Demand expands to fill the space that productivity opens up, and the ingenuity of ordinary working people fills it with work no one had thought to ask for yet.

That is the lesson Caroline missed, and it is the one her father missed when he listened to her. Their compassion was admirable. Their economics was wrong. The seamstresses they wanted to protect were not better off in the world without the sewing machine. They were poorer, sicker, and locked into worse work. The machine, when it finally came, did not erase them. It lifted the whole industry up around them.

The fear of change is honest. It is rooted in the visible thing in front of you — the needle, the job, the wage. But it is almost always blind to the cloth on the other side of the machine, to the markets that don’t exist yet, to the work that human imagination has not yet invented.

I think about the Hunts every time someone tells me artificial intelligence will end work as we know it. Maybe some jobs will go. Some always do. But if history has any lesson to teach us, it is that we have stood at this loom before. We have looked at a new machine and seen only what it would take away. And every time, human ingenuity has stitched something larger than we could imagine on the other side.

In January of 2024, the Mississippi Legislature voted in a special session to strip the Public Service Commission of its normal advance-approval authority over new electric generation, so that Entergy Mississippi could build power plants for Amazon Web Services without going through the standard regulatory front door. In April of 2026, Entergy and Mississippi Power are now asking that same Public Service Commission to use its full advance-approval authority to stop a competitor from building its own power plant for its own data center.

Same agency. Same statute. Two completely opposite requests. Both made in the favor of the same two established power companies.

If you want to understand what is wrong with the way Mississippi regulates this industry, you do not need to look any further than that pair of facts.

Start with what the legislature did in 2024. Senate Bill 2001 of the 2024 Second Extraordinary Session, signed by Governor Reeves on January 30 of that year, passed the Senate 49 to 1 and the House 120 to 2. Among other things, it authorized Entergy to build new power generating facilities tied to the AWS project without first obtaining the PSC’s normal Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. The PSC kept the authority to set rates and to review costs after the fact for prudence. But the upfront question of whether this generation should be built at all, and on whose dime, was taken off the PSC’s desk and handed to Entergy and the company they were building for. The justification at the time was that the standard process would slow the deal down and risk losing AWS to another state.

Now turn to 2026. In April, a Jackson-area developer named Gabriel Prado, the man behind the Fondren luxury apartments and the Topgolf in Ridgeland, filed Mississippi PSC Docket 2026-AD-10. He is asking the PSC for a declaratory opinion that he is not a public utility and does not need a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity to build a 350 megawatt natural gas plant in Ridgeland. The plant would exclusively power his own on-site project, a data center and an AI semiconductor fabrication facility. He is not proposing to sell power on the open market. He is not asking the State of Mississippi for a $44 million workforce training appropriation, a $215 million local infrastructure loan, or a 30 year rolling tax exemption. He is proposing to build it with private capital, on his own land, for his own use.

Entergy filed in opposition on April 13. Mississippi Power filed shortly after. Both companies argue that even though Prado would only be serving the tenants of his own campus, he should be classified as a public utility, because Ridgeland sits inside Entergy’s state certificated service area, where Entergy holds an exclusive right to sell power. They are leaning, according to Mississippi Today’s reporting, on a 2024 amendment to the Mississippi Public Utilities Act that expanded the definition of serving “the public” to explicitly include “an individual person or an entity or a collection of persons or entities.” In their formal filing, Entergy argues that whether Prado’s customers are “individual person(s) or an entity or a collection of persons … they meet the definition of the public.”

Read those two episodes side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. When the regulatory framework would have slowed AWS down, the legislature waived it. When the same regulatory framework can be deployed against a new entrant who would compete with the established utilities, those utilities are now invoking it. The agency in the middle, our Public Service Commission, is being asked to apply two different rules to two different developers, with the difference between them being which one is already on the inside.

That is not deregulation. That is not free market policy. That is exactly what the academic chapter by Garrett and Shughart in Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi calls “crony capitalism.” It is a regulatory framework that produces benefits for politically connected firms and costs for everyone who is not in the room when the rules are being written.

The Mississippi conservative position on this should not be complicated. Either the Public Service Commission has full advance approval authority over new electric generation tied to data centers, applied equally to Entergy, to Prado AI Industrial, and to anyone else who walks in the door, or it does not. Whichever rule we pick, it has to be the rule for everyone. Selective application of regulation, with the line drawn around who happens to already be a customer of the State of Mississippi’s economic development office, is the textbook definition of regulatory capture. Conservatives have been writing about its dangers since at least Adam Smith.

There is a clock on this. The PSC’s Public Utilities Staff is due to file its input in the Prado docket by May 15. The Commission has indicated it will issue its opinion by June 1. Mississippians who care about this should call our three elected commissioners and say it plainly: do not give Entergy one set of rules and Prado another. Apply the law equally.

If the PSC blocks Prado with rules the Legislature waived for Entergy, every Mississippi developer with private capital will hear the message clearly: do not bother. The deck is stacked.

That is not how a state attracts the next generation of investment. That is how a state protects the insiders, punishes the outsiders, and asks the rest of us to pay the bill.

Most Mississippians do not know that on July 1, 2025, a little after four o’clock in the morning, the United States Senate voted 99 to 1 to strip a federal AI moratorium out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

That sounds technical. It was not.

Had that moratorium stayed in the bill, Mississippi could have lost its ability to enforce ordinary state and local rules on the most important industrial development happening in our state.

The danger was real because the provision was real. The House-passed version of the bill contained language imposing a ten-year moratorium on state and local enforcement of laws or regulations “limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating” artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.

Ten years.

The text was not written as a data-center bill, and that is exactly why it was dangerous. Broad federal language rarely stays narrow once lawyers get hold of it. If an AI data center exists to train, host, or operate AI systems, then companies could argue that state and local rules affecting those facilities are really rules affecting AI. We would have been forced to fight for the right to enforce our own rules on our own soil.

That could have affected Mississippi DEQ. It could have affected county zoning decisions, noise rules, setback requirements, permitting conditions, and environmental reviews if they were challenged as restrictions on AI infrastructure. It could have invited new challenges to utility and grid decisions touching AI data-center loads.

Apply that to what is already happening. The lawsuit over xAI’s Southaven gas turbines turns in part on Mississippi DEQ’s interpretation of its own temporary-mobile rule. Under a broad reading of the moratorium, xAI or another operator could have argued that state permitting authority over AI-supporting infrastructure was preempted. I want Ai data centers to build in Mississippi, but we need to set the rules not Washington.

What killed the moratorium was a Senate amendment offered by Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and backed by a bipartisan group. The vote was 99 to 1. Mississippi’s two senators, Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, both voted with the 99. Three days later, the President signed the bill without the moratorium in it.

The encouraging part is the margin. When the Senate actually voted on whether states should be shoved aside for ten years on AI regulation, the answer was not close.

The alarming part is that the question almost never got asked.

The provision had already been written, negotiated, tucked into a massive reconciliation package, and passed by the House. It was not in some left-wing bill from California. It was in a Republican-led budget bill supported by an administration most Mississippi conservatives voted for.

That is worth remembering. Government does not only threaten local authority when the other party is in charge. Sometimes it does it with your party’s logo on the letterhead.

The federal preemption fight is not over. Senator Ted Cruz, who pushed the moratorium, has made clear the idea is not dead. The technology industry still wants one national rule, and that is easy to understand. One federal rule is cheaper than fifty state fights and easier than convincing county supervisors in DeSoto, Madison, Lauderdale, or anywhere else ordinary people might ask inconvenient questions about water, power, noise, emissions, taxes, and who pays when the deal goes bad.

This is exactly what federalism is for. Mississippi has its own DEQ, Public Service Commission, county supervisors, and city councils so decisions about what gets built next to our neighborhoods are made by people we can call, confront, embarrass, defeat, and replace.

A Senate cloakroom is not local government. A lobbyist-written preemption clause is not economic development. And a thousand-page bill passed in the middle of the night is not self-government.

Throughout this series, I have argued that Mississippi should welcome the data-center boom on its own terms. We should write the rules, enforce them fairly, reject corporate-welfare deals, protect ratepayers, and let the projects stand on their own engineering and balance sheets.

None of that works without local authority.

Mississippi must have the right to say yes. We must have the right to say no. And most importantly, we must have the right to say, “Yes, but not like that.”

In July 2025, we almost lost part of that right before most of us even knew the vote was happening. The next attempt is already being telegraphed. This time, Mississippi conservatives should be paying attention before it gets to four in the morning.

Mississippi did not invent the data center boom. But we did help invent the modern state level subsidy model for industrial recruitment. During the Great Depression, Mississippi’s Balance Agriculture with Industry program became the first plan of its kind in the country. Other states copied it, and we have spent almost ninety years trying to win an arms race we helped start.

The story is worth telling, because the people writing checks in Jackson today sometimes act as if this is new. It is not.

Before Hugh White became governor, he was mayor of Columbia, Mississippi. During his time in office, White tried to bring industry to his hometown and to Marion County. He did it without state taxpayer money. He declared a holiday lasting two hours, called a community meeting, and asked local people to step up. Businessmen, secretaries, clerks, schoolteachers, and farmers signed promissory notes guaranteeing the funding for a factory building. With those pledges in hand, White used his own wealth and influence to secure a loan from New Orleans bankers.

The plant was built. The jobs came. The Columbia Plan became the talk of the state.

That, by the way, is much closer to capitalism than what Jackson does now. Local people put up local capital, of their own free will, behind a project they thought would pay off. No special session. No statewide tax holiday. No corporate welfare line item. The market, meaning actual citizens making actual decisions with their actual money, built the factory.

Then White ran for governor on the strength of the Columbia Plan. He won. And he immediately turned the model into something very different.

The 1936 Balance Agriculture with Industry program, BAWI for short, became Mississippi’s first major experiment in state directed industrial recruitment. Under the Mississippi Industry Act of 1936, local governments could offer subsidies, grants, loans, and tax relief to entice manufacturers from higher wage northern states to relocate here. There was just one problem: the Mississippi Constitution explicitly prohibited the state from using public credit to finance industrial development.

White had to assemble a panel of attorneys to engineer a legal workaround. They linked BAWI to the constitution’s general welfare clause and argued that industrial employment itself served the general welfare. Courts eventually upheld the arrangement. But that does not erase the larger point. Our state’s own founding document was written to restrain this kind of public credit scheme, and Mississippi found a way around it.

BAWI created a new kind of economic development politics. The state would help decide which companies to recruit, and local governments would be expected to finance the incentives. For the first time, Mississippi was not just setting the rules of the game. It was helping pick the players.

And here is the most telling part: Mississippi canceled BAWI in 1940. The program had brought some factories and some jobs, but not enough to settle the argument. Only twelve manufacturing plants relocated under the program. Critics argued that the job numbers were overstated, that displacement was ignored, and that the cost per worker was too high. A 1944 evaluation by economist Ernest Hopkins credited BAWI with some benefits, but warned that the program itself was not the “fundamental or decisive factor” behind many of the gains claimed for it.

Translation: the subsidy did not do the work the press releases said it did.

That should sound familiar.

What changed over the next eighty years was not the logic. It was the size of the deals.

The Nissan vehicle plant came to Canton in 2003. The plant is real. The jobs are real. Nissan has reported 6,400 workers and a $400 million annual payroll. But the subsidy was real too. State and local governments offered Nissan more than $1.3 billion in incentives, infrastructure, borrowing costs, and tax relief. Using Nissan’s own employment number, that works out to $203,125 in public subsidy per worker, more than three times the average annual payroll benefit per Nissan employee.

That does not mean the Nissan plant is bad. It means the public price of the plant matters.

And the job math matters too. An academic analysis by John Patrick Peavy found that 90 percent of the Mississippians employed at Nissan already lived and worked in the surrounding five county area when the plant opened. They were not pulled out of unemployment. Many were pulled away from other Mississippi employers. That is the part governors do not mention at ribbon cuttings. The new plant is what is seen. The existing businesses competing for the workers left behind are what is not seen.

Toyota in Blue Springs followed with a $354 million subsidy package. The plant opened, and it remains an important employer. But the indirect job promises used to sell the deal did not match reality. The state was promised 2,000 direct jobs and 6,300 supplier and indirect jobs. The direct job goal was met. The supplier and indirect jobs remained far below the projection.

Continental AG in Hinds County followed in 2016 with a roughly $600 million subsidy package, one of the largest in Mississippi history. That deal included state borrowing, state income and franchise tax breaks, local property tax breaks, and state income tax rebates. Again, the project was sold as transformational. Again, the public was asked to trust projections that almost no one would go back and audit years later.

There is a phrase the French economist Frédéric Bastiat coined in 1850 for exactly this: “that which is seen, and that which is not seen.” The plant in Canton is what is seen. The announcement ceremony is what is seen. The press release is what is seen. The Mississippi small businesses paying into the system, the public dollars not used elsewhere, the roads not repaired, the taxes not lowered, the local employers losing workers to a subsidized competitor, that is what is not seen.

The cumulative bill is staggering. According to research by Thomas Garrett and William Shughart in Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi, state and local governments in Mississippi have provided nearly $3.8 billion in tax breaks, grants, and loans to private businesses since 2000. That is roughly $1,300 for every man, woman, and child in this state.

Think about that the next time the state tells you it cannot afford something.

We could have cut taxes for working families. We could have made broad based business tax reform available to every employer instead of special deals for a few. We could have improved roads, ports, workforce training, and site preparation in ways that benefit every industrial user. Instead, we built a system where the public pays up front, the company gets the benefit immediately, and taxpayers are left hoping the projections come true.

The data center deals are not a new idea. They are the latest chapter of a ninety year old book whose ending we already know.

Amazon’s initial Madison County package included $44 million in direct subsidies and a $215.1 million state infrastructure loan, before counting longer running tax exemptions. xAI’s Southaven campus is eligible for Mississippi’s data center incentive program, which waives major state taxes for certified data centers. Compass Datacenters’ Meridian project includes data center tax exemptions, a $4 million site grant, and eligibility for Advantage Jobs rebates that can return up to 90 percent of employee state income tax withholding for qualified jobs.

Same script. Bigger numbers. Same ribbon cuttings. Same promises that this time, somehow, the subsidy will pay for itself.

There is a way out, and it is not nostalgia.

Not every modern project can be financed by passing around promissory notes at a courthouse meeting. A $20 billion data center is not a shirt factory in 1920s Columbia. But the lesson of the Columbia Plan still matters: private capital should bear private risk, local communities should have real accountability, and state government should stick to the basics.

Keep taxes low for everyone. Make permitting fast and predictable. Build infrastructure that serves more than one company. Protect property rights. Enforce environmental rules fairly. Make Mississippi an easy place to do business without making taxpayers silent partners in every corporate deal.

That is the conservative answer. Not because it is anti growth, but because it is the only kind of growth that can last.

We have one more chance to get this right with the data center boom. Our great grandchildren will inherit either the bill or the lesson. I would like, this time, for them to inherit the lesson.

Next week: "We Almost Lost the Right to Say No" — the federal preemption fight Mississippi narrowly survived in 2025, and the one coming next.

Last week I wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and the special session Governor Tate Reeves had called for May 20. Since then, the federal appeals court vacated the order that required Mississippi to redraw, and this week the Governor called the session off.

So what now?

The lawsuit isn’t over. The case is back before Judge Sharion Aycock, who has given both sides 14 days to file on next steps. The plaintiffs have agreed they will not push for new judicial elections in 2026 — that commitment is what let the Governor to cancel. But Aycock will still have to rule again, now under the tougher Callais standard.

The bigger story is what the Governor did NOT do. Many in his own party wanted him to expand the call to include congressional redistricting — in plain English, take a run at redrawing Bennie Thompson’s 2nd Congressional District. Reeves did not. He pointed out that when Mississippi was forced to redraw state legislative districts in 2025, Republicans actually LOST their state Senate supermajority. Redistricting is not always the political win conservatives assume. But Reeves was clear about the longer fight, saying “the tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson’s reign of terror over the 2nd Congressional District is over.” He expects the Legislature to redraw congressional, state legislative, and state Supreme Court districts before the 2027 state elections.

Here is where I want to be honest with my fellow conservatives. Mississippi’s current districts — judicial, legislative, and congressional — were drawn largely on race. They were drawn that way to comply with the Voting Rights Act as the courts interpreted it before Callais. A Republican state senator admitted on television last week that Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District was drawn the way it is specifically to protect Bennie Thompson. That admission applies to more than just MS-2.

If we are serious that maps should not be drawn around race, the honest conclusion is that Mississippi’s maps should be redrawn. Not to defeat any one congressman. Not to grow the Republican margin. Redrawn on an honestly neutral basis — following county lines, communities of interest, population and geography — the same way we would draw them if we did not know in advance which party benefited.

The dilemma is whether we can actually do that. Will the Legislature commit, before the first line is drawn, to a process that is principled even when the outcome is uncertain? That is the question conservatives ought to be asking now, while there is no court order forcing anyone’s hand. Callais gave us the legal room to draw cleaner maps. It did not give us a moral free pass to draw them around politics instead.

One thing worth saying: the lawsuit that started all of this is about judicial districts, not congressional ones. The justices who decide cases that affect Mississippians every day are elected from districts that haven’t changed since 1987. I have not seen a single Facebook or X post about it. We argue about Bennie Thompson because he is on television. We rarely argue about who sits on our Supreme Court — even though it probably matters to Mississippians more than who sits in Congress.

The worry has lifted for now. No special session. No court order. Districts unchanged. But this is a pause, not an ending. The fight will be back in 2027.

This isn’t going away. Whatever happens next, conservatives have a choice to make. We can stick to the principles we’ve argued for years, or we can set them aside when it’s convenient. I’d rather we stick to them. That means making sure every Mississippian, no matter where they live or how they vote, has a real voice in choosing who represents them.

If you’ve scrolled through Facebook lately, you’ve probably seen one of two takes on the recent redistricting fight. Either the U.S. Supreme Court “gutted” the Voting Rights Act, or conservatives finally got the green light to redraw any map they want. Both takes are wrong, and the actual story has moved fast over the last two weeks.

I think we owe our neighbors a straight explanation, without the talk-radio heat or the social-media hype. Here is part one of two.

Start with the U.S. Supreme Court. On April 29, the Court decided a case called Louisiana v. Callais. The vote was 6-3. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana drew a new congressional map. A federal court said the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part of federal law that bans practices that dilute minority voting strength. Louisiana’s Legislature then drew a second majority-Black district to fix the problem. A different group of voters sued, saying the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, meaning race had been the main factor in drawing the lines.

The Supreme Court agreed with the second group. It ruled that Louisiana was not actually required to draw a second majority-Black district, so race-based map-drawing was not justified. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still exists. Anyone telling you the Voting Rights Act is gone is wrong. But the legal test plaintiffs have to pass in these cases is now significantly harder. Basically, the bar moved.

Now to Mississippi. We have a related case that has been moving through the federal courts. Our three state Supreme Court districts — Northern, Central, and Southern — have not been redrawn since 1987. In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled those districts violate Section 2, especially the Central District that covers the Delta and Jackson area. She ordered them redrawn. The 2026 regular session of the Legislature ended without a new map. Governor Tate Reeves then called a special session for May 20 to comply with the order before the federal court imposed one.

Here is where the story changed. On Monday, May 11, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Judge Aycock’s order and sent the case back to her court for reconsideration under the new Callais standard. The motion to do that was filed jointly by both sides — the NAACP, ACLU and other plaintiffs on one side, the State of Mississippi on the other. Both agreed the legal ground had shifted under their feet.

What does this mean? The order requiring Mississippi to redraw the Supreme Court districts no longer exists. The case is not closed — Judge Aycock will look at it again under the tougher Callais standard, and the plaintiffs can amend their arguments. As of this writing, it is not clear whether the Governor will still hold the May 20 special session, postpone it, or use the call for other redistricting matters.

That is the immediate situation. One Supreme Court ruling. One federal-court order, now vacated. One special session, now cancelled. Three weeks ago this looked like a forced march to redraw judicial districts. Today it looks like the system pumping the brakes to apply new precedent.

In part two, I will get into what the Legislature actually has to decide, the louder argument about Mississippi’s congressional map, and what all of this might mean for us in Mississippi.

If you have read the first two pieces in this series, you know I want Mississippi to win the data-center boom. I think we should welcome it and stop apologizing for wanting investment in our state. That is the conservative case for data centers.

This piece is the conservative case against the way Mississippi is paying for them.

Let me say plainly what our state has done. In a January 2024 special session, the Legislature approved a massive incentive package for Amazon Web Services in Madison County. The package included $44 million in direct taxpayer cash, including workforce-training subsidies that shifted costs from Amazon onto taxpayers, along with a $215 million state loan for roads, water, sewer infrastructure, and a fire station. The deal also included a renewable 30-year tax exemption triggered by continued investment of at least $500 million annually, a 3.15% rebate on construction costs, full exemption from sales and use tax on equipment, and free rights to install company fiber in public utility right-of-way. The headline value of the package, not counting the standing tax exemptions, was roughly $260 million.

These are subsidies. Big, public, generational subsidies. They are not capitalism.

Then in April 2026, Amazon expanded its Mississippi commitment to $25 billion across additional sites, all of them eligible for the same standing exemptions.

Mississippi’s standing data-center incentive program, on the books since 2019, exempts certified data-center companies from state sales and use tax, corporate income tax, and franchise tax for ten years. xAI’s $20 billion Southaven campus falls under that program. Compass Datacenters’ $10 billion Meridian project qualifies not only for those exemptions, but also for a $4 million state site grant and eligibility for the Advantage Jobs program, which can return up to 90% of employee state income-tax withholding back to the company for ten years.

The Center for Economic Accountability, an independent watchdog group focused on subsidy policy, named the Compass deal the worst economic-development deal in the United States for 2025.

The argument we are constantly given is that the state will eventually earn this money back through economic growth. I would like to believe that. But independent audits do not back it up.

When Georgia’s own state auditor analyzed what else the state could have done with the forgone tax revenue from data-center incentives, the return collapsed from the headline claim of $11 in economic activity for every $1 of lost revenue down to about $1.33 for every $1 foregone. In other words, the incentives barely broke even, and only under the assumption that Georgia could not have used the same money more effectively elsewhere, whether on roads, schools, or returning it directly to taxpayers.

A separate independent assessment found Georgia’s tax exemptions were actually decisive for only about 30% of the data centers built there. The state had previously assumed the figure was 90%. In other words, many of those projects likely would have happened even without the subsidies.

Good Jobs First, one of the leading watchdog organizations tracking state subsidy programs, estimates the average data-center megadeal in America now costs taxpayers roughly $1.9 million per permanent job created. In Nevada, the only state that publicly reports actual permanent-worker wages for these projects, the average salary is about $65,000 a year, well below the figures commonly used in splashy press announcements. Of the 32 states offering data-center incentives, 12 do not even publish aggregate revenue losses, and not one publishes actual permanent jobs created versus jobs promised.

Here is the test.

xAI built its first Memphis supercomputer campus without taking a single PILOT or EDGE incentive from the State of Tennessee. Memphis is still collecting full property taxes on the project, estimated at roughly $13 million to $20 million annually, and reinvesting a portion of that revenue directly into surrounding neighborhoods through a community-benefit ordinance.

Same company. Same technology. Same kind of project. No subsidy.

That should at least force Mississippi taxpayers to ask whether these subsidies are actually necessary on our side of the state line.

A real conservative position on this is not anti-investment. It is anti-corporate welfare.

The state should make it easy to do business in Mississippi. Streamline permitting. Pre-approve industrial sites. Build infrastructure that benefits every industrial user instead of a single politically connected company. Enforce environmental standards fairly and predictably. Charge market rates for water and electricity.

That is what governments are for.

What governments are not for is writing checks to trillion-dollar corporations because we have convinced ourselves they will only come if we pay them to.

If a data-center project only works because taxpayers absorb the cost and the risk, it is not real economic development. It is a transfer from working Mississippians to shareholders in California and Seattle, dressed up in a press release.

I want the data centers. I do not want my neighbors to pay for them.

Those two sentences are the same sentence, and it is the one our governor, our Legislature, and our Public Service Commission ought to hear from every conservative in this state, loudly and often.

In the next piece in this series, I want to make the argument I find hardest to walk away from: Mississippi has been through this cycle before. The historical record is sitting right in front of us. We just keep choosing not to read it.

In the first piece in this series, I argued Mississippi should welcome the data-center boom. I stand by that argument. But I would not make it honestly without addressing the environmental concerns directly. Conservatives do ourselves no favors when we pretend every environmental concern is imaginary or anti-growth. Some of the concerns are real, and we lose credibility when we refuse to admit it. We are supposed to be the people who can tell the difference between a real problem and a manufactured one. So let me try.

Three concerns matter most: air, water, and the electric grid. A fourth — sound — matters in a smaller way that locals near the sites already know about. On each of them, the engineering exists to do this right. We just have to insist on it.

Start with air. xAI’s Southaven campus has been operating natural-gas turbines whose emission potential, on paper, includes more than 1,700 tons of nitrogen oxides, 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde per year. Those are the numbers in the federal lawsuit pending in the Northern District of Mississippi. Whether the turbines legally require permits is now a federal court dispute. Mississippi DEQ says the units qualify for a temporary-mobile exemption; environmental groups argue federal law overrides that interpretation. A judge will sort that out. But the larger engineering point remains: we already know how to reduce these emissions dramatically. Selective catalytic reduction cuts nitrogen-oxide output by about 90%. Oxidation catalysts cut formaldehyde and carbon monoxide. Better still is using grid power and putting any new generation on a permitted, controlled site instead of running uncontrolled turbines next to a neighborhood. EPA’s recently finalized emissions standards for combustion turbines push the industry in that direction as well. Mississippi should too.

Water is next. Memphis sits on the Memphis Sand Aquifer, our drinking water. The concern that hyperscale cooling systems could draw enormous amounts of water from the aquifer is real. The good news is that the cooling industry is moving fast. Closed-loop and direct-to-chip systems can reduce water use by up to 91% compared with old evaporative cooling. Microsoft is piloting a zero-water cooling design at new sites in Phoenix and Wisconsin. xAI and MLGW broke ground last fall on an $80 million greywater facility designed to recycle 13 million gallons per day and save five billion gallons of drinking water annually. None of that is theoretical. We should require it as a condition of operating in Mississippi, not hope for it.

Electric power is where conservatives have the most leverage and the strongest case. Data centers are huge new loads on the grid. If utilities build new substations, transmission lines, and generation capacity for those facilities and then spread the costs across ordinary ratepayers, Mississippi families end up subsidizing trillion-dollar corporations through their utility bills. Mississippi Power has reportedly delayed retiring older coal plants until the mid-2030s in part because of new data-center load. That is a cost. Virginia has already started addressing this problem: a new “GS-5” rate class that requires data-center customers to pay collateral up front and absorb their own grid-upgrade costs. If a data center leaves or scales back operations, ordinary ratepayers are not left holding the bag. Mississippi should adopt the same idea — and we don’t need a federal mandate to do it. Mississippi does not need Congress to solve this. Mississippi does not need Congress to solve this. The Public Service Commission already has the authority to structure rates so ordinary families are not left subsidizing hyperscale data centers.

On sound, the answer is mostly setbacks, equipment selection, and acoustic walls. It’s a real quality-of-life issue for neighborhoods near these sites — anyone who has lived next to a row of running gas turbines knows it is not a small thing — and it is the easiest of the four concerns to fix. Counties should write reasonable noise standards into the conditional-use approvals they hand out, the same way we already write them for poultry plants and asphalt batch plants. None of this requires a special agency or a federal mandate. It just requires the discipline to set the standards and enforce them.

There is one more piece, which is the question of process. A lot of the heat in Southaven and South Memphis is not really about the engineering — it is about people feeling that something massive was dropped onto their neighborhood without their being asked. That is a fair complaint. The fix is straightforward: real public hearings before construction, posted air-permit applications with enough lead time for citizens to weigh in, and county-level conditional-use review with real teeth. Conservatives believe in local government for a reason. We should not abandon the principle just because the project is exciting.

There is a temptation in our politics, on both sides, to pick a tribe and accept everything that tribe believes. The progressive who tells me a data center is automatically an act of environmental racism is asking me to ignore the engineering. The conservative who tells me an environmental concern is automatically a left-wing hustle is asking me to ignore my own eyes. I am not willing to do either.

The right answer for Mississippi is the conservative answer, properly understood: require industry to internalize the costs of its own pollution; require it to pay for the public infrastructure it consumes; protect the citizens who were here first; and let the projects stand on their own engineering and their own balance sheets. That is not anti-business. That is how grown-up business works.

In the next piece, I want to talk about the part of this issue that genuinely angers me, which is what Mississippi is paying these companies to come here, and why no real conservative ought to defend those deals.

There is a quiet argument going on right now in coffee shops and county supervisor meetings across Mississippi. Some of my fellow conservatives have started treating data centers as the next big threat to Mississippi communities, convinced they are going to drain our aquifer, strain our power grid, raise electric bills, and leave behind nothing but fenced off buildings humming with servers. I understand the suspicion. I share some of it. But I think we are about to talk ourselves into a serious mistake, and I want to make the case for why we should not.

Start with the size of what is happening. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that data centers will consume between 4.6% and 9.1% of all electricity generated in the United States by 2030 — more than double their share in 2023. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 165% increase in global data-center power demand by the end of the decade. Whether you love artificial intelligence or roll your eyes at it, the build-out is real, and the money behind it is enormous. The only question is which states get the investment and which states watch it go to Texas, Georgia, and Virginia.

Mississippi has spent most of my lifetime watching tech investment go somewhere else. Now it isn’t. Amazon Web Services has committed $25 billion across multiple Mississippi sites. Compass Datacenters is building a $10 billion campus near Meridian. xAI announced a $20 billion campus in Southaven, the largest single private investment in the state’s history. Add the smaller projects and Mississippi has roughly $49 billion in headline data-center investment on the books. That is not a typo. By any measure, it is the largest wave of private industrial investment Mississippi has ever seen.

What does that buy us? Construction crews working five-to-eight-year build-outs. Permanent operating jobs that pay at least 125% of the average state wage. Substations, fiber, water and sewer lines that serve the data center but stay in the ground for the next industrial user too. And importantly, it creates enough new electricity demand to potentially improve the economics of the grid for everyone else — if we make sure data centers actually pay the infrastructure costs they create. That “if” matters, and I’ll come back to it in Part 2.

Conservatives ought to be careful about reflexively saying no to this. One of the oldest truths in economics and politics is simple: if you don’t build, somebody else builds, and you live in their world. The country that hosts the compute capacity for AI will set the standards for everything that runs on it — banking, defense, medicine, agriculture. We have spent four years arguing about TikTok and Chinese surveillance. The same logic that makes us nervous about Beijing controlling the apps on our kids’ phones makes me nervous about Beijing controlling the data centers that run the next generation of those apps. American compute belongs in America.

It is also worth being honest about who is doing the work during the build. A hyperscale data-center campus is not a quick six-month industrial park job. The Compass campus near Meridian is planned to be built out over eight years; AWS’s Madison County complex is on a multi-year construction schedule. That is electricians, pipefitters, concrete crews, ironworkers, truck drivers, and surveyors, putting steel in the ground year after year. We can debate how many permanent jobs ultimately stay local. What is not debatable is that the construction work is real, long-term, and already underway.

There is another argument I hear from neighbors that I take seriously, which is that the projects are being shoved down our throats with no public input. On that, the critics have a real point, but that is a different problem from the projects themselves. We can have public hearings, environmental review, and ratepayer protections without throwing away the investment. The fight over xAI’s gas turbines in Southaven is genuinely complicated, and the legal justification Mississippi DEQ used for its “temporary-mobile” interpretation is now being challenged in federal court. That is the regulatory process working the way it is supposed to work, even if imperfectly and slowly. It is not a reason to send the next $20 billion project to Tulsa instead.

And finally — this is the part the loudest skeptics tend to skip — the alternative is not a Mississippi where nothing changes. The alternative is a Mississippi where we keep watching our young people leave for Atlanta and Nashville, where we keep waiting for the next big employer to magically arrive, and where the AI economy gets built somewhere else by people who will charge us to use it. We have a real seat at this table for the first time in a generation. I would like to keep it.

In Part 2, I want to talk about the environmental concerns honestly, because some of them are right. In Part 3, I want to talk about how Mississippi is paying for these projects, and why a true conservative ought to be deeply skeptical of the deals our state is signing. Welcoming the boom and demanding it be done right are not contradictions. They are the same job.

When people hear that Bitcoin may one day need to defend itself against quantum computing, the first question is usually technical. What code changes? What cryptography replaces what? But the more important question is institutional, not mathematical: who actually decides to make those changes, and how do they happen in a system with no central authority?

Bitcoin does not have a CEO, a board, or a government agency that can mandate an upgrade. There is no switch that can be flipped. Strengthening Bitcoin against a future quantum threat would be a process of coordination across a loose, global network of participants who all have different roles and incentives.

It starts with developers.

A relatively small group of open source contributors, often referred to as Bitcoin Core developers, are responsible for proposing and implementing changes to the software that runs the network. These developers do not have unilateral power. What they do have is influence through expertise. When a potential improvement is identified, such as adopting quantum resistant cryptography, it is first discussed publicly, often for years.

Those discussions are formalized through Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, or BIPs. A BIP lays out a specific change, explains the reasoning behind it, and invites scrutiny from the broader community. Anyone can propose one, but only ideas that survive intense review and debate gain traction. In the case of quantum resistance, proposals would likely involve new address types or new ways of signing transactions that are designed to withstand future attacks.

From there, the process becomes even more decentralized.

Node operators, the individuals and organizations that run Bitcoin software, ultimately decide whether to adopt a proposed change. They choose which version of the software to run. If enough of them upgrade to a version that includes new quantum resistant features, those features become part of the network’s accepted rules. If they do not, the proposal effectively stalls.

Miners also play a role. They produce blocks and enforce certain rules in practice. While they cannot unilaterally change Bitcoin’s protocol, their participation is necessary for any major transition to function smoothly. Exchanges, custodians, and wallet providers are equally important. They are the interface most users rely on, and they would need to support any new address formats or migration strategies.

Then there are the users themselves.

If Bitcoin were to transition to quantum resistant systems, it would likely require individuals to move their funds to new types of addresses. That is not automatic. It would require awareness, education, and action. The success of any upgrade would depend on whether millions of users actually follow through.

This is where Bitcoin’s greatest strength and greatest challenge intersect. The system is resistant to control, which makes it resilient against unilateral decisions, but it also means that change is slow and requires broad agreement.

There are different ways such a transition could unfold. Some changes could be introduced gradually, allowing users to opt in over time. Others might require more coordinated action, especially if a credible quantum threat emerged quickly. In extreme scenarios, the community could even face difficult decisions about how to handle vulnerable coins that have not been moved. None of these paths are simple, and all would involve tradeoffs.

What matters is that the process already exists.

Bitcoin has gone through upgrades before. Features like SegWit and Taproot were not imposed from the top down. They were debated, refined, and ultimately adopted through a combination of developer work, community consensus, and user choice. A future effort to address quantum computing would follow a similar pattern, though likely with higher stakes.

The key takeaway is that Bitcoin does not defend itself automatically. It is defended by people. Developers propose solutions. Node operators choose to run them. Businesses integrate them. Users adopt them.

That is how a decentralized system evolves.

And if quantum computing ever becomes a real threat to Bitcoin, the response will not come from a single decision maker. It will come from a network of participants, slowly and deliberately, deciding together how to adapt.

When people hear about quantum computing, the conversation often turns to Bitcoin. Could a powerful enough machine break its cryptography? Could digital assets be stolen? But there is a more immediate and less discussed question: what about your everyday bank account?

If quantum computing ever becomes capable of breaking modern encryption, your online checking account would not be exempt. In fact, in some ways, it could be just as exposed.

Today, banks rely on many of the same cryptographic tools that secure the broader internet. When you log into your account, your connection is protected by protocols like TLS, which depend on public key cryptography. Behind the scenes, systems use algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography to secure logins, transactions, and communications between financial institutions.

These are the very systems that quantum computing threatens.

A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could use Shor’s algorithm to break these encryption schemes, allowing an attacker to decrypt sensitive data or impersonate a trusted party. In theory, that could mean intercepting login credentials, forging transactions, or accessing private financial records.

But as with Bitcoin, the key phrase is “sufficiently advanced.” That level of quantum capability does not exist today. There is no evidence that any institution, government or otherwise, has a machine capable of breaking modern banking encryption in real time.

Still, the concern is not hypothetical in the long run. Security experts have been warning for years about what is called “harvest now, decrypt later.” The idea is simple. An attacker could collect encrypted financial data today and store it, waiting for the day when quantum computers are powerful enough to decrypt it. That does not require breaking systems now, only preserving the data for future access.

Banks and governments are not ignoring this risk. Standards bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology have already begun rolling out new forms of encryption designed to resist quantum attacks. Financial institutions are actively researching how to transition their systems to these new standards, though the process will take time. Unlike a simple software update, upgrading global financial infrastructure requires coordination across thousands of institutions and legacy systems.

There is also an important difference between Bitcoin and traditional banking when it comes to risk. If a vulnerability were exploited in Bitcoin, the burden would fall heavily on individual users to secure their funds and move them to safer systems. In contrast, banks operate within a regulated framework. They have security teams, insurance mechanisms, and, in many cases, government backstops. If a breach occurs, customers are typically not left to absorb the full loss.

That does not mean the system is invulnerable. It means the responsibility is distributed differently.

Your online checking account is protected by layers of security beyond cryptography. Multi factor authentication, fraud monitoring, transaction limits, and human oversight all add friction for attackers. Even if encryption were weakened in the future, these additional controls would still play a role in limiting damage.

The bigger challenge is time. Financial systems are vast and complex, and transitioning them to quantum resistant encryption will not happen overnight. The risk is not that your bank account will suddenly be drained tomorrow by a quantum computer. The risk is that institutions must complete a slow and careful migration before the technology reaches a tipping point.

For consumers, there is little immediate action required beyond basic security hygiene. Use strong passwords. Enable multi factor authentication. Monitor your accounts. These steps protect against today’s threats, which are far more practical than quantum attacks.

The conversation around quantum computing should not be limited to cryptocurrency. It is a broader issue that touches every part of the digital economy, including the systems people rely on every day.

If quantum computing eventually reshapes cybersecurity, it will not just be a story about Bitcoin. It will be a story about the entire financial system adapting to a new kind of risk.

For years, Bitcoin has been described as unhackable. Its cryptography is strong, its network decentralized, and its track record resilient. But there is a growing conversation among engineers and researchers that deserves more public attention, not because it signals imminent collapse, but because it highlights a real and often misunderstood future risk: quantum computing.

The concern is not science fiction. It is rooted in the mathematics that secure Bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin relies on two major forms of cryptography. The first is hashing, which underpins mining and address generation. The second is digital signatures, specifically elliptic curve cryptography, which allows users to prove ownership of their coins. Today, both are considered secure against classical computers. But quantum computers operate under a different set of rules.

Using an algorithm known as Shor’s algorithm, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive a private key from a public key. That matters because Bitcoin transactions ultimately reveal public keys. If an attacker could reverse engineer the private key from that public information, they could spend coins that are not theirs.

This does not mean all Bitcoin would suddenly vanish. The risk is more specific and more nuanced. Only certain coins would be vulnerable at first, particularly those whose public keys are already exposed on the blockchain. This includes some early Bitcoin addresses and cases where users have reused addresses. Newer address formats are more protective because they keep the public key hidden until the moment a transaction is made.

Even then, the attack is not as simple as pressing a button and draining the network. Timing would matter. An attacker would need to derive a private key quickly enough to interfere with a transaction before it is confirmed. That requires a level of quantum computing power that does not exist today.

And that is the key point. The threat is real, but it is not immediate.

Experts across academia, government, and industry generally agree that cryptographically relevant quantum computers are still years away, though estimates vary widely. Some projections suggest decades. Others argue it could arrive sooner if breakthroughs accelerate progress. The uncertainty is part of the challenge.

What makes this issue worth paying attention to now is not the likelihood of a sudden attack, but the scale of preparation required. Upgrading Bitcoin’s cryptography is not as simple as updating an app. It would require coordination across developers, miners, exchanges, and millions of users. It would also require moving funds to new address types designed to resist quantum attacks.

There are already early discussions within the Bitcoin development community about how such a transition could happen. Proposals for post quantum cryptography exist, and standards bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology have begun approving new algorithms designed to withstand quantum attacks. But no final path has been adopted for Bitcoin, and any change will involve tradeoffs in security, efficiency, and compatibility.

The cold wallet question also illustrates the complexity. Many people assume that storing Bitcoin offline makes it immune to future threats. Cold storage protects against hacking through the internet, but it does not change the underlying cryptography. If a public key is exposed, the theoretical quantum risk applies regardless of whether the private key is stored online or offline.

None of this is a reason for panic. It is a reason for awareness.

Bitcoin has faced technical challenges before and adapted over time. But quantum computing presents a different kind of problem. It is not about a bug or a vulnerability that can be patched quickly. It is about a fundamental shift in computing power that could eventually undermine the assumptions Bitcoin was built on.

The responsible approach is neither dismissal nor alarmism. It is education and preparation. Understanding where the risks lie, how they might develop, and what steps may be needed in the future is far more useful than assuming either that Bitcoin is perfectly safe or that it is doomed.

In the end, the conversation about quantum computing is less about whether Bitcoin survives and more about how it evolves.

There is a peculiar ritual that plays out every cycle in Bitcoin. Smart and well informed people make confident predictions about where the price is headed next, and then the market humbles nearly all of them. It is not that analysts like James Check, Anthony Pompliano, Jordy Visser, Joel Bomgar, or Michael Saylor lack credibility. Quite the opposite. They bring data, macro frameworks, and years of experience. But when you step back and look at their views together, something more important becomes clear than any single price target. Even the best informed voices do not really know what Bitcoin will do in the short term.

Listen closely and a pattern emerges. Check warns of sideways movement and the possibility of painful declines before any sustained rally. Visser describes phases where early holders sell into new demand, creating turbulence and uncertainty. Pompliano talks about quiet periods that often come before major moves, but does not claim to know exactly when that shift will happen. Bomgar points to improving fundamentals but avoids making precise short term calls. Even Saylor, who is known for his strong conviction, focuses far more on long term structural trends than on where Bitcoin might land in the next six months.

Despite their different tones, they largely agree on one thing. The near term is likely to be messy.

That reality is uncomfortable in a market that thrives on bold predictions. Investors want clarity. They want to know if Bitcoin is going to fifty thousand or one hundred fifty thousand in the near future. But the honest answer, reflected in these perspectives, is that short term price action is driven by forces that are difficult to predict. Liquidity cycles, macroeconomic shifts, investor sentiment, and the behavior of large holders all play a role, and none of them move in a perfectly predictable way.

What stands out is not disagreement, but shared uncertainty.

That uncertainty points to a different way of thinking about Bitcoin. Instead of trying to predict every movement, many investors are choosing to focus on a longer time horizon. The idea is simple. Short term price action is noise, while long term fundamentals are what matter. Bitcoin has a fixed supply. Adoption continues to grow. Institutions are becoming more involved. And its role as an alternative monetary asset is gaining recognition. Those factors do not change because of a few volatile months.

This is where the real divide exists. It is not between bullish and bearish analysts, but between those focused on the short term and those focused on the long term.

Short term predictions will always vary. Some will call for declines, others for rapid gains. Occasionally someone will get it right, but more often those predictions will miss the mark. Meanwhile, the long term case for Bitcoin continues to build gradually.

That is why a consistent approach of investing with a long term perspective, rather than reacting to every forecast, has proven to be more durable.

The irony is that the more you listen to expert predictions, the clearer it becomes that certainty is hardest to find where people want it most. In the short term, no one really knows. Over the long term, the direction becomes much clearer.

Bitcoin does not reward perfect timing. It rewards patience and conviction.

And in a market defined by uncertainty, that may be the only advantage that truly lasts.

Bitcoin is one of the most important monetary innovations in a generation. It gives individuals a censorship-resistant alternative to government-controlled money, a fixed supply no central bank can dilute, and the ability to hold and transfer value without the permission of any intermediary. From a liberty standpoint, that is profoundly good.

So let me be clear: I support Bitcoin. What I oppose is the growing movement to have government buy and hold it as a “strategic reserve asset.” Those of us who genuinely value both sound money and limited government should oppose it too.

The argument for state Bitcoin reserves sounds appealing. Proponents call it a hedge against inflation, a signal of financial innovation, a way to position states for a decentralized future. Some frame it as monetary sovereignty. But strip away the framing, and the question is simple: Should your state government be in the business of making investment decisions with taxpayer money?

The answer should be no—not because Bitcoin is too risky (private citizens are free to take risks with their own funds), but because government should not be a market actor at all. When a state buys Bitcoin hoping it will appreciate, that is not a reserve strategy. A reserve is about liquidity and stability. What proponents are describing is a portfolio decision—a bet on future price performance. Call it what it is: speculation with public funds.

Once lawmakers accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. If appreciation justifies buying Bitcoin, why not equities? Why not tech funds, real estate, or venture capital? Every asset class has a compelling long-term story. The moment government enters the investment business, the argument that it should invest only in Bitcoin becomes very hard to defend.

There is also the asymmetry of risk. In private markets, gains and losses fall on those who voluntarily took the position. In government, politicians take credit for gains and taxpayers absorb the losses—or the foregone alternatives. That is not market discipline. That is moral hazard financed by people who had no say in the matter.

Here is the deeper problem. A government actively seeking assets to purchase is a government that already assumes it has a legitimate claim to more money than it needs. If the state has surplus revenue, the proper response is not to build a portfolio. The proper response is to cut taxes, reduce spending, pay down obligations, and return resources to the private economy. State Bitcoin reserves become an excuse to avoid the harder reforms that actually matter.

Sound money matters because it limits government power. It disciplines politicians, restrains manipulation, and protects the public from the quiet theft of inflation. But adding Bitcoin to a state treasury does not restrain government—it expands its financial footprint, introduces new discretionary authority, and invites exactly the kind of political maneuvering that sound money is supposed to prevent.

Bitcoin was created as an alternative to government-managed money. It is a check on state power, not a new instrument of it. We should protect that distinction—and resist every effort, however well-intentioned, to blur it.

The filibuster is one of the most distinctive and often misunderstood features of the United States Senate. Though frequently invoked in modern political debates, its origins and evolution reveal a procedural tool that has changed dramatically over time.

Contrary to popular belief, the filibuster was not part of the Constitution, nor was it intentionally designed by the Founders. Instead, it emerged in the early 19th century almost by accident. In 1806, the Senate eliminated a rule known as the “previous question” motion, which had allowed a simple majority to end debate. Without that mechanism, senators were left with the ability to speak for as long as they wished, effectively enabling unlimited debate on legislation.

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the filibuster remained a rarely used tactic. When it did occur, it took the form of what is now called a “talking filibuster.” Senators seeking to delay or block a bill had to physically hold the floor and continue speaking, sometimes for hours or even days. This made the filibuster highly visible and physically demanding. It was not enough to oppose a bill. One had to sustain the effort in real time, often under intense public scrutiny.

The first major attempt to limit this practice came in 1917, when the Senate adopted Rule XXII, establishing the cloture process. Cloture allows the Senate to end debate with a supermajority vote. Initially set at two-thirds of senators present and voting, the threshold was lowered in 1975 to three-fifths of the full Senate, which is 60 votes if all seats are filled. This change marked a significant step in balancing the Senate’s tradition of extended debate with the need to eventually reach decisions.

However, the most consequential shift in the filibuster’s history occurred during the 1970s with procedural reforms that allowed the Senate to consider multiple pieces of legislation simultaneously. This “two-track system” meant that a filibuster no longer brought all Senate business to a halt. As a result, the nature of the filibuster changed. Senators no longer needed to continuously speak on the floor to block a bill. Instead, they could simply signal their intent to filibuster.

This modern version is often referred to as a “silent” or “virtual” filibuster. In practice, it has transformed the filibuster from a physical act of endurance into a procedural requirement. Today, most legislation in the Senate effectively needs 60 votes to advance, even though a simple majority is sufficient for final passage. The mere threat of a filibuster is typically enough to trigger this higher threshold.

The distinction between the traditional talking filibuster and the modern version highlights how Senate rules and practices evolve over time. What began as an unintended consequence of a rule change has become a central feature of legislative procedure. Whether viewed as a safeguard for minority participation or simply a feature of Senate process, the filibuster’s current form reflects decades of procedural adaptation rather than a fixed constitutional design.

Understanding this evolution is essential to understanding the Senate itself, a body where rules, norms, and traditions often carry as much weight as formal law.

In a recent conversation between a colleague of mine and a candidate running for state legislature, the candidate was asked about his views on several policy issues. He was thoughtful, open, and willing to explain his beliefs. But then he added a caveat that should concern every voter: once elected, he said, he would be obligated to vote however the majority of his district wanted—regardless of whether it conflicted with his own judgment or principles.

This may sound democratic, even virtuous. In reality, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to serve in a representative republic.

In our system, citizens do not elect legislators to function as human polling machines. They elect representatives to exercise judgment on their behalf within the constraints of a constitution. Those representatives are accountable to voters at election time, but while in office they are sworn to uphold the constitution, respect limits on government power, and protect individual rights—even when doing so is unpopular.

The idea that an elected official must always follow the immediate will of the majority is closer to direct democracy than representative government. History shows why that distinction matters. Majorities are not infallible. They can be misinformed, driven by fear, or motivated by short-term passions. Without restraint, majority rule easily becomes majority tyranny.

If a legislator believes he must vote for any policy his district demands, then constitutional protections become optional. Free speech, due process, property rights, and equal protection all become subject to popular vote. That is precisely what constitutions exist to prevent. Rights are not supposed to hinge on whether they are fashionable or politically convenient.

This mindset also creates a convenient escape hatch for politicians. “My hands were tied,” they say. “My district made me do it.” In practice, this often becomes a way to justify voting against principles they claim to hold, while avoiding responsibility for the consequences. Leadership is replaced with blame-shifting, and conviction gives way to convenience.

True representation requires more courage than that. It means listening to constituents, understanding their concerns, and taking them seriously—but not surrendering independent judgment. It means explaining difficult votes, defending unpopular positions, and trusting voters to decide whether that judgment deserves another term. Accountability comes at the ballot box, not through daily referendums.

The Founders understood this well. They designed a system meant to slow down rash decisions, elevate deliberation, and protect liberty from both authoritarian rulers and unchecked majorities. A legislator who does not understand this role—or worse, openly rejects it—poses a real risk to constitutional government.

Voters should be wary of candidates who promise to “just vote how the district wants.” That promise may feel empowering, but it ultimately weakens the very safeguards that protect minority rights, economic stability, and the rule of law. We should expect more from those who seek office—not blind obedience to opinion polls, but informed judgment grounded in principle and constitutional restraint.

A representative republic depends not just on good laws, but on legislators who understand why those laws exist—and who are willing to uphold them, even when it’s hard.

Americans are often told they live in a democracy. The word is used as a synonym for freedom, fairness, and self-government. But strictly speaking, the United States was never designed to be a pure democracy. It is a representative republic, and that distinction is not semantic trivia. It is the foundation of why the system has endured.

In a true democracy, citizens vote directly on laws and policies. Every issue is decided by majority rule. While this may sound ideal in theory, it comes with a serious flaw: the majority is not restrained. If 51 percent of voters want something, they get it, even if it violates individual rights, harms minorities, or creates long-term instability.

A representative republic works differently. Citizens elect representatives to make laws on their behalf, within a framework constrained by a constitution. Those representatives are accountable to voters, but they are also bound by limits on government power, separation of powers, and protections for individual rights. The goal is not just to reflect public opinion, but to filter it through deliberation, law, and constitutional restraint.

The Founders understood the danger of unchecked majority rule. James Madison warned that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” and were often short-lived. History backs him up. Pure democracies are vulnerable to emotional swings, demagogues, and policies driven by passion rather than principle. When decisions are made by immediate popular vote, there is little incentive to consider long-term consequences or the rights of those who disagree.

One major problem with a true democracy is the risk of majority tyranny. If the majority can vote itself benefits at the expense of others, higher taxes on a minority group, restrictions on unpopular speech, or confiscation of property, there is no built-in safeguard to stop it. A representative republic, by contrast, places certain rights beyond the reach of a simple majority. Free speech, due process, property rights, and equal protection are not supposed to be up for a vote.

Another problem is instability. Constant direct voting on complex issues leads to rapid policy swings and shallow decision-making. Most citizens do not have the time or resources to deeply study every issue of governance. Electing representatives allows voters to choose people whose job is to specialize, deliberate, and negotiate, while still being removable if they fail.

A representative republic also slows down bad ideas. That is not a bug; it is a feature. Requiring legislation to pass through multiple bodies, survive debate, and comply with constitutional limits prevents momentary outrage or fear from becoming permanent law.

Calling America a democracy may be politically convenient, but it misses the point. The country’s strength lies not in raw majority rule, but in a system designed to balance popular consent with liberty, stability, and restraint. A representative republic recognizes a hard truth: the purpose of government is not merely to do what the majority wants today, but to protect freedom for everyone tomorrow.