August 31st, 2026

Rough transcription of Hour 1

Segment 1
Hello, America. Mark Levin here. Our number 877-381-3811.  877-381-3811. Data centers. That’s right. Data centers. I. Wow. I never thought would be this controversial. Asia data centers. How many of you use Tik Tok or Instagram or X? Hmm. How many of you use any social media? How many of you use a computer or a laptop or an iPad or an iPhone? Or any handheld device. How many of you watch TV? Particularly smart TV? Netflix. One of those other. Options that are available to you. Just curious. How many of you see a doctor? How many of you been to the hospital? How many of you drive a car or rent a car? How many of you taking an airplane? A train? How many of you use email? Hmm. Just curious. All of you need data centers. What do you think all this stuff runs through? The cloud. What do you think the cloud is? Their data centers. Data center. It just amazes me. How quickly? So many. If our fellow citizens fall for this stuff, it’s like the pandemic all over again. Six feet, six feet wears a mask. I mean, my own home, I live by myself. Six feet. Where? The mask. Now we have people who are Luddites. And I’m going to play a little bit for you what I played last night or what I said last night on Life, Liberty and Lavin. The President. This morning posted his full throated support again. For data centers. On the heels of my show and he watches the show. And I thank you for watching it as well. It’s a lot of competition, but there you are. It’s nothing to be afraid of. I love it when people said, Do you want a data center in your backyard? Mr. Producer said the dumbest damn thing you’ve ever heard. It is. No. And I don’t want a train station in my back yard or steel mill on my back yard or oil rigs in my back yard. I don’t want a skyscraper in my backyard, a steel mill in my backyard. A coal mine in my backyard. It’s not what backyards are for. Ladies and gentlemen. There are four, I repeat, four data centers within two miles of our home in Loudoun County, Virginia, and they’re all over the eastern part of Loudoun County, Virginia. And it is left to local governments, not the federal government, local governments. To decide where to put them in their various communities. The zoning boards, we call them, just as they would decide about oil pipelines or gas stations or strip malls. We don’t typically like commercial or industrial production in our backyard. So I don’t know what people are talking about. But you do like all this data. Because otherwise, ladies and gentlemen, you wouldn’t be able to function. In this data has to go and come from somewhere. Data in data out. Data into what? Data out from what? I just ask Brock a whole bunch of questions I just asked. Google a whole bunch of questions. I just really. And where do you think those answers come from? Whether you are a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist or whether you’re in seventh or eighth grade, where do you think they come from? Your accountants use. Use your accountant’s use. I. Your surgeons use A.I., your doctors with their laptop computers on their lap. They use A.I.. The pharmaceutical companies looking for. You know, cutting edge drugs and drugs to improve the quality of care they use. I. And tell me, can you list all the uses of air? It’s impossible. Civilian uses, military uses, transportation uses, health care use. It’s impossible. And so the more we use and the faster we want it. In order to accommodate that. These data centers are required. And what’s happening now. In our advanced industrial society. We’ve gotten so smart. We’re doing so much. That the data centers are necessary. To translate it. They help us study it and research it. They help bring us to rational conclusions and to do it as quickly as possible. Now that’s just us. If there wasn’t any other country on the face there, we’d still need this. But there are other countries on the face of the earth. China among. The most worrisome. And they want to use this technology in their data centers. To defeat us. To defeat us economically, to defeat us militarily, to defeat us in every possible way. And they have a command society, so it’s easier than ever. And look at these polls here. Frank Luntz has his polls coming out. Oh, yeah. Now I’m going to play a little bit of this for you and. I will be stopping and going from time to time. But mostly I’m going to I’m going to want you to listen, if you don’t mind. So put up the volume on your radio or however you are listening to the program and however you are listening to the program. Do you listen to podcasters? You do. I. Yes, you do. You, Dennis used to say. Oh, yeah. It’s true. I’m sorry. It’s nothing to be afraid of. What you should be concerned about is that we is that we don’t lag behind anybody else and that we win this race. So we’re the ones who determine. What computer chips in the future will look like. We’re the ones who determine what life generally is going to look like in the future, not communist China. But even within our own borders, as I’ve explained, this is an absolute 100% necessity. Now what happens is the Luddites, the people who don’t believe in industrial progress, they’re going to tell you you’re going to lose jobs. No, you’re not. The construction workers. The electricians, the plumbers, the roofers on and on and on building these centers while they’re temporary jobs. Whenever you finish a building, it may be temporary, may not be temporary. This doesn’t change any of that. What it does do is it creates massive numbers of jobs we can’t even contemplate or imagine right now. I mean, folks, the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. The computer replaced, you know, just a long math. I mean, we can go on and on with this. It’s so ridiculous. Look around you. Look at look at how fantastic this economy and this society is. Compared to future gen excuse me, past generations and compared to other countries, it’s not even it’s not even close. Can you imagine in the first industrial revolution in the early 1800s? Nah, I don’t want that over here, man. The cotton gin was in the first industrial. Now we can’t do that now. The second Industrial revolution. Oil. Now. Oil. Now, that was ugly oil. And they were burning off natural gas until Rockefeller decided, Wait a minute, we can put that to use, too. Then we had automobiles. Well, they had a gas and we had gas stations. We literally had people want to put an end to economic and industrial advancements. But it’s never going to happen, ever. Because what goes on between your ears should be the focus, not between your legs, but between your ears. Because there’s no stopping that in a free society. There’s no stopping it. There’s a reason why the blue states and some of the red states and now we don’t want to do this. We don’t want to because there’s politicians in charge and they’re looking at these polls. And here’s the problem. People are being fed a lot of lies about the cost of electricity and what’s happening with water. And they think the cost of electricity is skyrocketing because of a data center not too far down the road. That’s not what’s happening. They think their water is being polluted like with fracking, but it didn’t happen in fracking and it’s not happening now. And most of the water that’s used by these data centers is recycled by the data centers. It’s also unusable other water that they’re using. It’s not like they’re denying people water or fish water. But as usual, it takes time to explain progress. It takes time to explain conservatism, constitutionalism and economics. But we’re going to do it. I’ll be right back.

Segment 2
We may have to cut this off. How much time do we have, Ron, about, would you say about five? All right, let’s get it started. Here’s cut one. Fox last night. Go. Artificial intelligence and data centers. This is all the talk. But a lot of it is just talk. And we are surrounded by people who want you to be afraid of them. You have an iPhone. It was smart TV have an automobile. Really? All of that relates to artificial intelligence. In fact, virtually every aspect of your life is affected by artificial intelligence. That’s correct. Ever hear of a Luddite? Not just as a pejorative, A Luddite and Luddite was a title, a label given to people in the 1800s who opposed the first industrial revolution. And it carried through to the second industrial revolution that picked up after the Civil War and worked its way into the early 1900s. And now we have the great powerful United States of America, an economy we call. Capitalism. We discussed that last evening. But we have Luddites who oppose economic advancement, technological advancement, even in medicines and so forth. They talk about, well, what’s going to happen to jobs Like jobs are stagnant. Like, people never get fired or we never create new businesses that create all these jobs and so forth. And so on the one hand, people attack. Capitalism is not being dynamic enough. On the other hand, they attack capitalism for being too dynamic. Ignore these carnival barkers, ladies and gentlemen. Luddites. Luddites are people who oppose technological and industrial progress and advancement. The United States wouldn’t be what we are today, the number one superpower. But for these industrial revolutions that took place in capitalism minds me the isolationist today. And you’ll notice that some of the Luddites are also isolationists, and many of them are in the Republican Party, for crying out loud. Isolationist wants an isolationist. They reject most foreign and military alliances. That’s kind of stupid, isn’t it? Very. Didn’t we deal with that in 1938? The result was World War Two. And then and then we actually lost over 400,000 men and women to fight that war. Yes, that did happen. So in the 1920s and thirties, we were dealing with isolationist. You know, we’re dealing with today isolationist and Luddites. It’s crazy, but it’s true. And by the way, that isolationist movement died after we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. And one of the leaders of what was then called the America First movement, believe it or not, was Charles Lindbergh. He apologized to the nation. He became one of the great leaders in raising money through government bonds for the war effort. He was also a rabid anti-Semite. So this is a history we have a history that we’re seeing play out today. But I want to get into this A.I. and these data centers because we are surrounded by cowards, cowards in the Democrat Party. More ideological, I suppose, and cowards in the Republican Party who are telling us who are telling us that these data centers, these data centers are nothing but trouble. Nothing but trouble. And let me tell you something. This is the new industrial revolution with these data centers. You’ve got New York Kathy Hochul enacting an executive order temporarily, a one year pause in all data centers. You’ve got Georgia lawmakers introducing bills to forbid local governments from permitting new data centers through 2028. In Virginia, where there’s the most data centers and have created the most wealth and reduction in taxes and so forth. They have proposals to delay final approvals for new facilities. Other states. They’re also trying to prevent data centers from being built. Delaware. Michigan. Pennsylvania. South Carolina. Vermont. Introduced moratorium or impact study bills to slow them down. Other states where they’re trying to stall them. Minnesota. New Hampshire. Oklahoma. South Dakota. Wisconsin. Maine. They proposed a moratorium that was recently vetoed by the governor there. So we have a lot of Luddites out there and big positions, Republicans and Democrats, governors and legislatures, even at the national level. Even in the Republican Party on TV, it’s endless. The ignoramuses are all around us. Winslet. We’re going to we’re going to kill it right here. And pick up as soon as we come back. I want you to hear this. I want you to be more informed than anybody else. That’s what we do on the Mark Levin program here on radio. That’s what we do on Life, Liberty and Levin. And that’s what we do in my books. This will be no different. This is the new industrial revolution. Somebody is going to win it. It better be us. Oh, and by the way, this is where the the finding is the inventions for things like fighting cancer and heart disease and so forth. This is where it’ll be found.

Segment 3
All right. Let us continue. Cut to go. Let’s start with electricity, which is arguably the most difficult data center issue, right, at least in the future. Several regional and national studies have found little merit to the common claim that data centers have already caused large localized increases in America’s electricity bills. You know, this reminds me of fracking for a better time. Oh, it’s destroying the water. No, it’s not. Oh, the amount of energy that you use is the same as you get from the fracking. No, it’s not. In fact, a brand new peer reviewed study found that data centers actually cost average U.S. retail electricity rates to fall modestly between 2015 and 2024. Why? Because the center is high. Steady power demand helps spread a grid’s fixed cost over more usage. This finding is counterintuitive, but consistent with the research from 2025 that high demand areas, including ones like North Dakota and Virginia, saw an explosion of data centers, also saw, quote, lower prices overall, while prices rose in places like California where demand had declined. Funny thing. Supply and demand more power customers, the Washington Post explains. Needs more ways to divvy up fixed costs, thus reducing rates for everyone. They go on. What about water? You know, I could have done five shows on this. I could have done this whole show on this. But I’m in a hurry because we have good guests on other subjects. But I want to give you enough information where you can go look on your own. As The Washington Post editors noted last year, arguably the most viral water claim that a single Google data center in Chile consumed more than a thousand times the water supply. But down there was later acknowledged by its author, to be, quote, off by a magnitude of 1000. They added that the US data centers combined use less than 0.5 percent of America’s fresh water, and that, quote, Google’s thirstiest facility in Iowa uses approximately what some golf courses use. The golf course comparison is that because it hints at a common trick data center, opponents used to gin up local angst, offer scary sounding numbers with no real world comparatives. The American Enterprise Institute, Jim Pethokoukis recently did such a comparison revealing data center water usage to be a relative non-issue. AI researcher Andy Measly has done yeoman’s work explaining why a lot of data center water usage stats in various studies include non-potable water, indirect usage from nearby power plants and water actually recirculated instead of consume that’s causing little change in local supplies. Doing this can inflate water usage stats, so they’re using stats involving water that you’re never going to drink now. You’re never going to bring it to your house in any in any of the appliances you’re never going to swim in. And that’s public outcry dramatically, even though the data center itself isn’t consuming much water at all and nearby locals aren’t effective. The other big problem with most data center opposition said it routinely ignores the benefits they bring to local communities and the nation as a whole. The easiest place to look is Northern Virginia, specifically eastern Loudoun County, where 70 to 80% of these centers are. And he goes on about the incredible impact on the tax base that taxes may well have doubled. Without this, these data centers and so forth. But what is the benefit to you, Mr. and Mrs. America? I always say capitalism creates all these benefits and we take them. We take them for. For granted. Artificial intelligence is used today across daily life health care, business, transportation to automate tasks, analyze data, make fast decisions for you. To improve your life. Tools like Siri and Alexa manage schedules, set reminders, enter voice commands. That’s air streaming services, and online stores use algorithms to suggest movies, music and products that say apps like Google Maps uses AI for real time traffic updates, route planning and estimated arrival times. Email providers use AI to filter spam, sort mail or of complete sentences. What about health care? This is a biggie. A.I. models review medical images like X-rays and scans to spot early signs of diseases or emergencies like strokes. Computer algorithms speed up the creation and testing of new medicines. Wearable devices like tracking heart rates and vital signs to warn users of potential health issues. That’s air over a tabloid icon from robotics and hospitals and clinics to predictive software used to diagnose rare diseases. As many users in the field of health care for you, Mr. and Mrs. America, doctors and medical staff work with AI powered software to provide better care to patients of all types. Early Diagnosis. Hey, I can analyze patient and disease data to predict the likelihood of a single patient you developing a disease and either diagnosed early or helped to prevent it entirely. Disease Tracking Using Predictive Analytics. I can model how a contagious disease could spread over the course of time or across a specific area. Drug discovery models can discover new applications or potentially harmful interactions between different types of drugs. Diagnosis. Things that are invisible to the human eye might be missed. Hey, I can pick up and it goes on. In all these examples. You’ve got others with AI. Scientists can now analyze genomic data at an unprecedented scale. Algorithms trained on massive databases are uncovering mutations linked to everything from Alzheimer’s disease to rare genetic syndromes. More importantly, they are identifying combinations of genetic variations that increase disease risk patterns so complex they would be invisible to the human eye. There’s no way to explain this, folks, other than to explain it. We’ve got one more clip. We’re on a roll. Let’s hate it that we could talk about it after the break. Cut three. Go take Cancer Genomics, for example. Our models are helping to differentiate between driver mutations, those that cause cancer and passenger mutations, those that are incidental. This distinction is critical, and it helps oncologists target the real culprits and design more effective, individualized treatment plan. All these scientists, doctors, labs are using AI to great effect in the medical field, and you are going to find in the years ahead cures that you never even thought were possible in some of the most horrific diseases that mankind gets. But none of this is going on to the extent it can go on on these states that are banning it or creating red tape and bureaucratic obstacles to it. I’ve got the Cleveland Clinic analysis here. We have what is it does interpret images to identify broken bones, brain aneurysms, other concerns, tracked nodules over time to detect cancer flag potential concerns that might otherwise be overlooked. Support diagnostic decision making. It’s supporting research and innovation, developing new medications to understand how diseases work. Discover biomarkers. Yeah, moving fast because the amount that air is doing is really infinite. Combined patient data uncover larger health trends, make clinical trials more efficient by identifying ideal participants and flagging earlier results. What else is it doing? National Security. Open source intelligence, it’s able to pull together, filter enormous amounts of information. Also, it applies the history, the experience and battlefield activities to what’s taking place. Open source intelligence and analyze that signal intelligence table at breakneck speed. Analyze that. Tradecraft automation, Advanced machine learning models and so forth. Cyber security. Critical infrastructure. Defense. Real time detection. Autonomous agents. Local grid Protection against attacks. Predictive Threat Analysis. It’s tracking illicit funding. Pattern recognition. Battlefield operations and Tactical edge. Autonomous reconnaissance. Contested environments. Predictive maintenance. It goes on and on. I’ve got page after page. Page after page. And guess what’s happening right now? The gap between the United States and China. It’s getting much, much smaller. Why? Well, for one. We have the Luddites who are preventing in certain states and certain communities. The advancement of A.I. and data centers, the boogeyman. And so now the communist Chinese is not worried about democracy. They don’t have to worry about voting. They don’t have to worry about polls, and they’re not. And the gap is tightening in some areas there now. Advancing beyond us. And this is a big, big problem. It’s pointed out here in Newsweek. China is in a race with the United States to dominate the era from the diffusion of its own A.I. models worldwide to setting the standard for governance. Beijing has never been in a stronger position to lead, and a low cost propaganda campaign on X on Twitter is only one small sign that it’s apparently willing to do whatever it takes. Trying to slow the expansion of America’s data centers is one way China is working to get ahead. Its next target may be the American power grid on which those data centers and AI firms so heavily rely. China is out to win, they point out. Artificial intelligence is at the center of the next industrial revolution. China’s leaders have named it a key frontier technology, signaling its readiness to devote more resources, including generous subsidies toward its more successful players. China isn’t arguing about data centers. It needs AI to reignite its stagnant economy. Its homegrown AI players matter because their success and only affects global could fundamentally alter its core growth engine for the rest of the century. And they intend to be number one, and they intend to defeat us. What about jobs? It creates jobs. I data centers, not just the building of the data centers, which creates all kinds of blue collar jobs, people say, but they’re temporary. Well, whenever you’re building buildings, it’s temporary residential, you know, communities or skyscrapers or roads or. Okay, that there’s more than that. There’s the creation of businesses and services that grow out of artificial intelligence. And again, that’s infinite. Things that are unimaginable today, but some that are imaginable today in all kinds of fields and so forth and so on. There has to be a pushback in our country against the war on capitalism, against the war on data centers, the new industrial revolution. There has to be a pushback against these Luddites, against the socialists, these Marxists in foreign policy, against these isolationists. We know what they propose doesn’t work. We know what they propose will damage our country. We know this to be the case. So the next time you hear a politician say, I’m against AI data centers. Ask him if he has an iPhone. Drives a car. Well, a thousand other things in their life. And if I were you, I wouldn’t rely on politicians when it comes to really anything. All right, I’m back alive. Let me check. Yes, I am. We’ll take a break now. Then we’ll have a little chat. We’ll be right back.

Segment 4
You know, I asked myself the question, how would the most advanced society and economy. On the face of the earth, survive as such without air in data centers. Mr. Producer. I can’t even understand how this would work. How would the most advanced society and economy. In the entire world. In the world. I just don’t. How would the most advanced society survive? Without air and data centers. I mean, the fact is jobs would be lost. No. Right. Foreign governments, Foreign, foreign, other countries would be it. You know, other countries aren’t going to stop. Other countries would. But our producers set out. I mean, I’m just sitting here just trying to figure this out. How would this work? Exactly. No more data centers. Meaning air is stopped in its tracks. How would this work? It wouldn’t work. So what is it that these people want? They’re never forced to ask. And I notice online they try to intimidate people, threatening people, name calling, ins, people. You make well, you’re calling them Luddites. Luddite is an actual word. It’s a noun. Check it out. It’s a historic term. That applied to those who opposed. Industrial advancement. That’s what it was until you can include technological advancement. So are you comfortable putting the brakes on all this? How are we going to find new cures for cancer, heart disease, kidney disease and a thousand other things? And how are we supposed to turn off the human brain? I’m just curious how this is going to work. You’ll see a flow. You know, people say, why are we giving all these STEM jobs to foreigners yet? We’ll see a flow of STEM jobs, you know, science, technology and so forth overseas like you’ve never seen before in your life. I mean, it’s it is bizarre. If you ask me, you didn’t. But I’m just telling you. Crazy. And and I worry about it. People are now saying, you if we lose, it’s because of this. I thought if we lose, it’s because of Iran. Mr. Producer. I mean, Iran. You see, what we have are the Luddites and the isolationists, many of whom are the same people. Many of whom are the same people. They act like people who want to, you know, work in a bubble. Well, then let them go to work in a bubble. That’s not us. That’s not who we are. There’s something called human interaction. I’m desperately looking for that, Mr. Producer, and I can’t find it. So we’re going to have to start at the top of the next hour. I don’t know what the hell happened to that. See if I can find it. I don’t think I have enough time. Bear with me, America. Count the seven, would you, please? Why seven? I don’t know. But I misplace something and my desk is a medicine I can’t find. We’re going to have to wait. But think about what I’m telling you. Most of us don’t know how all this stuff works. I don’t pretend to. But I do know. The manner in which it transmits. In other words, you don’t just turn on the can. Look at all this information I have. It comes from somewhere. It comes from these data centers, the cloud, they call them the cloud. Oh, I remember the cloud, Yes. Sounds so nice, but it’s utterly irrelevant. The cloud, these massive buildings with the most sophisticated and fastest computers on the face of the earth. Constantly generating information, generating information. Now they’re putting them to even better use. To have them figure out stuff. I had them figure out stuff. And in the fastest way possible. With access to endless amounts of data and algorithms and so forth and so on, not just in our country, but around the world. And they can access public data. They can access data from other institutions if that’s available to where they can seek that information. If they want things that are so far above any individual or group of individuals heads. It’s unimaginable. You know, these invented drugs. They don’t come from nowhere. They come from somewhere. Same with all these things that you use in your daily life, in your daily life. Most of you use social media. Okay. That’s how I. The so much of the more sophisticated aspects of your vehicle that say I and I get go on and on, but I won’t. We’ll be right back.