Sun Day and Make Billionaires Pay- September 21, 2025
– Rania Masri, NCEJN Director of Organizing & Policy
I was asked to speak on climate change, immigration, and fascism. Three big topics, yes.
Let’s break them down.
Where are we now with ‘Climate Change’? The current measure of carbon dioxide parts per million is 424! I remember, back in the 1980s, we worried about CO2 reaching 350 ppm. We are now living a climate emergency. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO2 was close to, or above 400 ppm. During that time, sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.”
What about immigration?
What is the difference, I ask you, between an immigrant, an expat, and a settler? Legally speaking, expatriation is the process of renouncing citizenship and relocating abroad permanently, while immigration can be anything from relocating abroad with the intent to reside abroad permanently to temporary relocating (typically for work). Yet, we have come to use the word ‘expat’ when people leave a rich country to work in a poor country, and an immigrant, when someone leaves a poor country to work in a rich country. And a settler? Well, that is a someone who moves into someone else’s land, steals their resources, and claims it as his own, often backed by a colonial power.
What is the United States? Is this a country of immigrants? No. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz powerfully lays out, such a presentation serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. And until this country recognizes the horror and genocide it imposed on the First Nation communities, and continues to impose through violating unjust Treaties with First Nation communities, and until this country pays needed reparations to both the indigenous communities and the African-American communities for the horror of slavery, then the US will continue to support other settler-colonies around the world, namely the theft of Palestine.
Where are we now, with regards to immigration?
To understand the injustices committed today – and to best protect each other, we must recognize that the anti-immigrant policies began before the Trump Administration. It was the Democratic Party that normalized anti-immigrant cruelty, alongside Republican administrations. Jean Guerrero reminded us that, “it was the Clinton administration that oversaw the initial militarization of the border in the 1990s, after which we have seen as many as 80,000 people who have died trying to cross the border. …And after Clinton’s border militarization, we saw President Obama deport 3 million people, more than any previous president.” Both the Republican and the Democratic Administrations have created a two-tiered system of justice, one in which immigrants and people who look like immigrants have fewer, if any, rights.
What about fascism? Define fascism is generally defined as the fusion of state power, nationalism, and violence to build a totalizing order that eradicates pluralism and remakes society in the image of the dominant nation, race, or ideology. The current administration is definitely moving this country further and further into fascism, but, as with immigration, we need to realize that settler-colonialism, and the racism that supports it, are foundational aspects of fascism. Ask the First Nation communities if fascism in the US was merely born in the past few years.
What brings all these elements together? A philosophy of profit over people.
What is the economic system that needs constant growth and expansion, an economic and political system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit? Capitalism. Profit over people. And in the US, the currency is not backed by gold – but backed by militarization, by the hundreds of US military bases around the world.
An economic system, backed by the military, produces imperialism.
Karl Marx predicted that the final stages of capitalism would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. Does the Trump Administration represent this stage of late capitalism?
One of the threads that brings all these elements together – a rush for private profit, a cash crop for fossil fuel expansion, and software systems that increase oppression against immigrants and support fascism – are data centers and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A data center is a facility that houses large groups of networked computer servers and related infrastructure (such as storage systems, networking equipment, and power supplies). These centers are designed to process, store, and distribute vast amounts of digital data. They increase fossil fuel expansion, increase energy usage, drain needed water sources, take farmland and other land and transform it into giant warehouses of hundreds and hundreds of acres, and all the while invests in AI.
A paper recently published, entitled Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI, reveals, “it is not sustainable, as, despite efficiency improvements, its compute demands increase faster than model performance, leading to unreasonable economic requirements and a disproportionate environmental footprint. Second, it implies focusing on certain problems at the expense of others, leaving aside important applications, e.g. health, education, or the climate. Finally, it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others in the context of shaping both AI research and its applications throughout society.”
AI takes every camera, phone, and database and turns it into a weapon for tracking and control. Big Tech provides the cloud and algorithms ICE uses to target, detain, kidnap, and deport people. AI fuels fascism; it merges corporates and state power, dehumanizes communities into data, and automates repression.
Data centers and AI have already become one backbone of military violence. Simply look at the violence imposed on Palestinians. A new kind of warfare by algorithms. The Israeli military has used four digital tools, in violation of international humanitarian law, to murder Palestinians, employing both Israeli and American technology companies, at unprecedented levels and at faster rates.
Israel’s military machine is using AI-driven systems to identify and target Palestinians. Systems like “Gospel” recommend buildings to bomb, while “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” recommend people to kill or track. These systems process mass surveillance data—facial recognition (including from Google Photos), WhatsApp memberships, social media, phone contacts, and cellular information—to generate “kill lists,” which soldiers then approve for strikes on families and neighborhoods.
U.S. tech companies enable this infrastructure. An Israeli military commander shared publicly that the military is currently using civilian cloud infrastructure from the companies Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to expand their genocidal military capacities in Gaza. The American data-mining company Palantir is also being used to operate AI systems for the IOF, as reported by The Nation.
Gaza has become the first AI-powered genocide.
All of occupied Palestine has become a laboratory for colonial domination. “Israel’s military rule and genocidal disregard for Palestinian life allow private companies to prototype and refine their products through contracts with the IOF, before exporting them abroad.” Colonial surveillance tools like Pegasus, created by the Israeli NSO Group, are now in use globally to hack journalists, human rights defenders, and activists.”
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, admits: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” And therein lies the temptation: “this technology promises to lay off more workers, more rapidly, than any innovation in recent memory. … So far, if the AI revolution has succeeded in anything, it is in making very rich people even more rich.” The AI boom could represent the most efficient upward redistribution of wealth in modern history.
Meanwhile, “AI is also being deployed by the State of North Carolina to improve government operations, to identify unnecessary or overly burdensome regulations, and to provide user-friendly AI agents to help North Carolinians navigate state services.” The Governor has also established “ the North Carolina AI Accelerator to “facilitate NC state agencies and private companies and university partners to develop and test new technology solutions.”
A new Media Justice report, entitled ‘The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in The South,” warns that data centers, marketed as “progress” by corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Apple, are creating a new wave of environmental and economic extraction in the South—similar to petrochemical “sacrifice zones.” The South is now the U.S. epicenter of data centers, with $200 billion in projects underway. These centers demand massive amounts of energy, driving construction of new gas pipelines, coal plants, and nuclear facilities. Data centers already use 8.9% of U.S. electricity (projected to reach 12% by 2028, 56% from fossil fuels). A joint study from NC State University and Carnegie Mellon projects these developments could increase electric bills by 8% nationally by 2030. Utilities are responding: Duke Energy has projected explosive new demand from data centers—equivalent to 4 to 6 nuclear power plants—fueling approval of new gas plants even though state law requires decarbonization.
In Richmond County, east of Charlotte, Amazon is planning a $10 billion, 800-acre ‘computing campus,’ threatening to worsen water issues in this small North Carolina community. West of Charlotte, a ‘data center corridor’ is underway: Apple’s Catawba County site is part of its $500 billion U.S. expansion strategy, Microsoft is preparing four new facilities in the area, and Google is weighing an expansion of its Caldwell County operations.
In response, people are organizing. Communities are organizing. $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition! Here, Tarboro, an hour east of Raleigh, voted to reject a $6.4 billion facility. In Apex, southwest of the city, opposition is mounting to a proposed “digital campus” on 190 acres of farmland. We are currently building a NC Data Center Coordination Network.
Data centers, and the AI they are built to support, are a hydra, a multi-headed beast, draining our water resources, fueling fossil fuel expansion, and expanding the powers of repression and oppression. But, as we know, the Hydra was defeated by Heracles. And, through the building of collective power and intersectional organizing, we can plan to do the same.
