Agitators united by Chinese money, hate for America target data centers, experts warn
In 2024, climate activists in New York City protested alongside anti-Israel protesters at a rally headlined “Climate Justice Means Free Palestine.” Last year, climate change celebrity icon Greta Thunberg tried to storm Israel by sea on a flotilla protesting the country’s war in Gaza, yelling “Free! Free! Palestine!” when she was refused entry.
And, last week, activists from CodePink, a far-left feminist activist group that has received funds from an American expatriate, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, took a break from their rallies supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cuba Communist Party to circulate a video on Instagram, attacking a Utah data center project backed by investor Kevin O’Leary.
What connects these causes?
Climate activists, anti-Israel protesters and other activist movements with very different agendas have become strange bedfellows united by a shared disdain for America and funding from China, according to experts who warn the trend is weakening the United States amid a rapidly accelerating AI race.
Critics say the same activist ecosystem is now targeting America’s AI infrastructure and industrial power, in a development that experts warn could undermine the United States in its technological competition with China.
The growing convergence increasingly includes communist and Islamist activist movements, and it recently extended into campaigns targeting America’s artificial intelligence data centers, with activist and environmental groups helping delay or block dozens of such projects worth billions of dollars over concerns about energy use, water consumption and environmental impact amid rising power demand.
Fox News Digital has observed many of the movements protesting side-by-side at demonstrations across the country despite their otherwise stark ideological differences.
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“What all of these protests have in common — the protests against AI data centers or the environmental protests or the protest against Israel — is that anti-American trend within them,” Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua told Fox News Digital.
“Climate change was also one of those very trendy causes to protest for or against, and now there’s always this quest to find what is the next thing to revolutionize,” Riboua added. “And this revolution against the United States is always welcome, no matter what type of forms and shapes it takes.”
Fox News Digital has previously reported that Singham, a U.S.-born tech tycoon living in Shanghai, funneled roughly $285 million into six activist nonprofits accused by lawmakers and analysts of promoting pro-China narratives and anti-American protest movements.
O’Leary accused local groups opposing the Utah project of being tied to China-linked funding networks and argued the backlash reflected a broader nationwide trend of activist campaigns targeting AI infrastructure, though Fox News Digital has not independently verified the Utah-related allegations.
Riboua, who specializes in anti-West ideological movements and China’s influence in the Middle East, warned that the overlap between climate activists, anti-Israel protesters, communists and Islamists is being driven by a broader anti-American worldview she described as “Third Worldism,” an ideology that divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed” and casts the United States and the West as the primary source of global problems.
The ideology unites otherwise unrelated activist causes under a shared anti-Western framework, she said.
“Third Worldism drives anti-Americanism because the goal of Third Worldism is basically dismantling a cohesive Western society or Western country,” Riboua said.
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Energy expert Brenda Shaffer, a research faculty member at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, described the broader activist convergence as part of a “red-green-green alliance,” an ideological overlap between three elements: communist movements, characterized by the color red; Islamist activism, described as green; and environmental protest groups, symbolized as green.
They increasingly unite around anti-West and anti-American causes, she said.
Riboua said the alliance has become increasingly visible as activist groups move rapidly from one issue to another — from climate protests to anti-Israel demonstrations and now toward campaigns targeting AI infrastructure and data centers.
The overlap has also become increasingly visible on the streets. At a 2024 “Climate Justice Means Free Palestine” rally in New York City, climate activists and pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested side-by-side.
“There’s always this quest to find what is the next thing to revolutionize,” she said.
Riboua pointed to Thunberg’s evolution into a vocal anti-Israel activist as an example of the growing ideological overlap between climate activism and broader anti-West protest movements.
“Greta is not an Islamist, and I think that she never read Karl Marx, but she has all the good instincts of a revolutionary against the evil oppressor, Westerner, and the United States,” Riboua said.
Shaffer warned the growing convergence is increasingly affecting industries critical to America’s economic and technological competition with China.
“Energy is crucial to the AI race, to the data centers,” Shaffer told Fox News Digital via a Zoom interview.
Shaffer argued that while activist groups in the West target fossil fuels, AI infrastructure and industrial development, China continues rapidly expanding coal production, manufacturing capacity and energy generation.
“So we’re truly by adopting international climate policies, we’re weakening the West,” Shaffer said.
“China really benefits from these policies that we adopt and we just let them keep forging ahead with coal.”
Shaffer compared the trend to Soviet-backed anti-nuclear activism during the Cold War, arguing that adversarial powers have historically benefited from anti-energy movements in the West.
“You saw traditionally the Soviet Union funding movements against nuclear energy in Europe so that Europe would remain dependent on Soviet and later Russian gas,” Shaffer said.
She also warned that increasing Western dependence on Chinese renewable-energy supply chains could create new strategic vulnerabilities because China dominates major parts of the global solar and inverter market.
Shaffer argued many activist campaigns focus on delaying or blocking energy and infrastructure projects in the United States while China rapidly expands coal consumption and industrial production.
Riboua added that many ordinary protesters are not necessarily driven by ideology, but by simplified narratives amplified through social media clickbait and activist messaging.
“Some people are generally good people and they want to have a moral position,” she said. “They know headlines … there’s a lot of ignorance.”
Shaffer warned that artificial intelligence infrastructure requires enormous amounts of reliable electricity and said the West risks falling behind China if energy costs continue rising and infrastructure projects continue facing activist opposition.
“You can’t have an arms industry built on solar energy,” she said.
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