Commerce Secretary calls his 'they suck water' quote 'propaganda' — the high-IQ stupid messaging a GOP senator just condemned

…(cont) That's the trick I want to walk you through today. Eggs were the practice run. Water's the real carton.

I've got a piece of paper in the truck — under the ice scraper, next to the registration I keep meaning to renew — dated September 2nd, about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on CNBC's "Squawk Box," answering a plain question about these AI data centers going up and how much water they use. Lutnick — and I wrote this down because I wanted to get it exact — is on the record having once said data centers "suck water." His words. Suck water. Not my phrase, not the reporter's, his.

Now here's the sticker taped over it, in that same piece, with no new study between the two sentences that I can find: the same water he'd already confirmed with his own mouth, he now calls "propaganda."

I'm not a scientist. I don't know what a data center drinks in a day. But I do know how to read two sentences from the same man about the same water, and I'd like somebody to tell me what changed between them. A new pipe? A new well? Or just a new word taped over the old one?

This is the part where Senator Kennedy comes in, because he was out that same week, Sunday, on Meet the Press, calling AI executives "high-IQ stupid people" over what the Washington Examiner described as their messaging failures. Very smart, he said. High-IQ. But stupid, about the messaging.

So which one's got the messaging problem — the executives Kennedy went on television to call high-IQ stupid, or his own party's Commerce Secretary, who went on television the same week and told the public their confirmed water concern was something the industry's critics made up?

My car's been making a noise since July that the mechanic says is the fan belt, and every time I open the glovebox for the manual I see the folded page from September 4th — Americans, the survey said, would rather live next to a nuclear plant than a data center, and the piece noted that's after four months of this getting worse, not better. I keep meaning to throw the page out. I keep not throwing it out.

Because the President already told those Americans what happens if they don't come around — "backwards and poor," his words, from a social media post on August 31st — and now his own Commerce Secretary is telling the same Americans that the reason they're worried, the water, was never real to begin with. Just a different word for the same thing.

I don't know how you hold both of those in your head at once. The water was real enough to confirm on television. Then it was real enough to deny on television. Same man. Same water.

Oh — before you go. One more thing. I want to read you the same page again, because I don't trust myself on this one without looking: on September 2nd, on the record, he said data centers suck water. And then, in that same piece, with nothing new on the desk in between, he called it something else.

Which sentence would you like me to believe, Mr. Secretary — the one about the water, or the one about the propaganda?