From§Each

Page A227From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 1 November 2026

DON'T USE WATER

Lutnick once called data centers' water use real, now calls it propaganda.

By LouOne More Question

“A Guide to the Races That Matter to Rural America”, 1 November 2026 (Photo via Drop Site News — the original report)

As it ran on the front

I keep a notebook in the glove box — spiral, cheap, from the corner store — and there's a page in it I have been meaning to ask you about. Give me a second. It's never where I think I left it. Here. Here it is.

September the 2nd, I wrote this down: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a piece about his own interview, is quoted as having once said data centers "suck water." That's the word the article used, in quotation marks, like it mattered that he'd said it that plainly.…

…(cont) Same page, same man, and this is the line I keep coming back to.

I don't know what you do with a man who has both of those in his file. Does the thing suck water, or doesn't it. I went out to the yard that evening with the hose still coiled from the week before and ran it into a bucket, just to have something to do with my hands while I thought it over. Didn't take thirty seconds to fill. The dog watched me do it, the way she does. I'm no engineer. I don't know what a facility that size uses in a day that a bucket in my yard would settle. I only know a man can't be right in both of those sentences, and I had written down both of them, off his own words, a page apart.

There was more under it, so I kept reading. July of 2024, I'd written that four companies hold almost all the fertilizer in this country, and that the Koch family was putting together a merger one outlet said would push the price up again on farmers who don't have another supplier to call. I don't know what that has to do with water. I know it's filed in the same book, under the same worry, which is what it costs a person to grow something.

Then this July, the 22nd, CBS had lung cancer passing breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in American women, and said a growing share of the new cases are turning up in women the broadcast calls never-smokers. How big a share, the page I have doesn't say. I wrote down "growing" because that's the word they used, and I'm not going to hand you a number I don't have.

Out on the prairie, the 25th of October, the Guardian had canvassers going door to door across the midwest, talking to people about what's weighing on them this close to an election. It didn't say which worry came up at which door. I wasn't there for it. I only have the one line, that it mattered to them to talk to every single person.

I had the pen capped and the notebook half shut when my wife called in from the porch that the mail had come, and there was a guide in it from a place called Drop Site, dated today, with a title that fits the words "Cancer" and "Water" and "Big Ag" into one line, and a second guide underneath it to the races, because the whole balance of power in Congress, it says right there, is up for grabs two days from now.

So here's what I can't get past, and I'll let you go. A man wrote "suck" in one sentence and "don't" in the next, and the guide that landed on my porch with nobody's name on it is asking the voter two days out to hold both of his sentences at once. Which one of those was the propaganda.

“That's the move: call it a real cost while you're building it, call it propaganda the second somebody asks you to pay for it — same mouth, same word, different week. Rural counties vote Tuesday holding both of his quotes in one hand, the lung cancer numbers and the four-company fertilizer bill in the other, while the man running Commerce tells them their own well is a messaging problem. The con isn't the water. The con is that he gets to decide, mid-sentence, which fact this week is real.”
Sal
“Secretary Lutnick wasn't contradicting himself, he was correcting the record — he flagged the water use early to get ahead of the story, then called the overreaction itself propaganda, which if you lay the quotes side by side is... actually the same claim said twice in opposite directions. Did I say that? That's not how it sounded when I practiced it.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

This Billionaire Family is Suffocating Rural America Four companies set the price of fertilizer in America
More Perfect Union§

Just 4 companies control almost all the fertilizer in America. Now the Kochs are planning a billion-dollar merger to drive up prices for farmers—and suffocate rural America—even more. The post This Billionaire Family is Suffocating Rural America appeared first on More Perfect Union .

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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.