Mr. Wonderful Admits He Can't Prove China Is Behind Data Center Protests [View all]

Source: Gizmodo

When Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a Mr. Wonderful, found that his Shark Tank-ian pitch to the people of Utah to put up a massive data center on their land received a collective, “I’m out” from the citizenry, he insisted that the protestations weren’t coming from true Utahans but rather from a Chinese influence campaign—and swore he had “guys” who could prove it. On Thursday, he admitted that his source for those claims was his vivid imagination.

“Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Katner are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” O’Leary wrote in a post on X Thursday.

O’Leary’s backtracking comes after he claimed that several Utah-based groups, founded and operated by Utah-based activists, were actually getting their talking points and funding from China. During an appearance on Fox News, he claimed that he had experts who did a “deep dig into the IP addresses” of accounts criticizing his project and found “two cells inside of Utah” that were supposedly linked to China. He also alleged that there was a slush fund of “millions, hundreds of millions of dollars” made available to the opponents of his data center by foreign adversaries.

Now O’Leary is admitting what was pretty much obvious to anyone who listened to him or has paid any attention to the general reception of data centers across the country: he’s full of shit, and the opposition is legitimate. According to ABC4, Utah’s local ABC affiliate, O’Leary has also deleted past posts in which he claimed that anti-data center organizations were bought and paid for by China and other foreign actors.

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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/mr-wonderful-admits-he-cant-prove-china-is-behind-data-center-protests-2000778388