2026 Virginia Candidates Meet & Greet: Q/A(1): How to Support local tech infrastructure to safeguard US’ leadership in AI

Elon Musk made the assessment that China is poised to pass the United States in artificial intelligence technology within the next several years and his assessment is this is partially due to intellectual property theft, the large number of students from China who are learning American technology, the lack of regulation in China, and the fact that the CCP is actively lobbying for restrictive policies on tech here in the United States. One area that has recently come to the fore, and I don't know what the exact status of this is, but the opposition to data center development that's been taking place throughout the United States, some say that that's a good thing and others say that that is actually weakening America's status as an industry, a world industry leader in artificial intelligence. So my question for the candidates is what is your assessment of China's threat to America's tech industry and what steps would you take to counter that and protect America's leading spot as the world leader in artificial intelligence? Well this is Nick again. The first thing we have to do is protect our supply chains. The second thing is making sure that we protect our technology and I see the president is doing both and when you also look at it we need to ensure that we are in the Indo-Pacific making sure that our forces are aligned so that we can show force and or peace through force and that's going to be important that we make sure that we are set up in that form and that's what we need to do. One of my platforms is countering federal policies which I'm primarily interested in focused on actively blocking and reversing the policies of Donald Trump and I advocate for his impeachment because he's in there with the Chinese leader, he worships them, they worship each other and so my thing is this we need to get rid of Trump like yesterday and I know women are the ones that are standing up more than the men are up to him. As soon as we get rid of Trump then that will enable us to not constantly run after him every day when he makes a bad trip and we catch up we get rid of Trump then we can get together and be in more position to conquer any type of Chinese infiltration into our policies just overall. I believe in absolute data privacy and as I said earlier I am running for local office for Fairfax City Council elections are on November 3rd. I'm going to be in the same ballot all the school board and James Walken show and so on so please please please exercise the right to go and vote. I don't care what party you vote for as long as you go and vote. So I will ensure in my local municipal and public schools technologies that reject any vendors or any hardware that compromise any foreign autocracy government. Your data should be your data and you should be know where it's going and us as government should make sure that it's not going anywhere that they say so my movement will be to make sure the families will never be tracked by transitional repression and or watch and let me tell you I work for Fairfax County Health Department. I have worked for the county for 22 years. This is my retirement job before that I used to work in pharmacy so I'm a retired pharmacy person. Right now Fairfax County and it's now public so I can say it right now Fairfax County wants to have face recognition to everybody that works for Fairfax County. They want you to use your face and your eyes to come in and recognize yourself and this is something that they want to do it and right now what we're doing is we're doing impact bargaining on it so I'm already doing something about it. Thank you very much my brother. Go to my prosper America for congress.com you're going to find it there. It actually talks about this. I have an act ready to go built out and it's going to deal with American resiliency and in there you're going to find parts that's going to deal with counter espionage. It's going to deal with our infrastructure and like I said one of the things that I have and I've built is actually things day one. I'm not going to come here and talk about strategies. I'm going to come here and talk about solutions. Yes we need data centers. Why? Because if we do not lead in technology and AI, who is? China? Russia? We know the end results from all that. Now regardless of what we feel about data centers, yes we can spread across if you want to understand more about my energy go to pillar one talks about energy what we're going to do with the data centers so the energy from them is going to go back into your grid system as go lower your pocketbooks. I can tell you this we need this because if we don't China's going to use it. They're going to exploit and they're going to lead the way. I can tell you America first is a miracle and a global stage because no more do we have these big borders protecting us of these waters. Instantaneously we could be attacked and I can tell you give a real quick story in the agency I went to learn more about this technology about hacking. I took this hacking course and if you saw the game war games or the movie war games you saw the missiles going back and forth. We had that up and I asked the instructor what is that? He says those are ongoing attacks right now. The threat is real and we need to take care of it and I'm ready to solve those issues. I don't think I can take Elon more seriously. He wants to sell cars in China so any assessment that he makes is not a credible one. He's also destroyed basically our northern Virginia economy by firing federal workers through Doge. So I don't think I think he says seriously. The second part is we really have to look within ourselves. Right now I've talked about authoritarianism and dictatorship but one of the things that they do is attack education and we're seeing literally brain drain from the United States right now. So the brains, the people, the experts who have this information are moving elsewhere including to China. So we have to take responsibility for that. Well I recognize China as a threat. It steals our intellectual property and other things like that but also they're still behind us on some things and we shouldn't be sending our chips to them, our conductor, anything like that if we think they're a credible threat. So I'm not sure that Elon Musk is someone that I would look at as an expert on that particular thing but the threat is somewhat real but we also have to look within ourselves. What are we doing to our educators and to our experts who feel like they have to flee the country to go somewhere else to take a job for less money and then also the expertise that they have is being used to potentially put someone ahead of us. So we have to take make sure that we are responsible for what we do. I would also mention that the additional thing that I want to say is not just the technology. I am concerned that China owns a huge part of our agriculture and that goes about food and when you talk about and that is something very serious we're not talking about enough. For the past 35 years I've been in leadership positions and I've always maintained China is our greatest threat. In fact I think they're number one, they're number two, and they're number three. I'm proud to count among my friends and supporters Gordon Chang and Xi Van Fleet and they both agree. Gordon's kind of focused on the CCP's activities overseas and Xi's focused on them here domestically and I think they both work together. So I want to make two key points about data centers which was the question was about data centers. Number one I will not see U.S. preeminence to any other nation when it comes to AI and data centers. I won't do it because I know it's going to be important for our future. The second point is that I will ensure that data centers are not shoved down the throats of any locality that does not want it particularly here in Virginia. So we'll have to look up some technological solutions where we maintain the lead but we do not impose it upon localities because the localities are the ones that will bear the cost. But let me make one point about those costs. There is some Chinese disinformation about how bad they are so I want to make sure we get the facts and one example is the amount of water it uses. It's kind of a closed-loop system like a radiator in a car but there are a lot of people thinking that there's going to be a huge burden on the local water supply. So number one I want to get the facts straight and I want to make sure the local decisions are made with full and transparent information. As I already mentioned in my introduction I'm already working to protect this country especially in the technology arena. When it comes to the Huawei equipment as a result of finding that equipment and mandating that it be taken out of our critical infrastructure our telecommunications network it wasn't it didn't just stop there. Any contract any federal contract requires certification by that contractor that they do not have that Huawei equipment in their infrastructure otherwise they are not a government contractor. So that's the first thing that we've already done for you that I'm already already worked on for you. The other thing is artificial intelligence. I actually have a executive leadership certificate in artificial intelligence. I've been formally trained by Microsoft, Google and the Ford Foundation. I understand how important artificial intelligence is for this country not only for our personal cell phones but also for our national security and working on that critical infrastructure is a perfect example and I will continue to protect your secure personal use of your cell phones as well as our national security concerns. And in doing that that's why it's important to me to bring those 514,000 vacant cyber security jobs to Virginia because we need to keep our country secure and we have vacant jobs. Why not fill them with Virginians and then at the same time protect our country from all the threats especially the CCP threats. All threats need to be mitigated and this is the best way to do it to make sure we're ahead in AI and also cyber security. Thank you. So I have a different take on the data centers. Ask you all to look into DFLOC Fairfax and understand the FLOC camera system but I also would say the show called The Highwire and this week they just did a very detailed review of how Axon, the body cameras that the police are wearing is going to integrate with our light posts. So we are in a full-on surveillance state right now. I don't know the connection between CCP and who's doing it but the bottom line is we need to be aware of it and you need to go to your supervisors and tell them not to do it right. There's contracts with FLOC right now. We have contracts with Axon and Axon uses AI to do police reports from body cam footage. So there's a lot that we don't know about. So I would focus on exactly what's going into these data centers. Why do we need them? Why are we even allowing them? So I think we need to get a lot more information on what the data centers really are and that would be my first focus. As a politician again I can emphasize the privacy is the main thing that I can contribute here but the truth of the matter in like the AI race is that China probably is going to win because they have way more power generation capacity which we are still struggling to build their way ahead there and also you need the most training data and we actually respect privacy rights to some extent here. Like if China has a billion people that they are generating data on every single day we have 300 million and most of that data they can't get to they're probably going to win and you can see that in the EVs already. Like China's EVs are out competing every other company's cars in every metric and that's because they had the most data they automated the fastest. I don't know if I want to live in a world where the way that we keep our competitive edge is sacrifice all of our personal rights and our privacy. So as an individual candidate I want to emphasize that I will protect the privacy of Arlington citizens, Arlington students. I do not want AI in schools. I don't want to be trained on them and how they give feedback to the machine to make it more addictive. Like it's so novel that we don't know what it's actually going to do and I think we should all be more afraid and more like eyes wide open because Anthropic just last week had an AI model escape its own containment center hack into another company to get the answers to a test question. That was not meant to happen. So I think we can't just say do we want AI supremacy we have to ask what is the cost of getting there and what are we risking? I appreciate it. Mo's comment about big ag, I wonder how much CCP money is in big food and big med that I talked about earlier. The Sierra Club is one of the biggest opponents of data centers and anything having to do with expanding energy. I call them up. The Sierra Club does not disclose their donors. I think it's up to the Sierra Club to disclose their donors and prove to us that they're not a front for the CCP. And finally, my opponent probably has a war chest of a million dollars. I have four thousand dollars. I think you should be very careful voting for candidates that have these huge, huge war chests. You need to really be concerned about where their money is coming from and how their hands are tied. Thank you.