by Jon Creasy
In 2024, Hawkins County voters gave President Donald Trump a very clear mandate.
Voters there chose the president by giving him 84 percent of the vote, making it one the Volunteer State’s top 20 Trump supporting counties.
But Hawkins County Government does not seem to embrace the America First agenda, including making the U.S. the crypto capital of the world and treating energy-abundant innovation as a national strength.
When Kentucky-based ExoticRidge Crypto Company proposed an 8-megawatt off-the-grid Bitcoin mining project in Bulls Gap, county leaders pursued a blanket, retroactive ban on the company.
The ExoticRidge facility is completely self-sufficient, using only an ethane flare from a local gas plant as power and no water for its operations. The cutting-edge Bitcoin mining operation also required no zoning or local regulatory approvals as Hawkins County has no active zoning laws in place.
Yet, the Hawkins County Commission passed their ban on the facility with no regard for property rights or the facts about its operation. Opponents tried to conflate the resource
neutral bitcoin mine with a data center – two completely opposite forms of industry. Despite the obviously conservative nature of its citizens, Hawkins County elected officials behaved like liberal government regulators when a private property owner sought to put land and energy resources to productive use.
But that was just the beginning of these elected officials’ hypocrisy. The Hawkins County Commission as warned by its legal counsel their ban was not something they could successfully defend in court. Citizens there worried openly about the financial cost to its small, rural government to defend the county commission’s actions.
The commission then rejected a no-dollar settlement offer by ExoticRidge that would simply have allowed the company to operate.
Fearful of its likely legal costs, Hawkins County government got in bed with one of the most liberal, anti-Trump organizations in the country – the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC).
SELC not a local lawyer helping a small county through a technical dispute. It is a national environmental litigation organization with a long record of suing the Trump administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the regional power provider that supplies most of Tennessee’s electricity and anchors the region’s economic development.
The county commission’s message is effectively this: We oppose the progressive agenda, unless it suits our purposes. That is not principle. That is any-port-in-a-storm governance.
And while SELC’s representation may be pro bono, there is nothing free about handing over the county’s reputation and voice to an outside advocacy group with a worldview many Hawkins County voters would reject in almost any other context.
Nationally, conservatives are arguing that America should lead in digital assets, blockchain, energy production, and advanced computing rather than cede those industries to hostile foreign competitors. Meanwhile, Hawkins County’s “Republican” government is helping build the legal precedent that these same industries can be banned outright when a handful of residents get loud enough.
Communities are right to care about quality of life as it relates to any project, and those concerns can be addressed through clear, neutral, and legally sound guardrails. What Hawkins County did instead was use the broad power of government to single out one industry and say, in effect, not here, not ever, regardless of the project’s actual impact. That is a dangerous precedent for rural Tennessee.
If Hawkins County government can ban a lawful use today because it dislikes cryptocurrency, the same theory can be used tomorrow against another business. If Hawkins County’s elected leaders want to oppose President Trump’s agenda, partner with left-wing environmentalists, and defend sweeping government power over private property, they are free to make that case. But they should come clean with voters about their true allegiances and stop pretending they are conservatives.
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Jon Creasy is an East Tennessee Bitcoin and cryptocurrency professional with over 12 years of experience marketing within the Bitcoin space.
Photo “Data Center” by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.
