President Zelenskyy's Address on December 31, 2025

 

What does Ukraine want? Peace, yes. At any cost? No. We want the end of the war, not the end of Ukraine. Are we tired? Extremely. Does that mean we are ready to surrender? Those who think so, are deeply mistaken. And clearly, over all these years, they still have not understood who Ukrainians are. A people who have held on through 1,407 days of a full-scale war. 

Just take in that number. That is longer than the Nazi occupation of many of our cities during World War II. 1,407 days of an unconquered Ukraine. A country that, in effect, spends every night in shelters. Every night in struggle. Often, without electricity; often without sleep, holding positions for many, many days. Yet always, without panic, without chaos, without division but in unity so that we can have peace.

Do we want the war to end? Absolutely. Why has it not happened yet? The answer is right next door to our country. Can Russia end the war? Yes. Does it want to? No. Can the world force it to do so? Yes, and only that way will it work. Why does the world not do this to the full extent? Let us break this down, step by step, honestly as it truly is. Our people know this better than anyone. Of course, more than anything else. Right now, we want peace. But unlike New Year’s snow, it will not simply fall from the sky like a miracle. 

But we believe in peace; we fight for it, and we work for it. And we will continue to do so. Because in 2026, we truly want that the skies be calm and the land be peaceful; that warmth and light fill our homes and not 170, but the full 220 days as it should be, that all our people return home from the front, from captivity, from occupation; that we stand, that Ukraine stands. 

Happy New Year, dear people. Slava Ukraini.

Nothing Is Ours Anymore

 

On Sunday [December 27], both President Donald Trump and his secretary of housing and urban development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die). This is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency and “innovation.” As a result, nothing is “ours” anymore. Instead, we’re renting our lives away. There was a time when you bought things.

You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or tablet without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

We’re renting our lives away. America is disappearing. Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental. Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought the word-processing program once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies and television. At first it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job — a college education — has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt — the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students — and I regularly get calls to my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance. That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.

It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone — banking, work, navigation, health care — being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like mobile apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information. Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal. Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you. And because the billionaire “tech bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth and polishing the public image of this new rental economy — all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits — America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire tech bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it.

It’s gotten so bad that apps — which also acquire and then sell our data — have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy — not billionaires — sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours anymore. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee. If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.

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Experts warn the internet could crash hard, and you’d better be ready

The modern internet was never designed to be the single point of failure for daily life that it has quietly become. Yet experts now argue that a large, cascading outage is not a sci‑fi scenario but a realistic shock that could hit banking, logistics, health care and even basic communication all at once. If that happens, the people who cope best will be the ones who treated a digital blackout like any other disaster and prepared in advance.

Why experts think a major crash is inevitable

Specialists in network resilience increasingly warn that the question is not if connectivity will fail on a massive scale, but how long it will stay down when it does. In detailed briefings, Dec analysts behind “Experts Warn the Internet Will Go Down In” a “Big Way” and “And You” “Better Be Ready” argue that the system’s complexity and centrality make a prolonged outage statistically likely, even if the exact trigger is impossible to predict. They stress that most households and businesses have no backup plan at all, despite clear advice to “Try and” create one before a crisis hits, which is why they frame preparation as a basic form of risk management rather than paranoia.

Those warnings are echoed in a separate Dec assessment that highlights how “Experts” see the internet as critical infrastructure on par with power and water. That report notes that “Most” people underestimate how quickly services would unravel if connectivity vanished, and it points to Federal guidance that already treats large‑scale network disruption as a national security concern. Taken together, these analyses sketch a simple picture: a system that underpins almost everything, maintained by a patchwork of public and private actors, and increasingly fragile at the edges.

The hidden fragility of the global network

On paper, the internet looks robust, with countless routes and providers. In practice, a surprising amount of traffic depends on a limited number of physical chokepoints and aging systems. A Dec infrastructure study titled “Introduction” and “Growing Concern for Global Connectivity” warns that roughly half of the world’s networks are now “threatened by ageing technology,” and that the “implications of widespread aging” equipment include higher failure rates and longer repair times. The same analysis calls for coordinated investment “between public and private sectors,” a diplomatic way of saying that many operators have deferred upgrades for too long.

Physical links are only part of the story. The encyclopedia entry on outages notes that “Disruptions of” submarine cables can knock entire regions offline and that “Countries” with less developed infrastructure are especially vulnerable to single points of failure. When those undersea arteries are combined with terrestrial fiber routes, data centers and internet exchange points, the result is a global system that looks redundant on a map but can still be crippled if a few key components fail at once.

Centralization, Cloudflare and the new single points of failure

Even where hardware is modern, the way traffic is routed has created new concentrations of risk. As one technical analysis puts it, “Nov” engineers remember that “Back” in the early days of the web, “there were countless web hosting providers, and many companies even ran their own servers,” but that era has largely ended. Today, a small group of cloud and content delivery networks, including Cloudflare, sit in front of huge portions of the world’s websites and applications, which means a configuration error or software bug in one platform can ripple across thousands of services at once.

That same explanation notes that this consolidation was driven by efficiency and performance, not malice, yet it has quietly turned companies like Cloudflare into systemic utilities. When a single provider handles DNS, security filtering and traffic optimization for banks, retailers and media outlets simultaneously, any outage can feel like “the internet” itself is broken. The more organizations pile into the same stack, the more a technical hiccup in one vendor starts to resemble a structural weakness in the entire network.

From aging hardware to cyberattacks what could actually break

When experts talk about a “big” failure, they are not imagining one neat cause but a tangle of overlapping threats. A technical review of the “10 Biggest Internet Outages in History” lists “Apr” “Key Takeaways” that show how “Internet” disruptions have stemmed from human mistakes, infrastructure failures, cyberattacks and environmental damage. In one case, a misconfigured router propagated bad routes that black‑holed traffic; in another, a construction crew severed a critical fiber bundle; in others, targeted attacks overwhelmed key services. The pattern is that complex systems rarely fail in isolation, and recovery often takes longer than anyone expects.

Security researchers add a darker layer. A study summarized under the headline “Catastrophic cyber event could cause widespread disruptions to global infrastructure” warns that a “Jul” scale “Catastrophic” incident could hit multiple sectors at once. The work by “Mun” researchers models scenarios where coordinated attacks on industrial control systems, telecom networks and cloud platforms combine to produce cascading outages that are far harder to contain than a single ransomware incident. In that context, the internet is both a target and a dependency, which means a serious cyber event could break connectivity at the very moment people most need information.

What a true blackout would feel like on the ground

It is easy to treat all of this as abstract until you imagine daily life without the constant hum of connectivity. Financial analysts who study systemic risk warn that “Analysts” now “fear global internet blackout would lead to widespread chaos,” precisely because “We barely notice the constant hum of our connected lives” until it stops. 

Their scenario work suggests that payment systems, logistics tracking, telemedicine and even basic navigation would degrade within hours, while misinformation and panic could spread through whatever channels remain. Emergency planners point out that the impact would not be evenly distributed. A safety guide that asks “At the” core “end of the day” what risk looks like in your area notes that vulnerability depends heavily on local hazards such as hurricanes, wildfires, flooding or tornadoes, and on how much critical infrastructure is already stressed by extreme “weather, according to Climate Central.” 

In regions where mobile networks and fiber lines share the same corridors as power and transport, a single storm or wildfire can knock out multiple lifelines at once, turning an internet outage into a broader community crisis.

How preppers think about a prolonged outage

While most people assume the network will always be there, some communities have been quietly gaming out the opposite. In one discussion titled “How, if at all, should prepping for a prolonged internet outage” a user named “Oct” “Paper” “Philosopher” lays out a simple hierarchy: secure water, food and medical supplies first, then think about information and communication. Commenters suggest low‑tech entertainment like paper books, board games and card games to keep morale up, and they emphasize solar chargers, power banks and spare batteries so that essential devices can stay alive even if the grid is unstable.

A separate thread bluntly titled “How do you prep for complete internet blackout?” drills deeper into information resilience. One widely shared checklist starts with “Dec” “What” to do: “Get” a local copy of “Wikipedia and” other reference material, download a “Linux Distro and” learn how to use it offline, and store manuals for everything from car repair to first aid. The logic is that if cloud services vanish, the knowledge they hosted should not vanish with them. In that sense, preppers are treating information the way earlier generations treated canned food and spare parts.

Building a backup internet plan for your household

Risk experts who study infrastructure failures argue that ordinary households do not need a bunker, but they do need a plan. The Dec advisory that framed “Experts Warn the Internet Will Go Down In” a “Big Way” and told “And You” that you “Better Be Ready” urges families to “Try and” think through how they would communicate, access money and get news if their phones and home broadband stopped working. It recommends a written family emergency plan that covers meeting points, alternative contact methods and key account details stored securely offline, so that people are not scrambling for passwords or phone numbers in the middle of a crisis.

Practical steps can be surprisingly simple. A guide on “How” to “Prepare for Power Outages and Blackouts” starts with the basics: “Charge All of Your Devices” in “Advance,” “Make” sure you have a charged cell phone and backup battery, and identify a safe place you can go for help if needed. Those same principles apply to a network failure, with one twist: you may still have electricity but no data, so it pays to keep critical documents printed, maps downloaded and a small amount of cash on hand in case card systems are offline. Treating connectivity as a convenience rather than a guarantee is the mental shift that makes all of this easier.

Your emergency connectivity and tech kit

For people who want to go beyond the bare minimum, technologists recommend assembling a small “connectivity kit” alongside the usual go‑bag. A detailed checklist on “How To Prepare Your Tech for a Natural Disaster” explains “How” to “Purchase” a compact waterproof case and stock it with “Emergency” numbers, backup drives, and multiple charging options. It specifically urges readers to “Include a crank, solar, or” battery‑powered radio, along with stress‑relief items “while you wait,” because information and morale are both critical in the first days of any disruption.

That kit can also hold the digital assets preppers talk about: offline maps, downloaded manuals, and a bootable operating system on a USB stick. Combining those with the power strategies from the blackout guide, such as topping up batteries before storms and rotating power banks so they stay healthy, turns a fragile smartphone into a more resilient tool. The goal is not to stay online at all costs, but to keep your most important data and communication options available when the wider network is struggling.

What governments and companies are (and are not) doing

Individual preparation matters, but it sits on top of decisions made by governments and corporations that own the underlying infrastructure. The Dec report on “Global Network Infrastructure at Risk” warns that without major investment, the “Introduction” to a “Growing Concern for Global Connectivity” will become a lived reality as aging routers, switches and optical gear fail more often. It calls for coordinated upgrades and better sharing of incident data “between public and private sectors,” arguing that secrecy and underfunding are a dangerous combination when half the world’s networks are already flagged as vulnerable.

Cybersecurity planners are wrestling with the same problem from a different angle. The study on a potential “Catastrophic” cyber incident by “Mun” researchers, summarized in the line “Catastrophic cyber event could cause widespread disruptions to global infrastructure,” has already fed into tabletop exercises that imagine simultaneous attacks on telecoms, cloud providers and industrial systems. Those scenarios are meant to push regulators and executives to think beyond narrow compliance checklists and toward systemic resilience, including backup communication channels and clearer public messaging when outages occur.

How to stay informed when the network is shaky

One of the paradoxes of a digital crisis is that people will still turn to screens first, even as those screens become less reliable. Broadcast segments such as “Internet infrastructure is overwhelmed, expert says after” a recent disruption, featuring “Nov” commentary from “Mashar” in “Washington” about how a “Tuesday of the” failure at “Cloudflare” exposed structural weaknesses, have already shown how quickly public attention swings to whoever can explain what is happening. Clips like that, archived on platforms such as YouTube, double as informal training in what questions to ask when services start to flicker.

There is a second version of that same segment, also titled “Internet infrastructure is overwhelmed, expert says after,” in which the “Nov” “Mashar” “Washington” correspondent again walks through how a “Tuesday of the” “Cloudflare” disruption rippled across online shopping and media, and that footage, available on another clip, underscores a key point: clear, jargon‑free explanations calm people down. In a future outage, local radio, over‑the‑air television and community bulletin systems may be the only channels left, which is why having a simple radio in your kit and knowing which stations carry emergency information is as important as any app on your phone.

Living with a more brittle internet

None of this means the online world is doomed, but it does mean that blind faith in its permanence is misplaced. The encyclopedia entry on outages makes it clear that failures “can occur due to” accidents, “security services actions, or errors,” and the historical record of “What Causes Internet Outages?” shows that even well‑run networks can be knocked offline by a mix of human error, aging “infrastructure and” hostile activity that “disrupt internet services.” When you combine that with the climate‑driven hazards flagged by safety analysts and the centralization trends highlighted in technical reports, the case for personal and institutional preparedness becomes hard to ignore.

I find it useful to think of connectivity the way earlier generations thought about electricity: transformative when it works, disruptive when it fails, and worth backing up with simple, low‑tech alternatives. That might mean keeping a paper map in the glove compartment, printing a few key phone numbers, or following the preppers’ lead and downloading reference material before you need it. If the experts are right that a large‑scale crash is a matter of when, not if, then treating the internet as a fallible utility rather than an invisible constant is not alarmist. It is just good planning. 

- by Dorian Maddox, NewsBreak

Trump's Administrative Scheme, Social Security Cuts, and Constitutional Violations

Tuesday, December 30, 2025 ■ Today's Top News  Judge Slaps Down Trump Administration Scheme to 'Starve' Nation's Top Consumer Protection Watchdog "If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. By Brad Reed Social Security Administration 'In Turmoil' as New Reporting Details Damage Done by Trump Cuts In-depth reporting from the Washington Post found the Social Security Administration is dealing with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers." By Brad Reed 'This Is an Act of War': CIA Carried Out Drone Strike on Port Facility Inside Venezuela One expert called the reported drone strike a "violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution." By Jake Johnson

"There’s no doubt that 2025 has been one of the most politically chaotic years of the 21st century"

Amid the domestic and geopolitical mayhem unleashed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, powerful interests were busy enacting a radical anti-democratic agenda that has already changed our world and will continue shaping it for years to come.

DeSmog’s team of investigative reporters, editors and researchers have spent the past year tracking the fossil fuel companies and tech giants seeking private gain from MAGA, along with the climate deniers and right-wing political operatives attempting to export the movement globally. Here are some of their most consequential achievements.

Supercharging Climate Denial

For years, the widely held belief in the community of people advocating for aggressive climate action was that outright denial of the science was becoming a marginal relic of the past. That was never accurate, as DeSmog has extensively reported, but the second Trump administration has shattered the illusion for good.

Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. During a February speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, Wright called 2050 net zero targets “a sinister goal.” In exclusive interviews with DeSmog at the London event, prominent climate crisis deniers praised Wright for his opposition to regulating CO2 as a pollutant. Overturning these regulations is a longtime goal of groups such as the CO2 Coalition and the Heartland Institute.

Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive.

The energy secretary this year convened a panel of climate deniers, including the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, to author an official Department of Energy report questioning the link between humans and global temperature rise. More than 85 actual climate experts released a scathing rebuttal describing the report as “junk science.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency drew on Wright’s report to initiate its effort to rescind the agency’s own “endangerment finding” on CO2 and other carbon emissions, which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations. (It was perhaps not the most far-sighted strategy, as the administration’s strident climate denial is now creating potential legal hurdles for the EPA’s repeal effort.)

To help craft legislation, the administration also relied on climate crisis deniers such as Alex Epstein, who was credited with shaping sections of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that eliminated tax credits supporting wind and solar energy. That legislative effort got an assist from Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.

These assaults on climate science and renewable energy had already been laid out in Project 2025, the reactionary blueprint for a second Trump administration created by the Heritage Foundation. DeSmog found that over 50 high-level Trump administration officials were linked to Project 2025, including many of the president’s closest advisers, such as Elon Musk.

Although Musk and Trump eventually had a bitter falling out, the consequences of Musk taking a power saw to the federal government will be felt for years in terms of shuttered climate programs, laid-off employees and diminished bureaucratic expertise. DeSmog revealed that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort was partly the result of a concerted effort — led behind the scenes by conservative groups — to tilt the U.S. toward hard-line Christian nationalist and libertarian ideology.

In the process, the climate denial movement appeared to gain a powerful new ally. “We welcome Elon Musk into the climate red pill group,” Climate Depot executive director Marc Morano stated in late 2024.

Undermining European Democracy

This November, the White House published a national security strategy that outlined U.S. policy goals in Europe. DeSmog has been reporting on these goals throughout the year.

“Our broad policy for Europe,” the strategy stated, “should prioritize cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The strategy “reject[s] the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

At a private event that DeSmog attended during February’s ARC conference, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, seemed to articulate these same principles, rejecting climate science as “fiction” and urging “our friends from Europe” to oppose international institutions. The following month, the Heritage Foundation convened hardline European conservatives for a meeting in Washington, D.C., where they discussed how to dismantle the European Union.

Trump-aligned groups were trying meanwhile to hollow out European climate legislation.

In April, DeSmog revealed that the Heritage Foundation was actively trying to shape an upcoming national election in Albania in favor of a Trump-aligned candidate. The following month, key MAGA influencers, including Trump administration Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, descended on Eastern Europe for the Conservative Political Action Committee Poland conference. According to audio of CPAC Poland obtained by DeSmog, speakers made calls to “liquidate” the European Commission, while pushing for the election of far-right Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki. (Nawrocki won in a June runoff election.)

Trump-aligned groups were trying meanwhile to hollow out European climate legislation. The Heartland Institute set its sights on the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a law requiring companies to address human rights and environmental issues in their operations.

Also fighting the CSDDD: a coalition of companies called the Competitiveness Roundtable whose members include Exxon Mobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron and Koch, Inc. Documents obtained by the research group SOMO and seen by DeSmog showed that this corporate campaign deliberately supported far-right groups in Europe in service of its goals.

It’s now clear that combating EU climate rules was essential to carving out a market in Europe for American gas exporters. “The industry and the State Department are putting a lot of pressure on the EU [to] commit to our dirty LNG,” one climate advocate told DeSmog.

Forging Anti-Climate Alliances With Big Tech

During the first Trump administration, the world’s biggest tech companies pledged to fight for climate action even as the U.S. exited the Paris climate treaty and rolled back key environmental laws. This time around, those same tech companies are actively supporting Trump’s climate denial.

DeSmog revealed that during an April AI conference in Washington, Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat called a preceding speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “fantastic,” even though Burgum used his appearance to attack the so-called climate extremist agenda and push expanding the use of coal.

Porat’s praise seemed at odds with her own company’s ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030. Google’s shift wasn’t an outlier, but rather part of a trend within Big Tech to go along with the Trump administration’s embrace of fossil fuels to power its energy-hungry data centers, despite renewables remaining the cheapest and quickest-to-install electricity source worldwide.

DeSmog revealed that OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who was a senior energy adviser in the first Trump administration and is a dedicated champion of natural gas. In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Trump on an official state visit to the United Kingdom, where the company is planning a massive new AI infrastructure project.

OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who is a dedicated champion of natural gas.

Jensen Huang, CEO of the supercomputer chipmaker Nvidia, also accompanied Trump to the U.K. in September. Huang followed that up in October by praising Energy Secretary Wright’s “passion” for science, despite Wright’s active promotion of climate denial.

DeSmog also reported on Nvidia’s marketing of AI tools to Brazilian oil and gas companies just weeks before the COP30 climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil. This was no coincidence, as the fossil fuel industry is increasingly using AI to boost oil and gas production, as executives told the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference in June. In turn, AI advocates including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are pitching AI energy demand to major oil producing countries as a way to keep fossil fuels alive.

In Texas alone, AI has spurred demand for over 100 new natural gas plants, while in Virginia, local communities fought against a data center proposal that would have seen construction of the largest U.S. gas plant in a decade. The data center explosion is also delaying the retirement of at least 15 coal-fueled power plants across the U.S.

DeSmog reported this year on the growing backlash to data centers in places like rural Georgia, despite a public charm offensive aimed directly at residents. Still, the large corporate backers behind these projects remain confident that they can overcome public opposition.

That includes a real estate arm of Koch Inc. that has been building data centers in Chicago, Kansas City and Atlanta and is pitching itself as having the “expertise and capabilities that major tech companies either don’t have or don’t think would be worth the time.” At this point, it’s safe to conclude, data centers are inseparable from fossil fuel expansion.

Backing the Right-Wing Reform UK

A fair question to ask this year was whether British Member of Parliament Nigel Farage spent more time cultivating ties to MAGA in the U.S. than actually leading his right-wing political party, Reform UK, back at home. In September, Farage skipped Parliament’s return from summer recess in order to speak at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Washington and address the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.

“Nigel Farage is far more interested in pleasing Trump and jostling for his affections than he is in turning up to Parliament on time or standing up for British values,” one Liberal Democrat source told DeSmog. Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe. DeSmog reported in 2024 that he helped set up a U.K.-EU branch of the Heartland Institute. This year, the pro-Trump group claimed it was spearheading opposition to the EU’s flagship Nature Restoration Law.

Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe.

Back in February, Farage himself stated at the ARC conference that “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors,” while taking aim at the U.K.’s net-zero policies. His comments are perhaps not surprising, given the previous donations Reform UK has received from fossil fuel and climate denier interests.

Other party figures also seem to be looking to the U.S. for inspiration. Reform UK Chair Zia Yusuf is an admirer of tech billionaire Musk, and apparently so is Paul Marshall, the right-wing owner of GB News and other outlets, which are key media backers of Reform UK. Marshall, who is also a hedge fund manager, bought a large stake in Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Musk, prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, DeSmog revealed.

Close ties to Trump may have helped smooth the way for massive new tech ventures in the U.K. DeSmog reported in September that Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Warren Stephens, has a family-owned investment firm with large shares in Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), which are planning major U.K. projects. The Trump-linked U.S. private equity firm Blackstone is meanwhile building a $13.4 billion AI data center in the U.K. that includes a fleet of massive backup diesel generators.

Fomenting Political Chaos in Canada

DeSmog was in the room at a conservative political event in Alberta where one of the speakers revealed a shocking piece of news. Dennis Modry, the former CEO of a group called the Alberta Prosperity Project, which is pushing for the oil-rich province to separate from Canada, claimed that he’d met directly with members of the Trump administration.

At that meeting, Modry claimed, U.S. officials offered “a $500 million transition loan that we would only draw down on as necessary as we work with the U.S. to transition from a province to a country.” That wasn’t the only instance of MAGA policies influencing the political discourse in Canada. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith revealed in September that she had met with the Heritage Foundation shortly after Trump’s election. Smith had already caused a national uproar months earlier by traveling to Florida to appear on a private panel with conservative U.S. pundit Ben Shapiro, who had previously called Canada “a silly country” that should be annexed by the U.S.

Carney is implementing a pro-oil-and-gas agenda.

During Canada’s federal election, which was dominated by fears about Trump waging a trade war on the country, Smith told the right-wing U.S. media outlet Breitbart News that Conservative Party candidate Pierre Poilievre “would be very much in sync” with the Trump administration. And indeed, DeSmog’s careful analysis of Poilievre’s inner circle turned up links to Musk, Koch Inc. and major oil and gas companies tightly linked to the U.S.

As in the U.K., some Canadian conservatives and executives openly expressed admiration for Musk and his work with Trump. DeSmog was at a conservative event in Ottawa where representatives from Amazon and the pipeline builder TC Energy discussed how a right-wing prime minister could replicate elements of Musk’s DOGE effort in Ottawa.

Poilievre ultimately lost the election to his Liberal opponent, current Prime Minister Mark Carney, but now Carney is implementing a pro-oil-and-gas agenda and taking ideas from the billionaire-founded AI and fossil fuel group Build Canada.

As we head into 2026, expect to see MAGA and its allies continue their global assault on climate science and policies to reduce planet-heating emissions. The Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson was a key organizer of this year’s ARC conference, where Trump officials, European conservatives, tech investors and climate crisis deniers discussed how to build and implement a global anti-net zero movement. They will be meeting again in June.

TRUTHDIG’S JOURNALISM REMAINS CLEAR

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Saving Our Democracy

 

The tendency, understandably, in Donald Trump’s second term is to focus on events in Washington, D.C. and the national and global consequences of his disastrous domestic and foreign initiatives. But because he and his antics have dominated and decimated the federal government, resistance within states and cities have become even more important. State and city elected officials (as well as political movements beyond Washington, D.C.) have become some of the most valuable fighters in the battle to preserve democracy.

Governor Wes Moore of Maryland: Moore continues to shine as a skilled advocate for American values (e.g., inclusion, decency) and the rule of law. While managing the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the fall-out from DOGE, and state budget, he kept up a drumbeat of criticism of Trump’s assault on functional government, misuse of the military, and abject racism. While Moore disclaims interest in 2028, do not be surprised if he appears on a presidential ticket in the near future.

Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois: Pritzker distinguished himself this year in his unflagging defiance of Trump’s disastrous policies, willingness to defend migrants in his state, support for sane healthcare policy, and eagerness to fight fire with fire in the redistricting battle. He thereby lifted himself to the top tier of 2028 presidential contenders.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California: No Democrat has mastered social media snark quite as completely as Newsom and his team. He plainly relishes endless opportunities for skewering, mocking, and humiliating Trump. Newsom put muscle behind his rhetoric in championing Proposition 50 to respond to Trump’s Texas re-redistricting power grab. He too has risen to the top echelon of 2028 contenders.

Democratic state attorneys general: These unheralded heroes stand at the vanguard of the democracy fight. They have brought dozens of suits against Trump’s lawless actions on SNAP, birthright citizenship, National Guard occupation, tariffs, DOGE unilateral cuts, and more. Their persistent efforts in court have held back the tide of authoritarianism and shielded their constituents from many horrors of MAGA rule.

Big city mayors and neighbors vs. ICE, CBP, and National Guard deployments: Mayors Karen Bass (Los Angeles), Keith Wilson (Portland), Jacob Frey (Minneapolis), Brandon Johnson (Chicago), and Viv Lyles (Charlotte) all stood up against the Trump regime’s brutal, lawless and racist juggernaut deployed against immigrant communities. They summoned their residents’ better angels to stand with their neighbors. They resisted cooperating with ICE and maintained support for immigrants in the face of political pressure, lawsuits, and even threats.

Ordinary (albeit heroic) residents rose to the occasion as well, in peaceful and often whimsical protest, devising an early warning system for their neighbors—and when necessary, by refusing to indict or convict protestors.

Missouri referendum and Indiana anti-redistricting activists: People Not Politicians, the grassroots campaign to overturn Missouri Republicans’ re-redistricted map successfully gathered hundreds of thousands of signature to get their measure on the ballot. “There should be nothing for politicians to fear about a referendum,” said Richard von Glahn, executive director of the group, who organized 2,000 volunteer signature-gatherers. “[S]o when I see politicians doing desperate actions, coming up with extreme legal theories just to keep this from the ballot, what they’re really saying is, ‘We don’t want voters to have the final say in how our democracy works.’ And that is a message that falls extremely flat with Missouri voters.” This could be the second successful progressive referendum in Missouri, following the jaw-dropping win on abortion in 2024.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, pro-democracy groups including Common Cause local Indivisible chapters, scored a remarkable redistricting victory in very red Indiana, overcoming threats of violence (and of political retribution from Trump and Heritage Action). “The 19 to 31 vote was a highly public defeat for Mr. Trump, who has spent significant political capital pushing for redrawn maps in Republican-led states and who repeatedly threatened political consequences for Indiana Republicans who did not fall in line,” the New York Times reported.

Zohran Mamdani: The mayor-elect’s stellar rise from obscurity to victory, and his creation of an historic grassroots movement reverberated throughout the country. His humane focus on affordability, social media adroitness, deft handling of Trump, and consistent good cheer provide a model for Democrats. His victory should chastise the establishment billionaire class who flailed away in a futile effort to defeat him. Democrats would be wise to appreciate the Mamdani phenomenon, regardless of policy differences. If Democrats want to win elections, their big tent better be big enough for Mamdani and his followers.

Virginia Democrats: Virginia Democrats picked up an astounding 13 seats in the House of Delegates and swept all statewide races with Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger leading the charge. Their success should inspire Democrats to organize early for 2026, focus on the issues that matter most, and run straight at the unpopular MAGA president. It also helps to have a rising Democratic star at the top of the ticket.

Governor-elect of New Jersey Mikie Sherrill: Defying expectations for a nip-and-tuck race or even a GOP upset, the former Navy officer and prosecutor running on affordability won by nearly 15 points in an election with record-high turnout for a governor’s race. Sherill won 94% of the Black vote and 68% of Hispanics, rebutting punditry that pronounced that Democrats had permanently alienated these voters. (She also won white women by 8 points and non-college graduates by a point.) In blasting the shutdown capitulators, she aligned herself with young, aggressive fighters in the party.

Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky: As a pro-choice Democrat governor in a deep red state who hasn’t thrown LGBTQ+ people bus and who never failed to stand up to Trump, Beshear is turning heads. CBS recently reported, “Heading into what could be a favorable national political environment in the 2026 midterms, Beshear is leading the Democratic Governors Association as it tries to win in states where his party has either lost ground or are hoping to hold on to critical seats.” He has managed the state through one natural disaster after another, taken a responsible stance on guns and racked up an impressive economic record. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to two other winning Democratic governors from Republican-dominated states: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

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US offers Ukraine 15-year security guarantee as part of peace plan

 

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The United States is offering Ukraine security guarantees for a period of 15 years as part of a proposed peace plan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday, though he said he would prefer an American commitment of up to 50 years to deter Russia from further attempts to seize its neighbor’s land by force.

U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Zelenskyy at his Florida resort on Sunday and insisted that Ukraine and Russia are “closer than ever before” to a peace settlement.

Negotiators are still searching for a breakthrough on key issues, however, including whose forces withdraw from where in Ukraine and the fate of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, one of the 10 biggest in the world. Trump noted that the monthslong U.S.-led negotiations could still collapse.

“Without security guarantees, realistically, this war will not end,” Zelenskyy told reporters in voice messages responding to questions sent via a WhatsApp chat. Ukraine has been fighting Russia since 2014, when it illegally annexed Crimea and Moscow-backed separatists took up arms in the Donbas, a vital industrial region in eastern Ukraine.

Illia Novikov, AP News