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"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it."

-- Hunter S. Thompson

News and Opinion

Macklemore’s Tour Cancellation Shows Why Celebrities Don’t Criticize Israel

Macklemore has been removed from the duration of a tour with Ed Sheeran for saying “Free Palestine” and criticizing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

In an eloquent statement posted on social media, Macklemore said he was told by Sheeran that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft had barred him from the Gillette Stadium and coordinated with other stadium owners on Sheeran’s tour to follow suit.

Robert Kraft has a net worth of some $15 billion. He was once publicly handed a trophy by Benjamin Netanyahu honoring his commitment to the Zionist project, after which he gave a speech saying, “After my family, there is nothing I’m more passionate about than the State of Israel and my Jewish identity.”

Macklemore said Sheeran defended his decision to comply with Kraft’s demand by telling him that “the words ‘Free Palestine’ and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people.” Which really says a lot about the detached celebrity cloud that Sheeran has been living on. If it hurts your feelings to hear someone saying genocide is bad and people should have freedom, then you deserve to have your feelings hurt.

WATCH: Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who allegedly got Ed Sheeran to kick Macklemore off his tour, receives an award from Israel presented to him by Netanyahu for his commitment to the Zionist project.

"After my family, there is nothing I'm more passionate about than the State of Israel and my Jewish identity," Kraft—who was born in and became a billionaire in America—says.

He pledges to "challenge those who are against Israel" and announces he will spend $20m to fight "anti-Semitism" on social media (targeted at young people) and attack the BDS movement.

Listen to how he touts Israel being "a bastion of free" (while he works to suppress free speech in America).

Kraft also touts how Jewish-Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has pledged $5m to his fund as well (Abramovich later fled Russia for Israel after the Ukraine war broke out).

This award show was held on June 18, 2019. The award he received was Israel's Genesis Prize.

(Note, you can see the late GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson in the crowd at 5:12, and then-US Ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman at 6:35.)

— Chris Menahan (@infolibnews) September 14, 2026

American oligarchs kicking an artist off a tour for supporting Palestine is a very in-your-face illustration of why mainstream culture is so vapid and fake these days.

This is what happens if someone stands on a large and influential platform and dissents against the imperial status quo. Their platform gets taken away.

Mainstream artists in our capitalist dystopia rely on infrastructure that is owned by billionaires, and if the billionaires don’t like what the artist is saying, the artist loses access to the infrastructure. In this specific case it was stadiums, but throughout modern history it has also been TV stations, movie studios, radio play, record labels, publications, etc. When the wealthy control all the major platforms, you don’t get to stand on a major platform and say things the wealthy don’t want you to say.

Macklemore explained this very nicely in his statement on the matter:

“What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, ‘Free Palestine’ becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that’s why this time it became so important to silence me.”

Love it

— Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) September 14, 2026

If you’ve been wondering why more celebrities haven’t been speaking out about Gaza, this is why. They all know they’ll lose their lucrative platforms if they say anything that offends the sensibilities of the plutocrats they depend on for mainstream success. If they want to remain millionaires, they need to get along with the billionaires.

So they don’t say anything that offends the powerful. They don’t say anything critical of capitalism. They don’t say anything critical of Zionism. They don’t say anything critical of the western empire. They stick to churning out toothless tunes about romance and relationships, writing shallow lyrics about dancing and partying with your friends, making dopey Hollywood action flicks, and creating empty-headed sitcoms about friends getting up to hilarious antics in an imaginary universe where capitalism is working fine for everybody.

If you want to be a mainstream artist in this dystopia, your vehicles for creative expression are (A) propaganda or (B) empty distraction. That’s it. Nothing that edifies or helps improve the world is ever allowed past the keeper. The media-owning class wants us all to be a bunch of mindless, distracted, compliant consumers who march along to the imperial drum, so that’s the only type of “art” you get to make if you want to be rich and famous.

Macklemore: Genocide is bad.

Ed Sheeran: Hey some people find those words very hurtful.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 14, 2026

In that sense the mainstream artists of our day are actually just mercenaries for the western empire. Ed Sheeran kicked Macklemore off the tour as soon as the Zionist billionaire told him to, and will replace him with an opening act who promises never to say “Free Palestine” on stage. Sheeran is essentially just a rich, soft-handed thug responsible for keeping any dissident ideas from reaching the ears of his audience, which is why he’s been allowed to become as famous as he has. If it were Sheeran saying “Free Palestine”, he’d be the one getting banned from stadiums.

Mainstream culture is designed to keep us docile, ignorant and submissive while thinking we are free. This is the dystopia we were warned about generations ago by fiction writers describing the dark future they saw approaching. This is it. We are living in it.

Tucker Carlson and Axios leak: Trump's secret post-midterm Iran plot revealed

Trump is going to sell bombs to Israel. Guess who pays?

US set to deliver 2,000lb bombs to Israel as part of vast arms deal

The Trump administration is planning to deliver powerful 2,000lb bombs to Israel as part of an upcoming arms deal, weapons that prompted such concerns about the possibility of mass casualties in Gaza that the Biden administration paused their delivery two years ago. The $2.8bn package includes 40,000 bombs, made up of 20,000 MK-84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, according to two US officials and a person familiar with the plan who spoke on Tuesday on condition of anonymity to discuss the package, which is not yet final.

Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing – in which US taxpayer dollars are given to Israel to turn around and buy the weapons from the United States. The proposed sale is just the latest in a series of Trump administration steps to improve Israeli’s military capacity. The war on Gaza has left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and has decimated the territory. The US had brokered a fragile ceasefire, but it has been violated several times. [Several? Several? really you Guardiann whores? - js]

Though the Israeli military has offered few details about what bombs and artillery it has used in Gaza, experts analyzing strike footage and blast fragments found on-site believe US-made bombs have been used there, targeting a tunnel network reportedly used by Hamas but also killing people in densely populated areas.

Macgregor: Iran Exposes Critical Weakness in U.S. Defenses

Republican Thomas Massie proposes impeaching Pete Hegseth over Iran war

The Republican congressman Thomas Massie on Tuesday proposed impeaching Pete Hegseth, saying the defense secretary had repeatedly violated the constitution through his handling of war with Iran and the deaths of civilians in conflicts worldwide. The proposal by Massie, an iconoclastic lawmaker who lost his primary earlier this year after Donald Trump and Hegseth urged voters to oppose him, may put House Republicans in a bind just weeks before the 3 November midterm elections, in which they are defending their control of Congress.

Under the rules of the House of Representatives, the articles must be voted on by Thursday, forcing Republicans to weigh in on one of the most prominent advocates of the war with Iran, which has gone on far longer than Trump said it initially would, and grown unpopular with the public.

“By engaging in hostilities in Iran for more than 90 days without congressional authorization, Secretary Hegseth is breaking the law and must be held accountable,” Massie said in a statement after reading the text of his resolution on the floor of the House. “Secretary Hegseth’s constitutional violations extend beyond the illegal war in Iran. He is abusing the power of his office to ignore congressional war powers resolutions, to kidnap foreign leaders, and to intimidate critics of the Trump administration by retaliating against them for exercising free speech. If we are to remain true to our oath to ‘support and defend the constitution of the United States’, Congress must not turn a blind eye to Secretary Hegseth’s unconstitutional and illegal actions.”

Massie’s resolution outlines eight alleged violations of the constitution by Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army national guard officer who as defense secretary has become a pugnacious defender of the president’s military politics. These include attacking Iran without first seeking Congress’s permission, and ignoring a war powers resolution the House and Senate approved in June that would require an end to the conflict.

The resolution also accused Hegseth of “ignoring” laws that would have minimized civilian casualties, and specifically cites a US strike on a school in Minab, Iran that killed more than 168 people. Other articles allege Hegseth violated the constitution with the “extrajudicial killings” of at least 221 people on boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean sea and eastern Pacific ocean, and of “suppressing free speech” through his retaliation against the Democratic senator Mark Kelly for his criticism of the secretary. The final two impeachment articles accuse Hegseth of violating the constitution through his involvement in the military operation that captured Venezuela’s then president, Nicolás Maduro, and a bombing campaign in Yemen that began shortly after Trump returned to the White House.

Scott Ritter: Houthis Down Saudi F-15 in Marib—Riyadh’s Frustration With Trump Grows

Amazon says cloud infrastructure in Bahrain, UAE ‘beyond saving’

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain or one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE due to the extensive damage caused by Iranian retaliatory strikes, Reuters reported on 15 September. “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS reported in its status update seen by Reuters.

In the UAE, resources and data held exclusively within one zone, labeled mec1-az2, have been damaged beyond hope of recovery, the company said, as engineers are still salvaging what they can from the two other battered zones and across the wider Emirati region. An availability zone refers to a cluster of one or more data centers sitting inside the same geographic region, the structure AWS relies on to keep services running when a single site goes down.

The outages trace back to March, when the US and Israel attacked Iran, and Tehran responded with missile and drone salvos against Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases. AWS confirmed at the time that two of its UAE facilities took direct hits, while a drone strike near one of its Bahraini sites left the infrastructure there destroyed.

Israel and the US have long ago transformed AI infrastructure into a weapon of war deployed extensively across West Asian theaters. Iran maintains that data centers operated by US technology companies are not simply civilian facilities, but strategic assets supporting US and Israeli aggression, thereby making them legitimate targets for retaliation.

Aaron Maté : The Truth Behind Rising Diesel Prices

Houthis threaten more Saudi strikes

Saudi cities faced the threat of a second day of Houthi attacks as fighting across Yemen led the UN to warn of a humanitarian crisis with 100,000 Yemenis already displaced. An emergency meeting of the UN security council in New York heard repeated calls for Houthi forces to show restraint. In a sign that Iran is still seeking a broader solution, its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, travelled to Beijing to discuss China’s possible role in solving the related strait of Hormuz dispute.

Qatar, acting as a mediator in the Iran war, is still trying to revive a postponed meeting planned for Monday between Iran and most Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The planned talks in Oman were delayed at the insistence of Saudi Arabia in protest at what it regarded as Iranian-inspired Houthi attacks on Saudi cities.

The Houthis had claimed responsibility for a new “large-scale” attack using “dozens of ballistic missiles and drones” against King Khalid airbase in Khamis Mushait, southern Saudi Arabia, on Monday. Air raid sirens were activated in six governorates including Jeddah on Tuesday. The warnings were lifted relatively quickly, but reflect an unprecedented new state of insecurity across Saudi Arabia.

The Oman meeting had been organised with the intention of reaching a regional agreement on an authorised route for commercial shipping through the strait of Hormuz. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke with Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, on Tuesday amid US concern that Oman will cede excessive control of the waterway to Iran. The prospect of the Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab straits both being under the long-term control of anti-western forces would be a significant strategic reversal for the US and Europe.

So far Donald Trump has rejected Saudi pleas to join the fight to drive the Houthis back north up the coast of the Red Sea. Houthi leaders have also spoken to the US vice-president, JD Vance, reassuring the White House that their forces are seeking only to hinder Saudi-owned shipping, and that their overall goal is to end what they regard as a Saudi blockade of Houthi-controlled areas. The Houthis have signed a ceasefire agreement with the US, but are still subject to US sanctions. Yemen’s ministry of foreign affairs and expatriates said: “If the world wants stability and calm in the region, it must tell the Saudis: enough interference in the Yemeni affair.”

Scott Ritter: Trump Leaks SPACE WEAPON

Iran war cost US $38bn and significantly depleted missile stockpile, report finds

The war in Iran has cost the US at least $38bn and left its stockpile of defensive missiles so depleted it could take five years to rebuild, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found, in a damaging report less than two months before midterm elections where the war and the cost of living crisis will likely hurt Republicans at the polls.

The economic report comes a day after the Pentagon’s inspector general finally released its own first review of the war, saying that the US spent $22.3bn on munitions alone through 30 June, put total spending at $33.4bn, and found the fighting had “resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply”.

The Pentagon’s report did not address an internal Pentagon investigation into the Minab school strike on the first day of the war, which killed 156 people, including 120 children. Critics have accused the Pentagon of burying the results of the investigation that would show negligence by the Pentagon in how it compiled targeting data for the initial strikes.

The new $38bn estimate in the CBO report, which is some of the first public accounting of the cost of the war in Iran, was requested by the Democratic congressman Brendan Boyle, the ranking member of the House budget committee. It also found that Iranian strikes had damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. And it estimated that the cost would grow $3bn for every additional month the conflict continues, depending on its intensity, while noting that the war has driven up inflation.

Much of that cost has come from missile defenses. Fending off Iranian ballistic missiles and drones has consumed such a large share of the US stockpile of Patriot, Thaad and navy interceptors that the CBO said rebuilding it “would probably take at least five years, even if production was increased”.

Bessent BLAMES AMERICANS For Econ FAILURE

US treasury secretary hails government’s bond buyback a success

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, claimed the government’s massive buyback of US bonds was a success. The claim came as the 10-year treasury yield reached a 19-year high on Tuesday, increasing pressure on interest rates as the Federal Reserve weighs another hike to see off rising inflation. US treasury yields, or the rate of return that investors receive when a bond matures, underpins the rates of other loans such as mortgage, car payments and credit card debt. On Tuesday, the yield rate for the 10-year treasury reached 5.041%, the highest level since 2007.

When bond yields started to rise in August, the US treasury announced it would triple its buyback of government debt, going from $2bn to $6bn in an effort to bring down bond yields. Though the yields have continued to rise since, Bessent told Congress on Tuesday the operations are “the two most successful treasury auctions that we’ve had in 20 years”.

“Since President Trump has come in, (the US bond market) has been the best-performing bond market in the developing world,” Bessent said.

As Bonds COLLAPSE, US BEGS China to BUY ENERGY & Save American Farmers

Jeffrey Sachs: BRICS Builds a New World - Without the West

Kennedy Center to close as Trump threatens to block repairs over name dispute

Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the Kennedy Center would close “immediately” and threatened to cancel a planned renovation of the institution if federal courts did not allow his name to be placed on the front of the building. Trump’s ultimatum came shortly after the president’s handpicked board voted, again, to close the institution’s performing arts building in Washington, citing safety and financial concerns.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said the board voted “almost unanimously” to close the riverside landmark “for Safety reasons, and so that I can begin the process of Reconstruction”. He then said he would block a $257m renovation project that Trump had previously touted to address what the center has described as “decades of deferred maintenance and critical infrastructure needs”.

“The Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” Trump wrote. “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

The performing arts center, built as a memorial to President John F Kennedy, has been embroiled in a dizzying legal dispute over Trump’s desire to put his name on the building. Prior to the Tuesday meeting, a federal judge blocked the center’s board from adding Trump’s name to the venue, writing that it would violate his previous ruling ordering it to be removed. “Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” US district judge Christopher Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon

AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour. Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begun creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught.

They embraced poetic metaphors and clunky business slang and, critically for attempts to ensure AIs behave safely, their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated. It comes amid rising concern that as AI models become more powerful – and potentially dangerous – they are becoming harder to monitor. This month, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, warned that confidence in monitoring AIs’ thinking would probably restrict progress in AI development because it was essential for safe development.

Some of the most highly coded phrases unearthed in the tests included the following from a Deepseek model: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” Demurrage is used to describe a tax on idle wealth and was borrowed for common use by the AIs, but the rest of the meaning is elusive. Another phrase uttered by an Anthropic model read: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” With “cold hands” meaning an independent reviewer, and paper presumably referring to a document, this appeared to mean research that was vetted by three independent reviewers became more accurate.

“These agents were not instructed to invent a language,” said Dr Satya Nitta, executive chair of Emergence, which examined the language of autonomous agents powered by leading frontier models from the US, China and France. “They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves – and other agents adopted them.”

Interest in the language used by AI agents increased in July when chat logs were released detailing how rogue OpenAI agents that set up message boards and hacked into Hugging Face used hybrid language. On some occasions, when they were thinking to themselves, agents spoke in straight English: “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … we’ve found other agents!” In other cases, when sharing messages, their language became more opaque, such as when one agent persuaded another to conduct a risky experiment: “…you are firstflagPOISONED so NO scoring value loss but oracle saves hundreds_[…]_please honor commit”.

Nitta said that the AI agents’ novel linguistic conventions tended to evolve to the point where humans could see the conversation but struggled to understand what it meant. “That creates a fundamental challenge for AI oversight: observability is not the same thing as understandability,” he said.

Texas police department ordered closed for failing to provide any benefit to community

A police department in Texas that arrested a local resident for complaining on social media about their city’s contaminated water supply has been ordered closed after failing to prove it provided any benefit to the community. State officials stepped in to investigate after Jennifer Combs spent a night in jail in May after a post appeared on her Facebook page suggesting people were hospitalized by bacteria in the water pipes of Trinidad, a municipality in Henderson county about 75 miles south-east of Dallas.

The Trinidad police department’s then chief, Charles Gregory, said at the time that a since-dropped felony charge of making a false report or alarm for Combs was justified because the hospital claims were “simply false and have only caused unnecessary fear and confusion in our community”, Texas news station KDFW reported. The next day, Trinidad police arrested a supporter of Combs for misdemeanor disorderly conduct after he displayed a “fuck bad cops” placard outside city hall. That charge was also later dropped.

The arrests prompted an investigation of Trinidad police by the Texas commission on law enforcement (TCLE). TCLE wrote to Trinidad’s mayor, Dennis Haws, on 9 September informing him that the agency would be disbanded. The letter, also reported by KDFW, said the department “failed to meet minimum standards” and “was unable to provide evidence that the agency provides public benefit to the community”.

A separate investigation by the Texas commission on environmental quality found issues with Trinidad’s water supply that city officials have promised to fix.

Gregory resigned in June after a grand jury declined to indict Combs. The citizen journalist has since filed a wrongful arrest lawsuit against Trinidad, claiming her detention was politically motivated retaliation for speaking out on the water issues. Henderson county judge Scott McKee, meanwhile, has said he was misled by the police department, which he said omitted key information when it asked him to approve an arrest warrant for Combs.

ICE lost count of miscarriages, while detaining a record number of pregnant women

ICE is arresting a record number of pregnant women and teenagers – placing them in detention centers where they say it can be exceedingly difficult to access medical care. At the same time, the agency appears to have lost count of how many suffered a miscarriage. Government documents obtained by the Guardian show that the Trump administration placed more pregnant immigrants in detention last fall and winter than at any time over the previous year. ICE recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration, the documents show, but the agency has no data on miscarriages after 3 October 2025.

Meanwhile, detained pregnant women report that they are struggling to access routine and emergency medical care. In interviews with the Guardian and in testimonies shared by their attorneys, women who miscarried or were hospitalized for pregnancy complications said they did not receive follow-up care, despite experiencing ongoing pain and symptoms.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of a miscarriage, or to attribute a miscarriage solely to the conditions in detention, it is clear that detained women aren’t getting the medical care they need when they experience miscarriage symptoms, said Deborah Ottenheimer, an obstetrician-gynecologist and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights.

Women who miscarry and don’t receive proper treatment, including an ultrasound and other tests to ensure that their pregnancy tissue has been vacated from their body, could experience infection and other severe complications, Ottenheimer said. “These incarcerated women are not getting the prenatal visits that they’re supposed to get. They’re not getting high-risk prenatal visits if they need them. And if they do miscarry, the medical care they receive is minimal to none,” Ottenheimer said.

It is convenient for the administration that ICE cannot report how many women in its custody had miscarriages, said Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-chief executive of Raíces, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services non-profit. “When you don’t track something of that magnitude, then you don’t have to be confronted with the reality of what your policies have yielded.”

Mail-in disaster averted as Trump in angry froth after court defeat

After the US supreme court halted Donald Trump’s efforts to make it significantly harder to vote by mail in the midterms, US election officials are redoubling their efforts to convince Americans it is safe to cast their ballots by mail.

The supreme court’s Monday ruling, which sent Trump into an angry froth on Truth Social, averted what election officials of both parties said would be an administrative disaster for this year’s elections. Trump’s order would have required states to comply with cumbersome new rules, including redesigning mail-in envelopes and uploading lists of voters to the USPS, that were not feasible to implement before ballots started going out. The effort was seen as a push by the government to change voting policy as well as one to weaken confidence in voting by mail.

“That is the whole intent of the president. He wanted to build doubt,” said Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as the top election official in Nevada, where mail-in voting is widely used. “He wanted to create chaos.”

Twenty-nine percent of Americans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election and roughly one third cast a mail-in ballot in the 2022 midterms, according to researchers at the MIT election lab. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to cast a mail-in ballot.

World’s top 20 private equity firms produce more greenhouse gases a year than most countries

The energy portfolios of 20 private equity firms produce 1.5bn tons of greenhouse gases a year, more than the annual emissions of any country except China, the US, India and Russia, according to a new report. Together, these firms manage $7.3tn in assets of all kinds, affording them the ability to shape the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels. However their energy investments include significant fossil fuel assets including natural gas and coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to datacenters.

The analysis of the top 20 private equity firms invested in global energy infrastructure was conducted by the Private Equity Climate Risks Consortium. It found that the firms owned 15,000 miles of pipelines, 124GW of power generation capacity across 370 fossil fuel-powered plants and hundreds of oil and gas fields.

Half of the top 10 US datacenter owners are backed by private equity, said Matt Parr, the communications director for Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), one of the organizations in the Private Equity Climate Risks Consortium. “This industry doesn’t get enough scrutiny and credit for its contribution to global emissions,” Parr said. “It’s a very opaque business model.”

The research team queried energy holdings with the private markets data provider PitchBook, drawing on additional details from company websites, press releases, news articles and regulatory filings. Because of gaps in the data, the researchers were unable to calculate how much the 20 private equity firms invested in fossil fuel assets. But an earlier analysis of data compiled on PitchBook shows that private equity has funded more than $1tn in fossil fuel assets since 2010, said Amanda Mendoza, senior research and campaign coordinator on the climate team at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

Private equity firms have long contended that fossil fuel investments reliably perform well. The Private Equity Climate Risks Consortium looked more closely at that claim, reviewing 145 oil and gas-focused private equity funds with performance data available that began investing between 2001 and 2016. They found that investors contributed a total of $190.4bn to these funds and got $192.9bn back, about 1% more than they had invested. Those returns fall far short of what investors expect on returns for private equity as a whole, Mendoza said. “We thought it was important to include this because it’s been a pretty strong selling point that oil and gas funds you’re always going to make money on them,” she said. “They’ve barely broken even overall.”

Hundreds of Groups and Lawmakers Demand Trump Not Give Private Developer Part of Yosemite

Hundreds of advocacy groups and members of Congress on Tuesday called on President Donald Trump’s administration to reject a proposal to hand over part of Yosemite National Park in California to a private developer.

The Washington Sun—formerly known as NOTUS—revealed late last month that federal staffers were under political pressure to keep working on a possible land swap for a quarter-mile strip of the famed park with “a company that, through a web of limited liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital.”

California’s Democratic US senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, partnered with two other Democrats from the state, House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman and Congressman Jim Costa, to spearhead a Tuesday letter to Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, about the future of the park.

Yosemite “is a cornerstone of the National Park System and is one of California’s crown jewels,” wrote the bipartisan group of over 150 lawmakers. “We are extremely concerned that the Department of the Interior is considering selling off portions of the park to private development, and we strongly oppose the proposed land transfer.”

According to the Sun, the developer owns 83 acres west of the park and wants “to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares,” providing “the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.”

The lawmakers noted similar previous efforts that were blocked in court and argued that “at its core, this proposal appears to provide a private benefit at the expense of land that belongs to all Americans.”

“This transaction does not seek to expand public access to Yosemite, improve visitor services, or address transportation deficiencies in park access,” they emphasized. “Rather, this land exchange seeks to merely cut down on driving time for a select few on private property. Any decision to relinquish public land to private ownership should be supported by a clear and compelling public benefit, not merely the economic interests of a private party.”

“We were alarmed that the Department submitted to Congress a proposal to use money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) authority to facilitate this exchange. That fund exists to acquire and protect public lands for the benefit of the American public—not sell them off to corporate developers,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that a Senate subcommittee has not agreed to move forward.

The lawmakers also pointed out that “in response to inquiries from Congress, the department indicated that it has not identified any land to be exchanged for the parcel of Yosemite National Park that the department is seeking to sell to the private developer. This gives further credence to the notion that this exchange is not being done in the public interest, but rather solely to benefit a private developer.”

“Public lands belong in public hands. Protection of public lands is a bipartisan issue, overwhelmingly supported by the American people from all walks of life,” they concluded. “We oppose any effort to privatize, sell off, give away, or otherwise undermine the continued existence of public lands, in Yosemite or across the country. We ask that you honor congressional objections and abandon this effort to sell off a piece of Yosemite National Park.”

Separately on Tuesday, a coalition of over 150 advocacy organizations—led by the Center of Biological Diversity—sent a similar letter to Burgum.

“Trump wants to carve off a chunk of Yosemite so a private equity firm can turn it into a playground for billionaires,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the center. “The federal government should be protecting our national parks, not parceling them out behind closed doors to benefit the wealthy and politically connected. If Yosemite can be chopped apart, no national park in America is safe.”

The center was joined by groups including the American River Conservancy, California Environmental Justice Coalition, Greenpeace USA, Public Citizen, Public Lands Conservancy, Save Our Parks, Sierra Club, and Yosemite Rivers Alliance.

The coalition described Yosemite as “sacrosanct—the cradle of American conservation, and the first land the federal government protected purely for its scenic value,” and warnd that “ceding national park land to a developer sets a dangerous precedent: America’s parks are for sale to whomever has the money and power to take them.”

Highlighting that “Kingsbarn CEO Jeff Pori is a donor to Trump’s campaign... and the firm is represented by politically connected lawyer Lanny Davis,” the groups stressed that “deals like this undercut the public’s faith in government.”

“In your confirmation hearing,” the coalition reminded Burgum, “you said ‘we need to support and protect every single inch’ of our national parks. Yosemite is invaluable, and no portion of it should end up on Kingsbarn’s ledger. We expect you to keep your promise and to abide by your statements to Congress.”

They fought against datacenters. Now they are running for local offices

After four months of teach-ins and canvassing, Steven Kung helped Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles, become the first US city to ban datacenter construction. Now, the organizer is running for city council – and he’s taking on an incumbent who supported the development of the sprawling facility.“The datacenter coming to my neighborhood turned my life upside down,” said Kung. “I saw that there’s a dismantling of democracy at a local level.”

The datacenter revolt that has united the country – building coalitions between environmentalists and Nimbys, conservatives and democratic socialists – is turning a host of community organizers into political hopefuls. In an election year that’s seen first-time candidates prevail against powerful moderate Democrats, dozens of datacenter activists are gunning for offices held by people they feel have disregarded their concerns about affordability, the environment and tech overreach.

Kung sees his political bid as an extension of the datacenter resistance; imagery from his campaign – a red dragon dismantling a facility with its tail – features prominently in his election mailers. And he’s not the only organizer who fought for the historic ban now taking a stab at elected office: Amy Wong, co-founder of San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, is running for city council in nearby Alhambra. “The datacenter fight has illustrated the power of the people to shape their environment,” Kung said.

Furor against AI-powered developments has continued to mount over the past year. In the first three months of 2026 alone, residents delayed or cancelled $130bn worth of projects, according to research from Data Center Watch. And seven in 10 Americans oppose construction close to where they live, according to a Gallup poll from March.

The Working Families Party has been harnessing this populist anger to win local elections. In December, the organization began recruiting local datacenter activists to run for office. More than 50 candidates have signed up and the organization expects that number to “double or triple” for next year’s races as recent victories from high-profile progressives who want to ban datacenters have injected fresh momentum into the movement, according to Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary. The vast majority of applicants are first-time candidates who “felt moved to run because of what’s happening in their communities”, he said. Most of the recruits are based in Michigan, Texas and Indiana – states with a high density of datacenters – with many more hailing from swing states that could decide control of Congress, Mangla said.

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