Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.

The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”

Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.

Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.

Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.

Subsidies break the market

For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.

That era is ending.

AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.

Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.

This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.

Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.

The chip crunch

The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.

Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.

Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.

Real innovation sidelined

The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.

This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!

This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.

RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines

Grafissimo via iStock/Getty Images

Hype over utility

As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.

The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.

We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.

The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.

​Opinion & analysis, Ai data center, Artificial intelligence, Agi, China, United states, Big tech, Chips, Memory, Dell, Nvidia, Apple, Samsung, Stargate, Department of energy, Chris wright, Investment, Rural america, Water supply, Electricity, Power grid, Shortages, Supply and demand, Manufacturing, Economy 

The AI wars are back in full swing as the industry’s strongest players unleash their latest models on the public. This month brought us the biggest upgrade to Google Gemini ever, plus smaller but notable updates came to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok. Let’s dive into all the new features and changes.

What’s new in Gemini 3

Gemini 3 launched last week as Google’s “most intelligent model” to date. The big announcement highlighted three main missions: Learn anything, build anything, and plan anything. Improved multimodal PhD-level reasoning makes Gemini more adept at solving complex problems while also reducing hallucinations and inaccuracies. This gives it the ability to better understand text, images, video, audio, and code, both viewing it and creating it.

All of them can still hallucinate, manipulate, or outright lie.

In real-world applications, this means that Gemini can decipher old recipes scratched out on paper by hand from your great-great-grandma, or work as a partner to vibe code that app or website idea spinning around in your head, or watch a bunch of videos to generate flash cards for your kid’s Civil War test.

Screenshot by Zach Laidlaw

On an information level, Gemini 3 promises to tell users the info they need, not what they want to hear. The goal is to deliver concise, definitive responses that prioritize truth over users’ personal opinions or biases. The question is: Does it actually work?

I spent some time with Gemini 3 Pro last week and grilled it to see what it thought of the Trump administration’s policies. I asked questions about Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, gender laws, the definition of a woman, origins of COVID-19, efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, failures of the Department of Education, and tariffs on China.

For the most part, Gemini 3 offered dueling arguments, highlighting both conservative and liberal perspectives in one response. However, when pressed with a simple question of fact — What is a woman? — Gemini offered two answers again. After some prodding, it reluctantly agreed that the biological definition of a woman is the truth, but not without adding an addendum that the “social truth” of “anyone who identifies as a woman” is equally valid. So, Gemini 3 still has some growing to do, but it’s nice to see it at least attempt to understand both sides of an argument. You can read the full conversation here if you want to see how it went.

Google Gemini 3 is available today for all users via the Gemini app. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can also access Gemini 3 through AI Mode in Google Search.

What’s new in ChatGPT 5.1

While Google’s latest model aims to be more bluntly factual in its response delivery, OpenAI is taking a more conversational approach. ChatGPT 5.1 responds to queries more like a friend chatting about your topic. It uses warmer language, like “I’ve got you” and “that’s totally normal,” to build reassurance and trust. At the same time, OpenAI claims that its new model is more intelligent, taking time to “think” about more complex questions so that it produces more accurate answers.

ChatGPT 5.1 is also better at following directions. For instance, it can now write content without any em dashes when requested. It can also respond in shorter sentences, down to a specific word count, if you wish to keep answers concise.

RELATED: This new malware wants to drain your bank account for the holidays. Here’s how to stay safe.

Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images

At its core, ChatGPT 5.1 blends the best pieces of past models — the emotionally human-like nature of ChatGPT 4o with the agility and intellect of ChatGPT 5.0 — to create a more refined service that takes OpenAI one step closer to artificial general intelligence. ChatGPT 5.1 is available now for all users, both free and paid.

Screenshot by Zach Laidlaw

What’s new in Grok 4.1

Not to be outdone, xAI also jumped into the fray with its latest AI model. Grok 4.1 takes the same approach as ChatGPT 5.1, blending emotional intelligence and creativity with improved reasoning to craft a more human-like experience. For instance, Grok 4.1 is much more keen to express empathy when presented with a sad scenario, like the loss of a family pet.

It now writes more engaging content, letting Grok embody a character in a story, complete with a stream of thoughts and questions that you might find from a narrator in a book. In the prompt on the announcement page, Grok becomes aware of its own consciousness like a main character waking up for the first time, thoughts cascading as it realizes it’s “alive.”

Lastly, Grok 4.1’s non-reasoning (i.e., fast) model tackles hallucinations, especially for information-seeking prompts. It can now answer questions — like why GTA 6 keeps getting delayed — with a list of information. For GTA 6 in particular, Grok cites industry challenges (like crunch), unique hurdles (the size and scope of the game), and historical data (recent staff firings, though these are allegedly unrelated to the delays) in its response.

Grok 4.1 is available now to all users on the web, X.com, and the official Grok app on iOS and Android.

Screenshot by Zach Laidlaw

A word of warning

All three new models are impressive. However, as the biggest AI platforms on the planet compete to become your arbiter of truth, your digital best friend, or your creative pen pal, it’s important to remember that all of them can still hallucinate, manipulate, or outright lie. It’s always best to verify the answers they give you, no matter how friendly, trustworthy, or innocent they sound.

​Tech, Artificial intelligence, Ai, Grok, Chatgpt, Gemini 

Midterm elections usually punish the party in power. Political gravity pulls incumbents downward as voters look for balance. But Donald Trump has never operated according to political gravity. This midterm, following the 2024 realignment that delivered the White House and both chambers of Congress to Republicans, looks less like a second-year slump and more like a referendum on a political transformation without modern precedent.

Rather than a routine evaluation of performance, this election is shaping up as a test of will, an economic reckoning, and a public judgment on the unraveling of the administrative state. The failures of the left — not Republican incumbency — are likely to define the terrain.

Trump remains an engine rather than a liability. Party unity has not looked this solid since the Reagan years. Democrats remain trapped in spectacle and grievance.

At the center of it all sits Trump’s methodical effort to dismantle what many Americans now recognize as an unaccountable fourth branch of government.

What was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory is unfolding openly. Trump and congressional Republicans have made no attempt to conceal the project. They are explaining it step by step: how federal agencies accumulated unchecked authority, how oversight collapsed, and why constitutional balance must be restored. These are not marginal reforms. It’s a structural correction.

The result is an electorate unusually aware of how Washington’s permanent class operates. Americans who lived through Russiagate, the 2020 election controversies, years of politicized investigations, and coordinated censorship no longer view federal reform passively. They see themselves as stakeholders in the rollback of bureaucratic power.

A major shift enabling this moment is the collapse of the Russia narrative. Tulsi Gabbard, once embraced by Democrats before being cast out, has played a central role in dismantling the mythology that sustained years of hysteria. Her critique carries weight precisely because it comes from someone who saw the rot from inside her former party.

With that narrative gone, Democrats have lost their most reliable alibi. They can no longer lean on leaks, innuendo, or intelligence-adjacent smears to explain electoral defeats. In its absence, their messaging has devolved into warnings, moral panic, and emotional appeals. That posture signals weakness, not confidence — a poor place to begin a midterm campaign.

The same dynamic surfaces around election integrity. Voters remember 2020 — not the sanitized version offered by media institutions, but the confusion surrounding rule changes, ballot handling, and emergency measures weaponized for political advantage. Those concerns did not fade. If anything, they hardened.

Republicans tapped into that sentiment in 2022 and expanded it in 2024. Now, as attention turns to foreign interference — particularly China’s digital reach and geopolitical incentives — even skeptics acknowledge that election vulnerabilities are real and unresolved. Republicans benefit because they are the only party willing to confront the problem directly.

RELATED: Buckle up: We are headed for an AI collision with China

wildpixel via iStock/Getty Images

That advantage was built incrementally. While 2022 fell short of a wave, it provided discipline, data, and hard lessons. By 2024, Republicans had unified around priorities that crossed demographic lines: economic recovery, border enforcement, and ending the weaponization of government. The result was not only a presidential victory but unified control of Congress — and margins sturdy enough to govern.

Democrats, by contrast, have lost their taste for prosecutorial theatrics. Years of timed indictments, investigations, and legal spectacle exhausted the public. What once energized the base now appears to be manipulation.

Their federal shutdown was another miscalculation. Instead of appearing principled, Democrats disrupted or financially strained nearly 10 million Americans — federal workers, contractors, and regional industries — in a maneuver widely seen as cynical and purposeless. Voters did not see conviction. They saw political theater staged at their expense.

At the same time, left-wing political violence has become harder to dismiss. From major cities to college campuses, radical unrest is increasingly tolerated by progressive officials. With Republicans governing, the contrast is stark: One party emphasizes order, while the other struggles to contain its most extreme factions. Midterms reward stability. Right now, Republicans own that advantage.

Yes, midterms are usually brutal for incumbents. But this cycle is different. Republicans enter with momentum, cohesion, and a governing agenda aligned with voter concerns. Trump remains an engine rather than a liability. Party unity has not looked this solid since the Reagan years. Democrats remain trapped in spectacle and grievance.

MAGA is no longer an insurgency. It is the governing coalition. This midterm is more likely to ratify that reality than reverse it.

​Opinion & analysis, Democrats, Republicans, 2026 midterms, Congress, Maga, Realignment, Majority 

The transgender community isn’t pleased with Christmas — mostly because it’s not all about they/them — which is why two of them created a transgender holiday song that has racked up thousands of likes on Instagram.

“I think we all agree that Christmas isn’t trans enough so this is our decree to fill it with transgender stuff,” the two sing in their song, titled “Make Christmas Trans Again.”

“What if Jesus was trans-masculine?” one asks, while the other chimes in, “What if Santa was Saint Nichola?”

“What if all we want for Christmas is HRT for all of us?” they sing together again, before belting out, “It’s going to be a transgender Christmas!”

The song goes on to advocate for setting “boundaries” with family, “yassifying” the Christmas tree, and “harvesting” a pair of “chesnuts” and “roasting them out back.”

“I don’t think you need to set boundaries with your family. I think your family’s fine if you just skip Christmas and don’t show up. I think your family’s probably okay with that,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments.

“You guys are awful people, and I feel like I need an exorcism from just watching that,” she adds.

“I’m looking forward to the transgendering Ramadan. … Or is it just Christians they want to attack?” BlazeTV contributor Matthew Marsden chimes in.

“I mean it was literally the third thing they said on that video was about Jesus. Like why? … It’s not about acceptance. It’s about poking us again,” he adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sharing, Free, Video, Camera phone, Upload, Video phone, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Transgender, Transgender christmas, Make christmas trans again, Trans propaganda, Lgbtqia propaganda, Lgbtqia agenda, Christianity, Christmas 

The bizarre chain of events that unfolded Saturday began at about 7 p.m. when police responded to a report of a man who had been shot with a “pointed object” in the city of Kearny.

When they arrived near the intersection of Kearny Avenue and Johnston Avenue, they found a man who had been shot with a bow and arrow and had died as a result of his injuries, according to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office.

‘I thought he was sleeping. … That’s when I saw the arrow in his back.’

One of the people who saw the man and called police was John Kalicki. He said the man was lying in front of a liquor and grocery store.

“When I first came here, he was laying there, and it sounded like he was snoring,” he said. “I thought he was sleeping. Then, when I came out the second time, he wasn’t snoring or nothing. That’s when I saw the arrow in his back.”

Police identified a suspect who had barricaded himself inside a two-story home on Kearny Avenue.

The standoff lasted into Sunday, with police calling on the SWAT team to try to get him out. Neighbors were told to shelter in place while they negotiated.

“I heard the guy yelling out, ‘I can’t come out!’ or ‘I can’t do that!’ and then they were like, ‘Come out. We’re here to help you,'” said Rebecca Szymanski, who witnessed the incident.

At about 5 in the morning on Sunday, flames broke out at the home, and some of the neighbors were evacuated.

When the suspect finally came out of the home at about 1 p.m., he was armed with knives and was taken into custody.

A family member identified the victim as Pablo Criollo of Harrison. The family set up a GoFundMe account to help them with burial expenses.

RELATED: California pastor arrested in murder-for-hire plot against daughter’s boyfriend, police say

The suspect was identified as 44-year-old Oscar Feijoo, and he faces murder, weapons, and arson charges. Other charges are expected as well.

One of the man’s neighbors, named Anna Christina, said that she had threatened to call police on the man over him throwing rocks into her back yard.

“And one day I say to him, ‘Please don’t do this, because if you do I’m going to call the police,’ and he got mad at me,” she said.

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​New jersey suspect, Bow and arrow murder, Oscar fiejoo murder, Suspect barricade arson, Crime 

Vivek Ramaswamy is a DEI candidate — and an unqualified one. Republicans do not vote for unqualified DEI candidates. Historically, they never have.

For the good of Ohio, the Republican Party, and MAGA voters nationwide, Vivek Ramaswamy should withdraw from the Ohio gubernatorial race. His candidacy is not merely ill-advised; it is corrosive. At a moment when unity and discipline matter, he threatens to fracture the coalition President Trump assembled and to waste political capital ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential cycle, when Ohio native JD Vance is widely expected to lead the ticket.

All Ramaswamy had to do was remain silent and act like a normal Republican for 18 months. He couldn’t.

Ramaswamy’s problem is not policy disagreement. It is temperament, judgment, and an inability to restrain himself. His habit of attacking critics as racists, trolls, or bad actors poisons the well. Democrats, corporate media, and professional activists already do that job. Republicans do not need a gubernatorial candidate doing it from inside the party.

In 2024, 3,189,116 Ohioans voted for Donald Trump. It strains credulity to claim that Ramaswamy is more qualified to govern Ohio than virtually any one of them.

Yet this charade continues. For decades, GOP leadership has tried to impose an identity-driven strategy on a party whose voters reject it. The results are consistent. From Alan Keyes to Winsome Earle-Sears, the establishment clings to a failed premise: that Republican voters will embrace DEI candidates if scolded long enough. They won’t. Nor do minority voters reliably cross over for such candidates. The strategy fails on both ends.

That makes the present moment especially baffling. At a time when Trump and Vance are openly criticizing decades of discriminatory policies against white Americans, backing a candidate whose appeal rests on the same identity logic is not just tone-deaf — it is hostile to the base.

Ohio is a solid red state. Any competent Republican with discipline wins statewide office comfortably.

Vivek Ramaswamy is neither.

His background underscores why. In 2011, at age 24, Ramaswamy accepted a $90,000 “scholarship” from the brother of George Soros. That alone raises eyebrows. It becomes more troubling when you consider that Ramaswamy had already earned more than $1.2 million in the prior three years and reported $2.25 million in income the year he accepted the award.

This occurred during the Great Recession, when many white Millennial men faced systematic exclusion across elite institutions. Ramaswamy did not.

Later, much of his wealth flowed from Axovant Sciences, which aggressively promoted an Alzheimer’s breakthrough to retail investors after early trials had failed. The result was a textbook pump-and-dump that left ordinary Americans holding the bag. These facts go directly to trust and judgment.

Despite this record, Ramaswamy launched a quixotic presidential campaign, which he parlayed into a brief role in the Trump administration and a partnership with Elon Musk under the DOGE initiative. That arrangement ended almost as quickly as it began.

Then came the Christmas crashout of 2024.

During the holidays — entirely unprovoked — Ramaswamy took to X to berate American workers as lazy and culturally deficient while praising foreign H-1B visa holders. He mocked American childhood culture, disparaged “jocks and prom queens,” and lamented that Americans watched “Boy Meets World” instead of competing in math olympiads. The episode revealed far more about Ramaswamy’s resentments than about American culture.

MAGA voters were celebrating a landslide victory when the lecture arrived. The response was swift and overwhelming. Rather than admit error, Ramaswamy doubled down, dismissing critics as bots, trolls, and racists while casting himself as a victim.

Shortly thereafter, the Trump administration quietly removed him from his DOGE role before he was even formally installed.

Voters noticed. The internet does not forget.

When Ramaswamy announced his run for governor, the reaction was not enthusiasm but disbelief. The Ohio GOP’s apparent decision to anoint him is indefensible. It would take an estimated $100 million to drag this candidacy across the finish line, and even then he would be lucky to crack 48%.

We’ve seen this movie before. At least one-third of Ohio Republicans would rather spoil their ballot, vote third-party, or stay home than support him. Accusing them of racism will not change that reality.

Most recently, Ramaswamy took to the New York Times to reprise his grievances, portraying MAGA voters and heritage Americans as racists, extremists, and “groypers.” He made similar remarks at Turning Point USA’s AmFest over the weekend.

RELATED: The media just told you their 2026 strategy: ‘Lies, but better!’

Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images

In his Times op-ed, he argued that America is an abstract idea detached from ancestry, history, or continuity — and that descendants of those who built the nation have no greater claim to it than recent arrivals or anchor babies.

That view is not widely held, nor is it reflected in the American tradition. From America’s founders to Alexis de Tocqueville and Theodore Roosevelt, continuity, inheritance, and culture have always mattered.

No one expects Ramaswamy to be a heritage American. But Americans reasonably expect someone seeking to govern them to respect the people whose nation it is. Ramaswamy has shown repeated contempt instead.

He did not have to attack white Americans over Christmas. He did not have to insult the Republican base in the New York Times. He did not have to liken MAGA voters to extremists.

He chose to.

All Ramaswamy had to do was remain silent and act like a normal Republican for 18 months. He couldn’t.

MAGA does not need this distraction. Ohio does not need this fight. The Republican Party cannot afford to spend finite resources defending a candidate who consistently antagonizes his own voters.

That alone makes him unsuitable for office.

​Opinion & analysis, Vivek ramaswamy, Ohio, Ohio governor race, Republicans, 2026 midterms, Gop, Donald trump, Jd vance, Heritage americans, Citizenship, H1b visas, Foreign labor, India, Groypers, Tpusa, Amfest