Month: August 2023

Six medical schools in New York state have been hit with civil rights complaints by white and asian teens who say the schools have made it easier for blacks and other races to join their introductory courses.

According to the Daily Mail, Columbia, NYU and other top institutions now face probes by the federal Department of Education, after six letters of complaint were filed with the DoE’s civil rights office in New York.

The complaints, filed by the nonprofit Equal Protection Project (EPP), say the state’s Science and Technology Entry Program (NY-STEP) makes it easier for some 7-12th graders to get a spot than others.

Under the scheme, students who are black, Latino, Alaskan native or American Indian can seek a place. Others — including whites and Asians — have to also show they’re ‘economically disadvantaged’ to apply.

According to EPP founder William Jacobson, this “additional barrier to eligibility” is illegal.

“Erecting additional barriers for some races and ethnic groups in and of itself is unlawful discrimination,” he told the Mail.

“Imagine if the roles were reversed, and these programs explicitly favored Asians and whites — there would be universal outrage and these medical schools would never accept such funding.”

According to the report, the discriminatory schemes are designed to give “highly motivated” secondary school students access to the state’s top medical schools, where they can learn key skills and obtain a mentor – with the goal to “increase the number of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students” in the medical field, according to Columbia’s website.

Jacobson says that the policy unfairly assumes that all asian and white kids have it easy.

“The eligibility guidelines engage in the types of crude stereotypes that presume students of certain racial and ethnic groups are disadvantaged and in need of preference,” he said.

According to EPP, the schools should face fines or lose federal funding.

The civil rights office is a ‘neutral fact-finder’ that aims to investigate complaints and propose resolutions, according to its website.

The letters refer to the US Supreme Court’s decision in June to strike down affirmative action in college admissions.

The justices declared that race cannot be a factor in the process, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.

EPP says it is against racial discrimination in college admissions.

Most of its cases and complaints involve discrimination against whites. -Daily Mail

Of note, black students made up one-tenth of those enrolled int he 2022-2023 year according to the report, while Latinos made up 12%.

By Benjamin Picton, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank

Here Be Dragons

I’ve been away on holiday for the last two weeks trying my best to pay more attention to my children than I do to the markets. Mission accomplished for the most part, but it has been hard to look away while momentous shifts seem to be occurring all around us. Indeed, at the Jackson Hole symposium over the weekend, ECB President Lagarde re-upped her comments from April by suggesting that “there are plausible scenarios where we could see a fundamental change in the nature of economic interactions”, “past regularities may no longer be a good guide for how the economy works” and “there is no pre-existing playbook for the situation we are facing.” Translation: “we really don’t know if rates are high enough or not, and that isn’t really the point anyway.”

So, according the second most senior central banker in the world we’re in uncharted waters, and as anyone who has ever taken an interest in the Age of Discovery will know, once you reach the edge of the known world, here be dragons.

The most obvious dragon is of course China, and its surrogates, which are making new attempts at formalizing challenger status to the G7 via the BRICS bloc. Michael Every notes:

The BRICS just expanded to allow in Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran, so with much hullabaloo we can colour in more countries, GDPs and commodities (like oil) as ‘anti-dollar’. However, Argentina is a serial defaulter with a plummeting currency, and may dollarize soon; Ethiopia is one of the world’s poorest countries, and recently brushed with civil war; Egypt has a wilting currency; Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their currencies pegged to the US dollar, and the former is haggling over a US defence deal and nuclear tech; and Iran is heavily sanctioned, again with a collapsing currency, and could be daggers drawn again with Saudi at any time. In short, the world is changing, but as the FT has pointed out, the BRICS+ (a name created by Goldman Sachs) don’t even have an official website. Meanwhile, it was the Euro, not the dollar, that saw its share of SWIFT transactions collapse to a record low in the latest data. You want to look at potential early victims of any global tectonic shifts? Look there.

This reads as a very ragtag group, with “relationships” built mainly around a common outsider status and no small dose of opportunism in seizing a perceived first-mover advantage in undermining dollar hegemony. We remain sceptical. As we’ve covered in this publication many times, the idea of commodity standard like some kind of petro-Yuan is laden with problems.

The auspices aren’t great for the new alternative multilateralism. The putative centre of the BRICS+ bloc, China, is struggling to revive its flagging growth engine while economic remedies that are taken as orthodox in the West are shunned for their perceived incompatibility with Xi Xinping thought. Markets have been waiting for months for signs of big-bang stimulus from the CCP or the PBOC, but as the WSJ reports, maybe it just ain’t coming. Chinese perceptions that Western consumerism is flabby, decadent and morally obtuse stands at odds with the need for China to fulfil the role of deficit-runner in order to get enough Yuan into the hands of the periphery. How can Argentina, Brazil, Iran and Egypt buy virtuous Chinese manufactures if they don’t have any Yuan? The answer here is that trade will continue to be conducted in dollars, one way or another.

China clearly has little appetite for further credit expansion either. The CCP has made several attempts over the years to rein-in debt levels, all of which have ultimately been abandoned in the face of a stalling economy. For the time being, Xi Xinping is resisting large-scale easing of credit conditions, urging “patience” while the economy passes through what policy-makers hope is a temporary soft patch, rather than the start of a Japan-style stagnation brought on by decades of malinvestment and speculative pump-priming of real estate assets.

The real question now is how strong the CCP and the PBOCs resolve to address burgeoning debt-levels will be in the face of economic slowdown. For an authoritarian regime whose legitimacy is built on the delivery of rapidly rising living standards, slow growth poses a potentially existential risk. The obvious retort here is that authoritarian states have no need to court popular opinion, but the speed at which the Covid-Zero policy was ultimately abandoned in the face of civil discontent should serve as an indication that the CCP is ultimately still sensitive to what the population thinks.

Looking back to Jackson Hole it’s fair to say that debt and popular discontent aren’t a uniquely Chinese problem. During the meeting of rich men north of Richmond (Jackson Hole is north of Richmond, I checked) a paper presented by Barry Eichengreen and Serkan Arslanap broke the bad news that “public debts will not decline significantly for the foreseeable future”, “primary surpluses of… 3 to 5 percent of GDP are very much exceptions to the rule” and that “inflation is not a sustainable route to reducing high public debts.” That all makes for sobering reading for already beleaguered millennials and Gen Z’s, who will be the can carriers for Eichengreen and Arslanap’s prognosis that “given ageing populations, governments will have to find additional finance for healthcare and pensions”.

What seems to be missing here is a dose of Huw Pill cod liver oil, whereby the West confronts the idea that we’re not as rich as we used to be, and that deteriorating demographics and higher spends on national security might necessitate a lowering of ambitions around what is possible in welfare economics. There are signs that the message is starting to get through. BOJ Governor Ueda nodded to the plight of the West when he suggested that the relocation of supply chains will result in lower productivity in the future, which ultimately means lower real incomes. Meanwhile, former French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud, echoes Michael Every’s assessment of Europe’s diminishing importance by writing in the UK Telegraph that “deluded Europe can’t see that it is finished.”

Nobody likes bad news, but telling young people that they need to pay a higher proportion of their stagnant incomes to fund the pensions of people who are wealthier than they are ever likely to be is sure to go down like a lead balloon, especially when pop culture is already communicating the sense that a Dollar doesn’t buy what it used to, and is taxed to the hilt.

So, the plates are shifting and policy makers in the West seem to be either totally unsure of the answers, or proffering answers that are anathema to the social fabric. We’re in uncharted territory and here be dragons.

Following the BlackRock filing for a Bitcoin spot ETF that helped propel the market at the end of June, Bitcoin reached a YTD high just about $31,800 in mid-July.

The August correction in crypto markets, which reversed the post SEC vs. Ripple court decision rally, can be partly attributed to the broader correction in risk assets such as equities and in particular tech, which in turn appear to have been induced by frothy positioning in tech, higher US real yields and growth concerns about China.

And at the margin, news related to SpaceX liquidating its bitcoin holding in the previous quarter acted as an additional catalyst.

This correction pushed the total crypto market cap back down to around $1 trillion…

And as JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzaoglou notes, these headlines all caught investors with an overhang of long positions (as implied by JPM’s futures position proxy based on CME bitcoin futures)…

These long positions were built on the back of a string of previous positive news such as the district court decision on the SEC vs. Ripple case, the launch of a stablecoin by PayPal, the launch of Coinbase “Base” chain, a wide anticipation that the SEC will approve the recent applications by several asset managers for a spot bitcoin ETF, as well as early positioning by some investors ahead of the bitcoin halving event, tentatively expected to happen in late Apr 2024.

But, as the chart above shows, this unwinding of long positions appears to be at its end phase rather than its beginning.

Additionally, as Michael Saylor noted recently, Bitcoin does not tend to spend too much time below its 200DMA…

Rarely does $BTC trade below its 200 Week Moving Average. pic.twitter.com/f2ItcB8YLb

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) August 28, 2023

And so, as a result of this, Panigirtzaoglou sees limited downside for crypto markets over the near term.

Which perhaps explains why – in the face of this selling pressure – the Bitcoin mining hashrate has only continued to rise recently to a record high, suggesting that the miners may not care too much about the crash.

Source: Blockchain.com

As Bitcoinist reports, the “mining hashrate” is an indicator that measures the total amount of this computing power that the miners have currently connected to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Source: Blockchain.com

Generally, the higher the hashrate, the more secure is the network as a 51% hack becomes much harder to perform. This is, of course, given that the hashrate is also sufficiently decentralized.

When the hashrate goes up, it means that miners are finding the BTC blockchain attractive to mine on currently so new validators are joining and/or old ones are expanding.

It would appear that the miners are unfazed by this price plunge, at least for now, even though revenue has plummeted…

Source: Blockchain.com

As CoinTelegraph reports, market analyst Dylan LeClair commented on the falling revenue and hash rate peak stating that more efficient new rigs will keep being produced, “but it’s almost time for the price to outpace,” meaning that prices need to adjust upwards to keep mining profitable at such high hash rates.

Bitcoin miners have reportedly been relying on funds from stock sales in the second quarter to keep them afloat during the bear market.

🚨🚨Major $BTC miners are in BIG trouble heading to the halving 🧵👇

To avoid selling the ~$900M BTC they’re hoarding, miners relied on debt and diluting shareholders

Now those lifelines are drying up. Soon their only option is dumping into the markethttps://t.co/I27tvV4kxu

— Rho Rider (@RhoRider) August 26, 2023

On Aug. 24, Bloomberg reported that the 12 major publicly traded miners raised about $440 million through stock sales in Q2.

Mark Jeftovic, who runs the Bitcoin Capitalist newsletter, said, “Some mining companies are diluting shareholders at an excessive rate,” adding that “if they are diluting you faster than Bitcoin is going up, then you are going the wrong way on a treadmill.”

Finally, Bloomberg suggests another possible reason for miners scaling up regardless of the current prices is in part due to an upcoming Bitcoin code update called the ‘halving’. The update cuts the Bitcoin rewards to miners in half every four years and maintain the coin’s 21 million supply cap. The next halving is set to take place in 2024. The mining companies have to increase their computing power and stay competitive to fight for even less rewards after the event.

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Las Vegas is the most popular location for relocating home buyers nationwide, topping Redfin’s list for the first time—with Californians making up the largest group of new residents in the Southern Nevada hot spot, according to a study by the national real estate group.

“Buyers with the freedom and inclination to relocate are choosing Las Vegas largely because their money goes a long way there: Its typical home sells for $412,000, less than half the price of a home in Los Angeles, the most common origin for buyers moving to Las Vegas,” Redfin stated in a report published last month.

The news was not surprising for the city’s real estate association, which has about 17,000 members.

“After COVID, a lot of people realized they don’t have to live in a certain area if they have certain job descriptions,” Las Vegas Realtors President Lee Barrett told The Epoch Times.

Besides more affordable home prices, many people moving to Sin City are also discovering how much the city offers outside of casinos, Mr. Barrett added.

“We have all the things a regular city has, and we have more of it than people realize,” he said. “It’s a good place to raise a family and a good place to run your business.”

The growing city of about 656,300, according to 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, also has mountain hiking, a ski resort, a symphony, shopping, theater, and the nation’s No. 1 hockey team, the Vegas Golden Knights, which won its first Stanley Cup championship this year.

The Oakland A’s baseball team has also agreed to move to Las Vegas after the end of the 2024 season following the NFL’s Oakland Raiders who moved there in 2020.

The city has also signed a Formula 1 racing contract for the next 10 years, Mr. Barrett said.

The amenities, opportunities, less crime, and family-friendly activities have also lured Hollywood celebrities recently.

Actors Mark Wahlberg, Holly Madison, and Dean Cain have recently relocated to the city.

Nevada also has no state income tax, adding to the draw.

“If you’re an extremely wealthy person, it’s a benefit to live in a state where there’s no income tax,” Mr. Barrett said. “If you still want to be close to Los Angeles to work, Las Vegas is a way to do that.”

The influx of Californians and other out-of-towners has caused a shortage of housing, which has plummeted since last year, according to Las Vegas Realtor.

For instance, in August 2022, 10,644 single-family homes were on the market, which then dropped by nearly 40 percent in July 2023 to 6,031.

According to Mr. Barrett, developers are now building more apartment complexes and condominiums as a result.

The median—or middle value—price for existing single-family homes sold in Southern Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, in July was $450,000, up 2 percent from June, but down 3.2 percent from July 2022, according to Las Vegas Realtors.

Median home prices in the region are still below the all-time record of $482,000 set in May 2022, the organization reported in an Aug. 8 press release.

Specifically for the Las Vegas market, the median price for a single-family home was $790,644 in July, which was a 2 percent increase over June’s median, Las Vegas Realtor reported.

The condominium and townhouse market in the city in July was significantly less expensive with a median of $333,109, according to Las Vegas Realtor.

Meanwhile, the median home price in California was $786,400 in July, Redfin reported.

Although prices in Las Vegas remain high compared to many other regions in the United States, they are lower than many California cities, including Los Angeles, which currently has a median of $830,000, Orange County’s $1,059,000, and San Diego at $835,000, according to Irvine-based CoreLogic, reporting its latest data as of June.

Phoenix, Arizona, and Tampa, Florida, are the next most popular cities for people to relocate nationally, Redfin reported. Both those city’s states have lower medians, at $420,000 and $390,000, respectively than California’s, according to national real estate service Zillow.

According to Redfin, five of the 10 most popular destinations for relocations are in Florida, which has no state income tax. The Sunshine State also has a low corporate income tax of 5.5 percent, a 6 percent state sales tax, and a local sales tax of 2 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, the nation’s leading nonpartisan tax policy nonprofit.

According to a different Redfin survey, 20 percent of those who moved to a new city in the last year did so for a lower cost of living. Fifteen percent of those surveyed said they wanted a better deal on a home and 13 percent said they couldn’t afford a home or the cost of living in their previous area.

The Redfin survey in May and June consisted of 884 respondents who indicated they moved from one metro area to another in the previous 12 months, according to the company.

Tribal police took aggressive action against a group of anti-capitalist climate protesters blocking the road to Burning Man in Nevada on Sunday.

Approximately six activists from Seven Circles and Extinction Rebellion locked themselves to a trailer in the middle of the road, when rangers from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police Department of Nevada drove straight through their blockade, sending demonstrators flying as they sobbed “We’re non-violent,” the Daily Mail reports.

At one point a tribal officer exited his vehicle and ordered a climate protester to the ground at gunpoint before telling her to ‘stop resisting’ arrest.

Another can be heard asking a protestors ‘who has the gun‘, as the protestors say ‘we have no weapons at all, we’re environmental protestors’.

Guardian journalist Michelle Hooq claimed on social media that the Rangers attended the protest after receiving a call that ‘someone in the crowd was going to shoot the activists’.

DailyMail.com did not immediately receive a response to a request for comment from Extinction Rebellion, Seven Circles or the PLPTPD.

Watch:

JUST IN: Nevada Rangers ram through climate protest blockade after group shut down BURNING MAN. (FNTV) pic.twitter.com/l0AXBUOqjC

— Real Frank (@realzitro) August 27, 2023

Nevada rangers drove directly into a blockade set up by climate protestors on the road to Burning Man. An officer pulled a gun out, tackling a protestor and threatening to shoot

Environmental activists were demanding that #BurningMan ban private jets + single-use plastics pic.twitter.com/dawDjxhV4y

— michelle lh࿊࿊q (@MichelleLhooq) August 28, 2023

According to the report, one ranger can be heard saying that the protesters were ‘trespassing on tribal land’ before they were arrested.

A social media account for Rave Revolution Global posted the footage with the caption “‘Nevada Ranger rammed into the blockade, an officer pulled out his gun and threatened to shoot,” adding “Activists from Extinction Rebellion and Rave Revolution Global were demanding that the festival ban private jets and single-use plastics.”

Meanwhile, the Seattle branch of Extinction Rebellion (imagine the smell) tweeted: “Why would a police officer risk public safety like that?”

Why indeed.

Full video below:

pic.twitter.com/v4EkkivbmE

— Ryan Duff (@ryancduff) August 28, 2023

pic.twitter.com/T29h68jCvI

— T. Lee (@RfLcopter3) August 28, 2023

So much to unpack here

— Banana Republic Justice Swan 🍌 (@TheWuhanClan) August 28, 2023

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.

Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable —a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy?

We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of a prior 12 generations.

Consider the following:

Three leftwing prosecutors are criminalizing politics with more than 90 simultaneous indictments of Donald Trump, the ex-president and currently the leading Republican primary candidate. While New York prosecutor Letitia James is hounding Trump with a $250 million state lawsuit against the Trump organization and family, on the pretense of supposedly Trump overvaluing his real estate and filing inaccurate financial statements.

Is there any Mafia don, mass murderer, or terrorist who has faced so many indictments or suits in so many jurisdictions at almost the same time?

The prosecutors’ immediate lawfare agendas seem transparent enough. They wish to bankrupt candidate Trump with endless legal costs, and humiliate him with his mugshot blasted over the Internet, and put endless Lilliputian legal ropes over a shackled candidate Gulliver, and inflate the ego and agendas of local prosecutors, and purportedly earn Trump empathy enough to win the nomination only to be hemorrhaged with still more indictments, gag orders, and court appearances to bleed him out in the general election.

Americans ask themselves questions whose answers are never given. Why are all these Trump prosecutors leftwing or with Democratic connections?

Would any of the 90 something indictments for “crimes” of years past have been lodged against a citizen Trump who had retired from politics?

Why are these indictments of alleged wrongdoing of years ago now in summer 2023 suddenly being synchronized in leftwing jurisdictions of New York, Washington, Miami, and Atlanta with the beginning of the 2024 election cycle?

Are any of the indictments against Trump also applicable to others?

Alvin Bragg’s charge of campaign finance violations (Hillary Clinton, 2016)?

Jack Smith’s allegations of encouraging mass civil unrest (Kamala Harris, 2020)?

Illegally removing and possessing classified federal documents (Joe Biden 2009-2022)?

Letitia James’s lawsuit alleging financial irregularities and fraud (Al Sharpton 2009-2014)?

Fani Willis’s claim that Trump was seeking to sabotage the constitutional duties of state electors (Martin Sheen, and an array of B-list Hollywood actors, 2016) and colluding to interfere with an election (Fani Willis 2023-4)?

Will any losing Republican candidate in a contested election any longer question the integrity of questionable balloting—in the manner of Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Sen. Barbara Boxer and 32 Democratic congressional representatives in 2004, candidate Jill Stein or Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Stacey Abrams 2018—and thereby risk financially and career-crimpling indictments?

Will conservative district attorneys in places like Wyoming, Alabama, or West Virginia now seek to indict a Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Gavin Newsom to earn notoriety, to weaken the opposing party, and to leapfrog to higher office in the manner that we should expect a Fani Willis or Alvin Bragg to be currently planning?

When Republicans retake the Congress and White House, will they begin indicting all the weaponized prosecutors who colluded to exempt a grifting Hunter Biden for five years? Will they try Joe Biden as a private citizen for his prior corruption over the last 15 years?

Why would Donald Trump believe the 2020 election was “rigged?” Was he cribbing that belief from liberal journalist Molly Ball’s braggadocious 2021 Time essay? After all, she outlined what she called a leftwing “cabal” and “conspiracy” to change voting laws, turn on/turn off the 2020 Antifa/BLM street protests, absorb the work of registrars, and suppress unwelcome social media news.

Was it more morally suspect to question the ethics surrounding the election year 2020 or for Mark Zuckerberg to infuse $419 million to absorb in asymmetrical fashion the work of the registrars in key swing precincts?

A Cardboard Cutout President

We are witnessing the daily deterioration of President Biden to the point that caricature and jokes about his senility are no longer funny. He is not just an embarrassment but becoming an existential danger to the country. Does anyone believe that in a national crisis over Taiwan or nuclear escalation in Ukraine, Joe Biden would or could make the final decision?

Biden cannot finish a teleprompter sentence without slurring his words, losing his place, or screaming and whispering in incoherent fashion. If that is his public persona, what he is like in private sessions of governance?

He spontaneously both shouts angrily and creepily whispers for effect. Moving a lightweight aluminum beach chair becomes a Herculean task.

In almost every impromptu speech Biden flat-out lies or spins self-serving autobiographical fantasies—often in the midst of foreign dignitaries, grieving families, and refugees from devastating natural disasters.

Biden often does not know where he is on stage or where he is to enter or exit. He is one fall from oblivion.

Not since Woodrow Wilson’s final year in office, has any president simply been unable to fulfill his duties, both physically and cognitively.

Or perhaps the country is in the same position as when an ailing Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944 was deemed just hale enough to get elected and continue Democratic control of the White House, but deemed not healthy enough to finish his first year in office—necessitating the rapid removal from the ticket of the socialist Vice President—and an otherwise likely 1945 President—Henry Wallace.

Yet there has been almost no serious speculation in Congress or among the cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment. This silence is doubly strange given the Left’s former fixation between 2017-21 with removing Trump by any means possible—including invoking the 25th Amendment.

That silly effort led to the surreal—the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and the deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein scheming to wiretap Trump in private conversations to reveal his supposed craziness–or the Congress dragging in an incompetent Yale psychiatrist to testify that at a distance she had diagnosed Trump as demented.

Do we recall ex-Pentagon officials and officers talking openly about a military coup to remove the supposedly touched commander in chief?

Our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs contacted the head of the People’s Liberation Army to warn him that Trump might be unhinged. So is Gen. Mark Milley now making yet another call to Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army to warn him that Joe Biden is dangerously disturbed?

It is precisely that entire cast of characters that now sit mum as Joe Biden believes we are fighting in Iraq against the Russians or that his late son Beau died in action in Iraq, or it is impossible to square the tens of millions of dollars that flowed from abroad to the Biden accounts with any concrete expertise rendered or income reported as taxable.

Is the tolerance of Biden’s senescence because his blank stares and mental confusion prove useful to the Left by exempting the president from offering any defense of his mostly defenseless policies or defending his absurd claims to know nothing of the Biden family grifting operations that were predicated on his own offices?

Or do the puppeteers, the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the hard leftists of the party find a non-compos mentis Biden mannequin a useful veneer in pushing through their extreme agendas? Or does the media call the shots, especially after they propelled a basement bound Biden to the White House?

Mainstreaming Corruption

There have been a few corrupt presidents in our past, who (as in the case of Lyndon Johnson) left office far richer than when they entered or were surrounded by rogues (Grant and Harding) or were masters of leveraging and grifting long-term contracts and networks in their lame duck tenures to ensure their impending multimillionaire status the day they left office (the Clintons and Obamas).

But never in memory has an entire extended presidential family been involved in selling influence for millions of dollars in quid pro quo lucre—the vast majority of such ill-gotten gains likely untaxed, by being channeled through sham companies, foreign deposits, fake names and alias email accounts.

Never has a corrupt presidential family itself offered so much proof of its own guilt. Do the Democrats have any idea of the smelly Biden albatross hanging about their collective necks?

How much longer can they continue to dismiss the communications on the Hunter Biden laptop?

Or the testimonies of IRS whistleblowers?

Or the assertions of Biden family business associates?

Or the statements of relevant Ukrainian oligarchs?

Or the latest assertions of Viktor Shokin?

Or the extraordinary efforts of the Bidens to stonewall subpoenaed documents, use fake names and shadow email accounts, compromise federal prosecutors, appoint sham special counsels, and use media toadies to the point of embarrassment to hide the ugly truth?

In sum, what were the Bidens so afraid of that prompted them to corrupt the DOJ and FBI to stonewall any discussion of the huge cash infusions that came from abroad into their family coffers?

Americans have impeached or nearly impeached presidents before for abuse of power, lying under oath, or supposedly using government to pursue their own personal agendas or harass their enemies.

But never has a president been so clearly compromised by bribery from shady foreign government-related grandees in expectation of favorable treatment.

In other words, there is growing evidence that Joe and Hunter Biden, and likely Jim Biden as well, made millions of dollars on the hopes that then Vice President Biden, and perhaps one day a future president Biden, would alter or compromise U.S. foreign policy on the expectation of getting rich.

The State Department’s Ukraine team deemed Viktor Shokin making progress in rooting out corruption. So why did Joe Biden without consultation fire him? Did Biden put his own financial interests above the country’s—in a fashion that the Founders worried was impeachable “treason?”

If the current investigations are not halted or compromised, we may soon learn why the Constitution explicitly specified bribery and treason as an ironclad cause for impeachment.

Can Americans even comprehend that they have elected a dishonest man to the presidency who is protected by his own senility, his decades-long everyman construct of ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton, his usefulness as a prop to the radical leftwing agenda, and the defensive and offensive weaponization of the criminal justice system?

Can Americans digest that instead of campaigning against Donald Trump, outdebating him, outspending him, and outfoxing him, their government must unleash kindred prosecutors to destroy Trump by blowing up the entire tradition of blind American jurisprudence?

Are the media and left claiming that to save the rule of law from Trump, they must first destroy it?

Townhall published a documentary on X, formerly known as Twitter, titled “David vs. Goliath: Big Government’s War on an Amish Farmer.” The film shows big government raiding the business of a small-town Amish farmer tucked away in Virginia’s heartland. 

Samuel B. Fisher and his family farm, Golden Valley Farms, was raided unannounced in June by the Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (VDACS) and Cumberland County sheriff’s deputy for selling meat from his 100-acre farm because the meat was not processed in a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) facility. 

“They went through everything, house, every building, in the barn. They just raided through everything, put their nose in everything, and wanted to know every detail of everything. They went out back, trying to find all the failure they can find on a farm, which, of course, some of their stuff, which they think is wrong, is just normal stuff on a farm,” Fisher stated.

“I wasn’t on the farm at the time” of the raid that lasted four hours, Fisher added.

Townhall said the state government tagged Fisher’s walk-in freezer, placing the meat under “administrative detention.” In other words, his own meat was now under state control and no longer for sale, nor could he feed his family. 

Mindy, the farm’s officer manager, said there is “nothing illegal” about Fisher processing his own meat and eating it for his own consumption — even though the state prevented him from doing so.

“So, he decided he was gonna go and feed his family, and since he would most likely be fined for doing that, he decided to open up meat sales again. Because if he’s going to be fined, he’s going to be fined, and you might as well do it,” she said. 

“Anybody can go and raise animals for their own family to eat. That’s where I got to the point: He [the VDACS inspector] crossed the line, so I’m going to cross the line,” continued Fisher. The state “crossed the line by telling me I cannot feed my own family with this meat. So, I decided I’m going to cross the line. I’m going to sell it. And that’s why I didn’t honor the state,” he added. 

“This ain’t right,” Fished expressed. He said, “We’re going to feed our family. We’re going to feed our customers […] So, we did not honor that tag. We sold the meat, some meat, out of there [the tagged freezer], whatever customers ordered. Then, the state came back and saw what we did. They really gave me a mouthful for doing that.” 

… and then the state took Fisher to court. This led to a court-ordered seizure of all the meat. 

The state returned to the farm with U-Haul trucks and loaded all his product, which was then dumped for disposal. 

“We had all this meat. We worked hard to get it in the freezer, process it, package it, stack it in there to sell and bring income. And, here comes the state, puts everything in their truck, and takes it to the dump, pays us nothing for it, so that definitely affects our income. We do have a big struggle to pay our bills right at the moment,” Fisher said. 

The Amish farmer explained his 500 customers believed in his products because it was “fresh,” unlike “when you go to the store, you don’t know what’s in your food.” 

Fisher said big corporations that control the food supply sometimes process “partly rotten” meat dipped in chloride, as a chemical preservative, to manufacture a red, pinkish look “just like it be fresh.” He said big corporations can’t track all the animals that are butchered. 

“So, that’s why I say if you buy food from a farmer, go to that farm, ask the farmer you want to see their animals, you want to see the farm, you want to know where your food comes from. You do have the full rights. Ask for that. If you are not given it, take it as a warning,” Fisher said.

David vs. Goliath: Big Government’s War on an Amish Farmer pic.twitter.com/p5U9MmLa18

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 18, 2023

He once sold USDA-inspected meat, but after a customer survey, 92% of them wanted Fisher to process on the farm. He built out slaughter and processing operations to avoid his meat being tainted with chemicals at meat packing plants.  

This situation sounds similar to Oliver Anthony’s blue-collar anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” in which he says, “Lord knows they all just wanna have total control.”