Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times,

Members of the South Carolina Senate voted on April 21 to remove the state’s embattled treasurer for “willful neglect” of his duties, sending the matter to the state House for consideration.

The 33–8 vote followed an hours-long hearing of the full Senate, during which state Sens. Larry Grooms and Stephen Goldfinch, both Republicans, pushed for state Treasurer Curtis Loftis’s removal over a $1.8 billion accounting error.

South Carolina Treasurer Curtis Loftis prepares for a hearing in the state Senate, in Columbia, South Carolina, on April 21, 2025. Jeffrey Collins/AP Photo

“The big secret of Treasurer Loftis, the one that he’s kept hidden away, is that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in errors in the Treasury books today, and he doesn’t know how to fix them,” Grooms said in opening the hearing.

A state Senate Finance subcommittee report released last month said Loftis, a Republican, “failed to maintain the integrity” of South Carolina’s banking and investment records after state officials were alerted to an unexplained $1.8 billion in funds under his office’s exclusive control.

An outside forensic audit determined that most of the funds in question were not real cash but the result of bookkeeping errors that followed the state’s transition to a new accounting system in the 2010s.

Loftis, now in his fourth term, was first elected treasurer in 2010 and has held the office since.

While two other public officials have resigned in connection with the state’s accounting issues, Loftis, Grooms said, “remains defiant and refuses to take responsibility for his failures.”

Loftis, defending his record, likened himself to President Donald Trump, who vociferously denounced various investigations related to his affairs.

“I’m inspired by President Trump, and I, too, will not back down,” Loftis said.

During prior Senate testimony, the treasurer indicated that the inexplicable funds not only existed but had been invested and were generating returns. After the audit, however, he claimed the report “validated what we’ve known all along,” a statement that Goldfinch derided as “a lie.”

The senator accused Loftis of attempting to cover up a serious error that he knew would damage his reputation.

Loftis’s attorneys downplayed the discrepancy as “an on-paper accounting error” and “an honest mistake.”

“AlixPartners reviewed more than 1 million documents and did not find a single piece of evidence suggesting wrongdoing by the treasurer,” noted Shawn Eubanks, an attorney in the treasurer’s office, referencing the firm that conducted the forensic audit.

Eubanks further held that the audit report provided “good news for the state” in that it found no missing or stolen funds.

“The treasurer’s books reconcile to the bank,” he said.

Loftis’s lawyers also criticized the Legislature’s efforts to oust him as a violation of both his due process rights and the will of the voters who elected him.

“Treasurer Loftis is the most popular statewide official in the history of South Carolina. This is a man who received 80 percent of the vote in the last election, a man who received overwhelming bipartisan support,” attorney Debbie Barbier said.

Decrying the proceedings as “drastic” and unprecedented, Barbier said lawmakers had stripped Loftis of his right to call and confront witnesses by using the state’s removal on address procedure rather than impeachment.

“They’re asking you to make this decision not based on a trial, not with witnesses, not with exhibits and documents and expert testimony and authentication of documents, not with rules of evidence, but based upon a one-and-a-half-hour presentation with video clips,” she said. “There is not one shred of proof and absolutely no evidence to support the removal of Treasurer Loftis.”

The more common impeachment process gives lawmakers the power to impeach and convict a statewide officer for “serious crimes or serious misconduct in office.” The South Carolina Constitution also provides an avenue to removal for “willful neglect of duty” or another “reasonable cause” deemed insufficient for impeachment. That process requires the governor to remove an officer “on the address of two-thirds of each house of the General Assembly” after a hearing.

If Loftis is removed, he would become the first state official in South Carolina’s 235-year history to be ousted under the provision.

It will now be up to the state House, also under GOP control, to decide whether to hold a hearing on the matter.

To begin the week, we highlighted a potential breaking point emerging in the global economy due to the escalating tariff war: Chinese plastics manufacturers—heavily reliant on U.S. petrochemicals—now face production halts as shipments are increasingly being diverted from the world’s second-largest economy. 

Bloomberg cites new ship-tracking data showing that a very large gas carrier hauling U.S. propane has diverted from its initial destination in China to a new port of call in Japan. 

The data showed that BW Gemini is hauling 46,000 tons of propane from the U.S. The gas tanker left Phillips 66 Freeport LPG Export Terminal in late March and was initially headed for Yantai, China. However, in recent days, while traversing the Pacific Ocean, the port of call was changed to Imari, Japan. 

There was no explanation for BW Gemini’s sudden port calling switch from China to Japan, but in recent weeks, Beijing slapped 125% tariffs on all liquefied petroleum gas. 

The tanker laden with U.S. propane brings the conversation full circle to our note on Monday (read: here), which warned that the global plastics industry could soon be thrown into turmoil:

Chinese plastics factories that depend on a gas they mainly import from the U.S. are contending with the prospect of widespread shutdowns as the world’s two largest economies bunker down for a prolonged trade war

The note titled “Chinese Plastics Factories Face Mass Closure As US Ethane Supply Evaporates” focused on ethane, a petrochemical feedstock to produce ethylene, one of the most critical building blocks in modern manufacturing. 

Ethylene is the foundation for a wide range of downstream products, including:

Polyethylene (PE):

• Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE): Plastic bags, films, food wraps

• High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE): Bottles, containers, pipes

• Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA): Shoe soles, foam products, adhesives

Industrial Chemicals:

• Ethylene oxide: Used to produce ethylene glycol, the base for antifreeze and polyester

• Styrene: For polystyrene plastics (packaging, insulation)

• Vinyl chloride (via EDC): Used to make PVC for pipes, window frames, cables

• Alpha-olefins: For synthetic lubricants and specialty polymers

Polyethylene is indeed one of the core inputs of the modern plastic economy. However, the deepening trade war is disrupting petrochemical shipments to China. If these disruptions persist over a prolonged period, China could face manufacturing slowdowns, potentially triggering ripple effects across the global economy. The IMF already issued this warning earlier…

Authored by Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,

“It’s not food. It’s food-like substances.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the many manufactured food products offered that are high in calories but low in nutritional value.

“So, strawberry flavoring in food, but there’s no nutrients. It’s sugar.” Kennedy said. “Your body is craving that, but it doesn’t get filled up. It doesn’t give you nutrition, but you want to eat more.”

Kennedy, a longtime health advocate, has championed President Donald Trump’s call for “fresh thinking on nutrition” as part of the Make America Healthy Again initiative. The secretary spoke in Indianapolis on April 15 in support of Gov. Mike Braun’s announcement of nine health-related executive orders.

Kennedy has urged states to prohibit the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds to purchase certain foods with high sugar content but little nutritional value.

SNAP, colloquially known as food stamps, is a federal program administered by the states that helps nearly 42 million low-income Americans pay for food.

To change the list of foods eligible for purchase with SNAP funds, states must request a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A handful of states, including Indiana, are doing that.

Advocates call this a commonsense way to promote better food choices.

Some critics say the initiative amounts to virtue signaling, a symbolic action unlikely to produce any positive effect.

Kennedy hopes it will fuel a movement toward healthier food consumption that will reverse the growing prevalence of obesity among Americans.

Junk Food Origins

Kennedy and others have blamed the glut of tasty but vacuous foods on big tobacco companies, which entered the food industry more than 60 years ago.

In the 1960s, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, then the largest tobacco brands, began developing children’s beverages including Hawaiian Punch, Kool-Aid, Capri Sun, and Tang, according to a report from The BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.

“Tobacco executives transferred their knowledge of marketing to young people and expanded product lines using colours, flavours, and marketing strategies originally designed to market cigarettes,” a team of researchers reported.

Vuse e-cigarette packages are displayed at Cigar N Vape in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 13, 2021. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the sale of R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse Solo e-cigarette and its tobacco-flavored cartridges the prior day, saying data show the product may reduce smokers’ exposure to harmful chemicals found in traditional cigarettes. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In May 1962, R.J. Reynolds’ director of research reported the status of product development in an internal memo.

The director described the result of taste tests for flavored drinks conducted with children in the same report detailing the addition of artificial flavoring to chewing tobacco and cane sugar to cigarettes.

R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris eventually went deeper into the food business, owning major brands Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco for several years starting in the 1980s. There, they applied some of the same strategies to manufacturing other foods people find irresistible.

Researchers at the University of Kansas found that food companies owned by tobacco companies were much more likely than others to market “hyper-palatable” food products.

Hyper-palatable foods contain more of the things that make food taste good, such as fat, sugar, sodium, or carbohydrates, according to Tera Fazzino, an author of the Kansas study and associate director of the university’s Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment.

These foods also have fewer of the nutrients that make us feel satisfied, Fazzino said in a 2023 interview. “As a result, hyper-palatable foods can be difficult to stop eating, even when we physically feel full.”

The researchers concluded, “Tobacco companies appear to have selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the U.S. food system between 1988 and 2001.”

That triggered an industry wide shift, the researchers said. By 2018, foods high in fat, sodium, and carbohydrates had long been widely marketed regardless of whether or not the producers were previously owned by a tobacco company.

The result, according to Kennedy, is an obesity crisis that threatens the health and safety of all Americans.

Boxes of sugary cereal fill a store’s shelves in Miami on April 16, 2025. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that many manufactured food products are high in calories but low in nutritional value. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“We have people who are obese who are at the same time malnourished, because the food that we’re eating is not nutrient-dense anymore,” Kennedy said. “It is threatening our national security: 74 percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.”

Nearly 70 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese, according to a 2023 report by the federal government. Obesity rates have tripled over the last 60 years, while severe obesity has increased by a factor of 10.

Americans are not alone in this. More than 60 percent of Europeans are either obese or overweight, according to data reported by the National Institutes of Health. Worldwide, the prevalence of obesity has risen for decades.

States Respond

Indiana and Arkansas became the first states to submit waiver requests to the USDA, asking to exclude soda and candy from SNAP purchases. Both sent their requests on April 15.

Several other states have announced their intention to seek a waiver, and some are considering legislation to that effect.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen sent a letter to the Department of Agriculture on April 7 saying that the state intends to request a waiver on soda and energy drinks.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a law on April 15 requiring the director of the state Department of Health and Welfare to request a waiver on soda and candy.

State representatives in Tennessee passed a similar bill on March 11, and the Iowa House passed one on March 26. Neither state’s senate has yet acted on the legislation.

Other states have failed to pass or have rejected legislation that mandates a waiver request.

Cans of Monster Beverage Corporation energy drinks fill a store’s shelves in Miami on April 16, 2025. Sweetened beverages—including energy drinks, juices, and powder mixes—account for about 9 percent of SNAP food stamps spending. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A West Virginia bill has been stalled in a House committee since Feb. 19. A Missouri bill failed in the state’s House of Representatives on April 8. A Montana bill passed in the state Senate but was shelved by the House Committee on Human Resources on April 9.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on April 15 vetoed a bill directing her state’s Department of Economic Security to request a waiver. However, Hobbs signed a bill prohibiting “ultra-processed” foods in school lunches.

Support, Skepticism

Advocates of a SNAP ban on soda and candy, including some health professionals, see the policy as reasonable, even obvious.

“I think it just makes wise nutritional sense, business sense, common sense,” Christy Hope, an Indiana social worker, told The Epoch Times. 

Hope has worked in an outpatient pediatric clinic as well as in a Medicaid office conducting eligibility screening.

“The benefits are intended to cover nutritional items,” she said.

SNAP benefits already exclude foods served hot at the point of sale, alcoholic beverages, vitamins, food supplements, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, and personal hygiene products.

Nutrition and policy experts broadly agree that limiting consumption of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods is a worthy goal.

“I can see the hope to shift [people] away from foods that are … ultra-processed, empty calories toward healthier options,” Bisakha Sen, a professor of health policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told The Epoch Times. “I think there’s actually some unity on both sides of the political aisle on this.”

Yet she and others doubt the practical value of excluding soda and candy from SNAP purchases, especially when many already struggle to find low-cost food options.

“If we start making a list of [foods] which are good for people and which are not, it will be a huge list,” Nikhil V. Dhurandhar, chair of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, told The Epoch Times. “It is not practical.”

Dhurandher likened a grocery store to a vast buffet. “If you remove one [sugary] food, there is some other food that’s going to take its place. I call that digging a hole in water.”

Richard Kahn, an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina Medical School, says the SNAP exclusions amount to a “cheap, easy way to blame the other guy.”

According to Kahn, the idea that taxpayers will no longer subsidize the purchase of sugary foods is mistaken. “They’re [still] paying for sugar-sweetened beverages because we subsidize the agriculture industry,” he said.

A sign alerting customers about SNAP food stamps benefits is displayed in a grocery store in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Dec. 5, 2019. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has urged states to ban the use of SNAP funds for foods with high sugar content but little nutritional value, in efforts to promote healthier food consumption and reverse rising obesity rates among Americans. Scott Heins/Getty Images

Alternatives

Many nutrition and policy experts favor a holistic, all-of-society approach rather than one that targets behavior in just one group of people.

Some have suggested a tax on soda to discourage consumption. Others mentioned improving the nutritional value of school lunches. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has suggested banning television ads for unhealthful foods targeting children.

Nana Gletsu Miller, an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, favors education over behavioral mandates.

“Based on the evidence for the effectiveness of nutrition education and the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of restriction of food choice, I suggest the former would be a better approach,” Gletsu Miller told The Epoch Times.

A deeper problem is the lack of affordable, nutritious food, according to Dr. Tamara S. Hannon, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of its clinical diabetes program.

“It is the sale of health-harming products at a very low price without affordable and convenient options that is problematic. This policy does not address this issue,” Hannon told The Epoch Times.

Kennedy acknowledges that the broader health care landscape can work against healthy outcomes, yet he believes that can change.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a news conference at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington on April 16, 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images

“We can realign medical choices, both individual and institutional medical choices, with public health,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times at the Indianapolis press conference, adding that right now, “it’s totally misaligned.”

Achieving that will require a concerted effort at the federal, state, and local levels, Kennedy said.

“We can’t do this alone, but we’re getting tremendous help from the governors, from the grassroots,” Kennedy said.

“What’s happening here [in Indiana] is driving this movement, and it’s going to drive cultural change.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has threatened nations that, in his words, “enabled authoritarianism in our country,” warning that Democrats will not view foreign leaders favorably when his party regains power.

Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, referenced El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele’s support for former President Donald Trump’s deportation policies. 

“If and when we come back to power – and we will – we are not gonna look kindly upon people who facilitated authoritarianism in our country,” Raskin said on Pod Save America with host Tommy Vietor, according to the New York Post. Vietor, a former spokesman for President Barack Obama, shared that a Latin American policy researcher advised Democrats to “threaten action against any foreign government complicit in the extraordinary rendition of American citizens.”

“The whole idea that Bukele doesn’t have any power to return an American prisoner who was sent to him under an agreement where he’s getting paid $6 million by America is ridiculous,” Raskin said. “He’s our legal agent in this dubious arrangement they created. Of course, he’s got the power to return them.”

Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal alien gang members to El Salvador. Some of these individuals have been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison.

The Trump administration deported Carlos Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran who illegally entered the U.S. in 2011, to El Salvador, initially calling it an “error,” though officials later justified the action, alleging MS-13 ties—a claim his attorneys reject, the New York Post said. 

Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 has faced legal hurdles. 

In March, Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador without due process, citing violations of judicial orders. Facing administration defiance, he initiated contempt proceedings, alleging bad faith in rushing deportations, including that of Carlos Abrego Garcia, despite a 2019 court protection.

Bukele, during a recent White House meeting with former President Donald Trump, addressed the deportation of Carlos Abrego Garcia, saying he lacks the authority to return him to the U.S. and dismissing such requests as “preposterous.”

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal. Could he be sent off to a foreign prison?,” Raskin said at another point in his discussion with Vietor.

“We’ve got to become the leaders of a nationwide popular movement to arrest the descent into fascism in America,” the House Democrat added. “These people really believe that democracy is defunct. They say we live in a constitutional America.”

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

A camp counselor picks favorites by lauding some campers regardless of how ordinary or even counterproductive their conduct while ignoring or disparaging other campers’ valuable contributions. A referee takes sides by giving all benefits of the doubt to one team. And a human rights activist flouts the rights shared by all persons by expressing outrage at and even exaggerating or outright fabricating abuses perpetrated by one set of combatants while turning a blind eye to atrocities executed by the opposing combatants.

The same goes for the rule of law in America – that is, a system in which individuals are subject to well established, general, and publicly promulgated rules that are equally enforced and impartially adjudicated. A group that defends law’s integrity against threats from one party but remains silent while the rival party repeatedly abuses the law over the course of many years to consolidate power and harm political opponents politicizes an essential principle that transcends the differences between partisans.

In this way, 96 voting members of the Harvard Law School faculty (active or emeritus) have called attention to their dubious dedication to the rule of law.

On March 29, this HLS faculty supermajority published online “A Letter to Harvard Law School Students.” Writing in their “individual capacities,” the professors explain that they took this extraordinary step because “American legal precepts and the institutions designed to uphold them are being severely tested, and many of you have expressed to us your concerns and fears about the present moment.” Despite their best efforts to demonstrate that they were not speaking for Harvard Law School – the professors declined to use the law school’s stationery and website, and they did not include their faculty titles in their signatures – the sheer number of signatories attested to the professors’ espousal of HLS orthodoxy.

A widely shared respect for the rule of law at Harvard Law School would be welcome. For decades, HLS has served as a premier platform for a variety of fashionable perspectives including critical legal studies, critical race theory, identity politics, and woke progressivism. In one way or another, all attack the rule of law’s claim to stand above politics. Some cutting-edge professors at HLS insist that in practice the rule of law is a fraud perpetrated by the powerful, a tool by which oppressors justify their power and lull the oppressed to accept their subordination.

The supermajority’s March 29 letter might suggest that the pendulum has shifted, inasmuch as the signatories say that they “share, and take seriously, a commitment to the rule of law: for people to be equal before it, and for its administration to be impartial.” This commitment, they stress, “is foundational to the whole legal profession, and to the special role that lawyers play in our society.”

The supermajority’s selective apprehensions, however, suggest that they are friends of convenience to the rule of law.

The HLS faculty do not explicitly mention President Trump or the Trump administration. But the professors highlight in four bullet points steps that “government leaders” are taking that imperil the rule of law:

• single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment;
• threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers’ pro bono work or prior government service;
• relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and
• punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern.

The HLS professors acknowledge that “reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of particular incidents.” But they do not explain why their genuinely concerning allegations endanger the rule of law itself. Not every unlawful action threatens the foundations of equal liberty under settled and fairly administered law. Indeed, America’s separation of powers system anticipates executive overreach, and the Constitution gives Congress and the courts ample power to rein in the president.

Furthermore, over the last 15 years or so, Democrats, federal bureaucrats, and the D.C. power elite have repeatedly abused power to advance progressive priorities: For example:

• In 2010, President Barack Obama’s IRS targeted conservative organizations to deny them tax-exempt status.
• In 2012, Obama effectively legislated from the White House by creating through executive order the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) which eliminated the administration’s responsibility to enforce elements of immigration law.
• In 2016, Obama administration FBI Director James Comey usurped the attorney general’s authority by publicly declaring that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton could not be reasonably prosecuted for conducting as secretary of state her email correspondence on her private server, including many chains containing classified information, several of which chains contained emails deemed “Top Secret.”
• Also in 2016, Comey launched, on the flimsiest of pretexts, an investigation – fueled in part by Clinton campaign opposition research – into Republican nominee Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. The successor investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller hamstrung the Trump administration for two years while concluding that the evidence did not show that candidate Trump collaborated with Moscow.
• From 2021-2024, the Biden administration furtively maneuvered to protect Hunter Biden from prosecution for tax evasion, making false statements on a firearm purchase, and unlawful possession of a gun.
• In 2022, President Joe Biden sought to usurp congressional authority by erasing through executive order approximately $400 billion in federal student-loan debt.
• In 2023, the Biden Justice Department declined to prosecute President Biden for retaining classified documents for many years and in several locations, and for disclosing their contents to at least one individual who lacked clearance.
• In 2023, as primary season approached, Democratic prosecutors filed against Trump four criminal indictments – some of which were based on novel and farfetched legal theories – in four jurisdictions for alleged unlawful conduct stretching back to 2016.
• In 2025, federal district courts have promiscuously issued nationwide injunctions that go beyond the parties before them to prohibit the Trump administration from implementing its policies anywhere in the country.

Reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of these events. But the larger question remains: Where were the collective statements of the supermajority of HLS professors – or majority, or even a small minority – about the sanctity of the rule of law when a long train of abuses of law over many years benefited the Democratic Party?

The HLS professors also highlight perils to the rule of law stemming from Trump administration efforts to terminate green cards and visas of international students whose presence in the United States, according to a memorandum from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, creates “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” At Harvard “and many other universities, international students have reported fear of imprisonment or deportation for lawful speech and political activism,” the professors write. Such government action, they warn, would contravene the First Amendment, “which was designed to make dissent and debate possible without fear of government punishment.”

The HLS professors rightly demand that government scrupulously adhere to free-speech requirements. If only the Harvard 96 had shown such firmness in defense of free speech over the last several decades. Instead, elite campuses have made a habit of punishing departures from progressive orthodoxy with censorship, ostracism, denial of job opportunities, and more. Indeed, if safeguarding free speech were a priority for the HLS professors, they had no further to go than their own back yard to come to its aid. Harvard University recently finished dead last for the second consecutive year in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) rankings for protecting campus free speech. Yet this disgrace has not roused the HLS supermajority to action.

In a March 30 open letter to his students, which provides a trenchant reply to his HLS colleagues, Professor Adrian Vermeule observes that the supermajority’s “ideological blindness” makes its letter “deeply corrosive of the shared ideal of the rule of law.”

For instance, Vermeule notes, the signatories were nowhere to be found when Trump’s lawyers were prosecuted for representing him; when activists threatened Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices’ homes and families; and when outside the Supreme Court Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh with retribution for their rulings.

“The central vice of the collective letter, then, is that it is tendentious,” Vermeule concludes. “It attempts to appropriate a shared ideal and turn it to sectarian ends, implicitly aiming to define anyone who disagrees as an opponent of the rule of law altogether. In doing so, it runs the grave danger of causing or at least licensing anyone who does not agree with those sectarian ends to see all talk of the rule of law as a political sham.”

The Harvard Law School professors’ self-discrediting reflects decades of squandered moral, political, and intellectual capital. At this precarious moment, the nation desperately needs citizens capable of rising above the political fray to adopt a constitutional perspective. Alas, our professors keep demonstrating that they are among the least likely to provide that crucial civic service.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

Chinese EV giant BYD is already expanding outside of China, into South America and…well, all over the world.

It’s next stop looks like it’s going to be deepening its offerings in Japan, where a crucial trade deal between the U.S. and Japan may hang in the balance somewhat. BYD plans to enter Japan’s minicar market by 2026, challenging domestic dominance with a low-cost electric model tailored for the country, according to Nikkei.

The company has finalized the design of the vehicle and is targeting a price of around 2.5 million yen ($17,700).

Minicars, or kei-jidosha, make up about 40% of Japan’s auto market but have historically been tough for foreign automakers to crack. BYD’s push comes amid its global expansion, particularly in Southeast Asia, as it looks to boost its presence in Japan’s EV sector.

Nikkei Asia reports that BYD, which entered Japan in 2023 and has sold just 4,530 units as of March, is shifting strategy with its first vehicle designed exclusively for a foreign market.

The company plans to produce a Japan-specific electric minicar and is bringing in experts familiar with the local market.

Japanese minicars—defined as vehicles under 3.4 meters long and 1.48 meters wide—are popular for their affordability and tax benefits. The segment now includes electric options like Nissan’s Sakura and Mitsubishi’s ek X EV.

Not exactly Ford F-150s…

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. economy is complex. So is the global economy. They are not just complicated but complex, and there is a difference. 

Complications can be studied, understood, and possibly managed with systems of intelligence.

Complex systems evade that. There are too many moving pieces, uncertainties about the weight of causal factors, unanticipated secondary effects, the presence of relentless change, plus myriad exigencies of human choice.

Economics as a science and profession prefers to deal with solvable complications, which is why all models frame factors into buckets of causal relationships. The favorite phrase is Ceteris Paribus: when all else is equal. It means that such and such is true provided there are no other intervening changes and factors that make it untrue. This is how economic logic works.

It is an enormously valuable science for understanding unchanging conditions. It becomes less valuable once it purports fully to understand the whole while changing factors in the mix, Attempts to manage economic life set off forces no model can anticipate. Which forces? No one can predict those either.

Think of macroeconomics as a giant Jenga puzzle with blocks built out of every economic force you can name: monetary policy, government spending, debts and deficits, consumer demand, loan markets, financial markets, national affairs, international affairs, taxes, prices, expectations, confidence, exigencies of response to changes, entrepreneurial innovation, the shifting labor force, demographics, supply chains, natural resources, cost calculations, and so much more, up to possibly infinity.

As with the game Jenga, you can pull out one piece, several, maybe many, and the structure will still stand. The reason the game is fun is that no player knows for sure which pull of a block will send the whole thing tumbling all over the table. Everyone screams in amazement that it stood this long, and no one can explain for sure precisely why this one last move caused the collapse.

Perhaps that is not a satisfying way to think. Intellectuals don’t like to imagine there is some system outside of their understanding or control. That’s why they render every complex system as one that is merely complicated.

In 1945, F.A. Hayek wrote a piece in the American Economic Review that tried to explain this. It was called “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” It argued that too many economists assume away the very essence of the problem in need of solving:

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

He concluded: “To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.”

Ouch.

This article became the most cited piece Hayek ever wrote, and one of the most often cited articles in the whole of economic literature. There was only one problem: taking it seriously would mean that most of what economics did would have to come to an end. In the intervening 80 years, not much has changed. Economics as a discipline has yet to absorb the lessons he offered.

I’m writing as many forces are colliding at once in the real world. Financial markets are terrified of an impending recession (supposing it is not here already). The new U.S. president is determined to deploy every tool to reconstruct trading relationships around the world, meaning mainly the tariff.

You can make a strong case for tariffs as a tool of revenue. There are conditions under which the tariff can operate as a tool of industrial protection, too. This is different. Tariffs bear the burden of rebuilding production processes that have unfolded over half a century.

The beef with the trading order as it existed for decades is that it depleted America’s manufacturing strength. It seemed as if China was becoming the producer to the world and not much was left for the United States, apart from the export of financial and data services plus raw materials.

In theory—and this was mapped out by the new head of the Council of Economic Advisors—the tariff could serve as a proxy for currency settlement that has eluded the world since 1973, when Nixon overthrew the gold standard.

The theory, as always, works on paper. But as with all models—perfect blueprints for navigating the Jenga tower of world economic affairs—we do well to ask what contingencies they are not foreseeing. Just how easy it will be to restore U.S. manufacturing using tariffs is highly contingent on an accurate reading of the extent to which U.S. standards of living are contingent on existing trading relationships.

No one has a clear answer on that.

That leaves financial markets guessing in a sea of uncertainty. They do not like that. As the new realities are starting to dawn—namely, the overthrow of 80 years of policy with a new plan hatched by just a handful of people—traders have become very nervous.

What exactly is the Fed’s role here? How many industries have to be bailed out given obvious sufferings? How much pain are we really willing to tolerate as we await the dawning of the new golden age?

These are hard questions. The soaring price of gold indicates a flight to safety. That’s not a vote of confidence in what is unfolding. A plan on this scale that once took the best and brightest the better part of 15 years to consider and deploy—speaking here of the Bretton Woods architecture built following World War II—is being unleashed in so many weeks, but with an even grander vision and the strong likelihood of prolonged retaliatory measures.

There is simply no possible way that every contingency has been considered here, and thus do we have this stop-and-start system of trade negotiations that looks very much like improvisation.

Looming large over all these efforts is the political timing. There are midterms. There is a presidential election in three and a half years. The last one was largely decided based on economics, the desire on the part of so many to stop the inflation and restart growth. Inflation has indeed been crushed. Not even the imposition of tariffs seems to have changed the real-time trajectory of downward prices.

How long can that last? No one knows for sure. We are in no-man’s land of policy impositions, and that stands atop great uncertainty about the implications of putting a hard stop on many decades of low-tariff or at least stable-tariff trade ambitions. We can argue about this all evening at a cocktail party, but real life doesn’t afford that luxury. This is real life now.

Again, economics is complex, meaning evasive of anyone’s full comprehension of the import of dramatic changes as pushed by a single regime. It’s for this reason in part that the default for policy bias should always be toward the old-fashioned values: balanced budgets, sound money, non-punishing taxes, and maximum freedom for enterprise. Freedom permits flexibility to adapt to change. Any other scheme open up potentially grave risks concerning the impact on people’s lives.

You can call me a worrywart, but my concerns are based on long experience and doubts about the “best laid plans.” I genuinely hope that I’ve failed to see the hidden genius underlying a global trade war. My deeper fear is that we are dealing with a beast that can bite back in ways that could ultimately be devastating long-term. We don’t know precisely what might cause this fragile system to buckle and fall.

Everything that Trump has accomplished, and it is a long and meritorious list, is at stake. If bungling the economic piece of this ends up provoking regime change, I don’t even want to contemplate the implications of the reign of left-revanchism. This is why I would counsel caution above all else in the imposition of huge plans and rather stick to the tried and true, which is more freedom above all else.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

With Chinese traders continuing to send physical gold premiums higher, a new ‘ATM’ has been spotted in Shanghai that accepts physical gold, melts it down, determines its purity and weight, and then sends funds to one’s bank account within 30 minutes.

🇨🇳 LATEST: China unveils gold-to-cash ATMs that melt jewelry, verify purity, and transfer funds to bank accounts, all in just 30 minutes. pic.twitter.com/mln1cC18O3

— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 21, 2025

The machine, made by China’s Kinghood Group, will accept any gold items weighing over three grams and at least 50% purity, and will process it and transfer the equivalent value straight into the seller’s bank account within 30 minutes, according to India Today, which notes that “No paperwork or ID is needed.”

Thanks to rising gold prices, people are lining up to cash in their old jewellery, reports mention. The demand is so high that users now need to book a slot to use the machine. Reports say all appointments are booked till May, reflecting its strong demand, as per Chinatimes.com.

In one demonstration, a 40-gram gold chain fetched 785 yuan (around Rs 9,200) per gram. The total payout? Over 36,000 yuan, or Rs 4.2 lakh, credited to the seller’s account in half an hour, according to the publication.

Chairman of RPG Enterprises, Harsh Goenka, posted to X: “Gold ATM in Shanghai: Drop your jewellery, it checks purity, melts it, calculates value, and credits your account instantly,” adding “If this comes to India, traditional gold lenders might need a new business model.”

Gold ATM in Shanghai: Drop your jewellery, it checks purity, melts it, calculates value, and credits your account instantly.

If this comes to India, traditional gold lenders might need a new business model.
Transparency in. Exploitation out. pic.twitter.com/KgjI7nxCP9

— Harsh Goenka (@hvgoenka) April 21, 2025

Authored by Allan Feifer via AmericanThinker.com,

We live in a world rife with narrative fallacies intended to herd Americans and other Westerners towards Marxism. 

Here’s a list of just a few of the fallacious narratives that drive politics to the left:

Poverty. 

The claim is that poverty has never been worse. The truth is that poverty is at its lowest level of all time. Global poverty has seen significant declines over the past two centuries, particularly in terms of extreme poverty. Most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty two hundred years ago, but today, that figure has dropped to about one in ten people. This progress is largely attributed to economic growth and development in many regions, particularly due to American dynamism.

The Courts’ Role In Controlling Policy. 

Weaponized use of the legal system is now de rigueur today for Democrats. Republicans are all criminals, we’re told. In this way, what Democrats can’t win at the ballot box may now be effectively undone by the courts.

In a delicious irony, Letitia James (“No one is above the law”), the New York Attorney General, is facing allegations of mortgage fraud for falsifying records to secure home loans for a property in Virginia, which she claimed as her principal residence while still serving in New York. This juxtaposes against claims she made that Trump had overinflated the values of many of his properties in a first-of-its-kind civil fraud trial that ended with a $454 million judgment now on appeal.

Climate Change. 

Is it about science or control? One has only to look at Europe today, where believers in climate change are reducing farming, restricting choice in how people travel, and trying to electrify everything with scarce “Green” energy that does not contribute to base load capacity, all while trying to get rid of your pets in the name of saving the planet.

American Colonialism. 

Is America a slave nation and colonizer, or quite the opposite? Little is ever said about the massive internal struggle we had in righting the wrong of slavery, ending with what remains America’s costliest war, with perhaps 750,000 dead, 2% of our entire population at the time. That would be the equivalent of 7 million dead today. Don’t you think we’ve already paid a high enough price for our mistakes?

Income Inequality. 

America has the highest number of billionaires in the world; is that a good or bad thing? If you care about your own personal economy, it is best not to look at too many billionaires as a bad thing. Progressives don’t want you to know it, but the top 10% of taxpayers pay 76% of all income taxes, and the bottom half, less than 2%.

Universal (aka Socialized) Healthcare. 

Will people live longer, better lives with universal healthcare, or maybe not? America already has universal healthcare. It’s called Medicaid, and it has 79 million beneficiaries. However, on average, people of means live 14 years longer than Medicaid recipients. Could factors like lifestyle choices, environmental conditions, and prioritizing healthy living be more critical than government spending? The facts tell a revealing story of misplaced priorities.

Education. 

Is there a correlation between spending money on education and creating thinking and functioning citizens? The US ranks in the bottom half on educational attainment among the most developed nations while spending the most per pupil. Frighteningly, the trend line is flat to declining, the opposite of improving. Johnny can’t read, write, or do math anymore in a world dominated by those who can!

America as a Citizen of the World. 

Does the world need America to lead or step back and let the world run itself? This is the key question we may be most divided on today.

Globalism has been a cancer that benefits government and big business. However, isolationism is effectively the opposite of globalism, and it would see America isolated and cut off from markets. Receding from leadership would automatically cede control to the strongest nation willing to step up and replace us. Unquestionably, that nation would be China. This would be the perfect setup for our economic destruction or, more likely, confrontation leading to WWIII. Rational minds must find the right balance between globalism and isolation.

Most popular progressive narratives ultimately attack the central premise that is a prerequisite for prosperity: economic growth and development by profit-seeking capitalists. Progressives largely eschew our history of success in favor of an ever-larger government that effectively decides what kind of growth and development there is to be through laws, regulations, financial incentives, and/or coercion, i.e., a Command Economy.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is raising eyebrows after revealing on Benny Johnson’s conservative podcast that he’s pushing for a congressional hearing to examine the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.

Johnson, who serves on the the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, raised questions about the World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse, saying the documentary film, Calling Out Bravo 7 has sparked “an awful lot of questions.”

Senator Ron Johnson drops BOMBSHELL:

Tells us that 9/11 Hearings are being planned, Building 7 was potentially a “Controlled Demolition”

“Structural Engineers say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than controlled demolition. Molten steel. Destruction of evidence. We… pic.twitter.com/aBQzCakll7

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 21, 2025

“Well, start with Building 7,” Sen. Johnson told Johnson. “Again, I don’t know if you can find structural engineers other than the ones that have the corrupt investigations like NIST that would say that that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition.”

WTC Building 7:

– Minor office fire

– Not hit by a plane

– Building leaseholder Larry Silverstein says “Pull it”

– Collapsed at free fall speed into its own footprint (2.5 seconds)

No other building has ever collapsed at free fall speed due to fire. Controlled demolitions do pic.twitter.com/0MrBNCKbjm

— LΞIGH (@LeighStewy) September 11, 2024

“Who ordered the removal and the destruction of all that evidence? Totally contrary to any other firefighting investigation procedures. I mean, who ordered that? Who is in charge? I think there’s some basic information. Where’s all the documentation from the NIST investigation?” the Wisconsin lawmaker continued.

“Now, there are a host of questions that I want and I will be asking, quite honestly, now that my eyes have been opened up,” he added.

BUILDING #7 FLASHES AT THE TIME OF COLLAPSE — CONTROLLED DEMOLITION ?
pic.twitter.com/NU0Na0eOVs

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 11, 2023

Johnson said he plans to work with former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to discuss 9/11, “to expose what he’s willing to expose.”

Rep. Curt Weldon Tried to Prevent 9-11, and The U.S. Government Shut Him Down pic.twitter.com/5vAzCT4lQJ

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) April 15, 2025

The senator’s comments prompted Johnson to ask: “So we may actually see hearings about this?”

“I think so,” the senator replied while referencing previous efforts to obtain unredacted FBI files on behalf of 9/11 families.

“We want to get those answers, those documents for the families,” the lawmaker replied. “Hopefully, now with this administration, we can find out what is being covered up.”

Sen. Johnson expressed optimism that the Trump administration will authorize the release of 9/11-related documents, despite prior unsuccessful efforts to declassify them.

“We want those made available in terms of what happened. What did the FBI know that happened? So we had engaged with that. It was on a bipartisan basis. We wanted to get those answers, those documents for the families,” Sen. Johnson said. “Again, we didn’t get squat from the FBI. So hopefully now with this administration, I think President Trump should have some interests being a New Yorker himself.”

“What actually happened in 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up? My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11,” he added.

Very interesting to say the least…

FDNY announced they were told “it would be taken down” on this news clip. pic.twitter.com/r57PvWUz6S

— Josh’s News, Memes, Photography, & Stuff (@joshbottweet) April 22, 2025