Tuesday night’s primaries in Indiana were not subtle. Five of seven Republican state senators who had blocked a congressional redistricting map favored by President Donald Trump lost their primary races to Trump-backed challengers. The message, delivered cleanly through the ballot box, couldn’t have been clearer.

Twenty-one Republicans in the Indiana Senate voted against a new congressional map that would likely have added two GOP-leaning U.S. House districts. Eight of those dissenters were up for reelection this cycle, and seven drew primary challengers who carried Trump’s explicit endorsement. By Tuesday night, the Associated Press had projected wins for at least five of those challengers. Only state Sen. Greg Goode managed to hold his seat among the targeted incumbents. The rest are heading for the exits.

Trump’s play here was neither complicated nor ambiguous. He targeted members of his own party, not for ideological apostasy or opposition to his signature policies, but for refusing to help the GOP fight back against decades of Democrat gerrymanders. It was a demonstration of leverage and political capital, and it worked.

The incumbents who lost weren’t rogue progressives or even moderate Republicans, either. They were conventional Republicans who had largely supported Trump on major national issues, and didn’t expect to become Trump targets. That calculation turned out to be wrong, and the lesson other incumbents will draw is obvious: the scope of what constitutes a disqualifying defection is wider than many assumed.

And there are likely to be other victims of Trump’s wrath.

In Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, Trump has endorsed Ed Gallrein against Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican who has broken with the president on the Iran war, tariffs, and quit a few other things. In Louisiana, Trump is backing Rep. Julia Letlow against incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who has pushed back against the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Both of those incumbents were watching Indiana returns Tuesday night and learning something about their own futures.

CNN’s Scott Jennings made it clear that the elections signaled who controls the Republican Party… It’s Trump all the way.

“He’s the boss of the party. He calls the shots in the Republican Party, and if you go against that, he will pour his wrath out upon you, and it doesn’t typically turn out well.” Jennings said.”If you look at what happened in Indiana tonight, and you’re Thomas Massie tonight, or you’re anybody else in a primary right now where Trump’s on the other side of you, you’ve got to be thinking, this is a bad night for me.”

Trump cleaned up in Indiana State Senate primary tonight. @VanJones68 and I analyze & debate presidents getting involved in state level redistricting matters on @cnn pic.twitter.com/LutBmNpX4h

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) May 6, 2026

The underlying data on Trump’s standing inside the party makes all of this easier to understand, if no less striking. Back in March, an NBC News poll found that Trump had a 100% approval rating among MAGA Republicans – a number that CNN analyst Harry Enten flagged as essentially without precedent. “You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know you can’t go higher than one hundred percent,” Enten said. He was careful to note the distinction: “Now, there are some Republicans who disapprove of Donald John Trump, but they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement. The bottom line is this: if you are a member of MAGA, you approve of Donald Trump.”

That’s the context in which Tuesday’s results make complete sense. Trump’s grip on the GOP isn’t merely rhetorical or cultural — it is electoral and operational. Indiana showed that the president is willing to spend political capital on state-level races to advance his agenda, even if tangentially. For Republican incumbents nationwide who have crossed him or are contemplating doing so, that combination — willingness and effectiveness — should worry them.

A DOJ investigation into the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) found its medial school allegedly used applicants’ race to discriminate against white and asian candidates. 

In a seven-page letter released on Wednesday, the agency’s Civil Rights Division wrote that UCLA “continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race after the Supreme Court’s decision in Harvard by granting and denying admission on the basis of race,” citing a 2023 decision – Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard – which barred race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities, but still allowed schools to consider how race affected students if they wrote about their experiences in essays. 

The finding is the latest salvo in the clash between the Trump administration and woke institutions since last year, after federal investigators went after DEI initiatives in higher education.

“Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American, and this Department will not allow it to continue,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division.

The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA responded – saying its process was “based on merit and grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant.” 

“We are confident in our practices and our mission to maintain access to a high-quality education to all qualified students,” a spokesperson told the Epoch Times, which notes further: 

The medical school was reviewing the DOJ’s report and was “committed to providing equal opportunity to all applicants and fully complying with federal and state laws,” the spokesperson said.

The DOJ issued a letter to the university’s medical school on May 6 notifying officials of the school’s failure to comply with federal civil rights law for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 classes.

Federal law authorizes the DOJ to conduct periodic compliance reviews and investigations of practices and policies of institutions, such as UCLA, that receive federal funding.

The DOJ found the medical school’s internal policies, literature, and email correspondence to leadership consistently demonstrated its intent to use race as a factor in admissions despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that found race-based admissions programs were unconstitutional.

The medical school allegedly used different academic metrics to discriminate against all racial groups except black and Hispanic applicants to accept more black and Hispanic applicants into its program, according to the DOJ.

If the DOJ determines that the institution can’t voluntarily change its practices to comply with federal law, the DOJ may seek enforcement through the courts, according to the letter.

The school is also facing a class-action lawsuit filed in May 2025 by Do No Harm, a nonprofit organization opposed to “radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideologies” in health care and medical education.

In the lawsuit, the group also claims UCLA’s medical school has ignored federal law by discriminating against applicants based on race.

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge ruled on May 7 that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) termination of hundreds of humanities grants last year was unconstitutional and involved “blatant” discrimination.

In April 2025, the Trump administration axed more than 1,400 grants, amounting to more than $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations.

The move was part of a whirlwind cost-cutting drive that tech billionaire Elon Musk was leading at DOGE as a “special government employee”—a role that is term-limited to 130 days. Musk departed that role after completing his term in May 2025.

However, Bill Clinton-appointed District Judge Colleen McMahon, ruling at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the administration “engaged in blatant viewpoint discrimination,” ruling in consolidated cases brought by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Authors Guild, and others.

McMahon said the terminations violated the First Amendment right to free speech and the Fifth Amendment, which confers equal protection.

She also ruled that DOGE did not have the legal authority to terminate the grants.

“What mattered to DOGE was not whether a grant lacked scholarly merit, failed to comply with its terms, or fell outside NEH’s [National Endowment for the Humanities] statutory purposes. What mattered was that the grant concerned a ’minority group,’” she ruled.

“DOGE swept in race and ethnicity – including grants concerning Black, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous communities – as well as national origin and immigration status; religion and religious identity (including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim subjects); sex; and sexual orientation, as criteria for grant termination.”

McMahon also said that DOGE staffers using ChatGPT to establish the rationale behind axing some grants would not absolve the government of responsibility for its decisions.

“The government cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT,” she ruled.

Neither DOGE nor the White House has yet responded to the ruling. The Epoch Times has contacted both for comment.

According to DOGE’s website, the department has saved an estimated $215 billion in taxpayers’ money since it was established in January 2025.

That figure amounts to around $1,335.40 per taxpayer, according to DOGE.

The department’s work has been met with other litigation since it began, with the Trump administration in March asking the Supreme Court for a second time to halt lower courts’ attempts to access information about DOGE’s inner workings.

The Supreme Court intervened in the case last year, ruling that lower courts’ orders for the government to turn over information about the department’s activities were overbroad. An appeals court has since asked for less information, but the government told the Supreme Court on March 23 that the requests were still intruding too much on executive branch powers.

“The court of appeals has continued to approve intrusive discovery against a presidential advisory body without adequate consideration for the separation of powers, the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] statute, and this Court’s previous order,” the government’s filing stated.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued DOGE last year after its FOIA requests were not honored.

The government has argued that DOGE is an advisory arm of the executive branch—not an agency—and is not required to submit to FOIA inquiries. But a district court in Washington ruled differently and ordered DOGE to comply with those inquiries.

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the administration’s latest request.

New details have emerged in the alleged AI chip diversion scheme involving the co-founder of Super Micro Computer.

Bloomberg reports that some of the $2.5 billion worth of servers containing advanced AI chips were allegedly routed through a Bangkok-based company before reaching Chinese AI leader Alibaba.

The Bloomberg report noted:

US prosecutors this year outlined a scheme in which Super Micro’s co-founder allegedly worked with an unnamed Southeast Asian company and a “rotating cast” of third-party brokers to divert the AI semiconductors in violation of US trade rules.

The Southeast Asian firm the prosecutors didn’t name, identified only as Company-1, is Bangkok-based OBON Corp., the people said.

Some of the $2.5 billion worth of servers sold to OBON allegedly went to Chinese AI leader Alibaba, according to the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive legal and geopolitical matter.

It is important to note that OBON is linked to Thailand’s AI infrastructure buildout and the creation of Siam AI, Thailand’s sovereign cloud champion.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even appeared at a Siam AI event in December 2024, focused on sovereign AI. Siam AI’s CEO, Ratanaphon Wongnapachant, said Siam AI was not involved and that he had left OBON when he launched Siam AI.

Washington has restricted exports of advanced Nvidia AI chips to China over national security concerns, leaving Chinese firms to either rent overseas computing resources or obtain chips through smuggling channels.

In mid-March, U.S. federal prosecutors charged three men: senior executive Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, the co-founder; Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang; and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, with conspiring to divert $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips to China.

“OBON’s purported involvement in the smuggling arrangement could deal a blow to Thailand’s fledgling AI ambitions and reignite calls in Washington for restrictions on chip sales to the region,” Bloomberg noted.

Shares of Super Micro have since recovered from the mid-March plunge that followed the co-founder’s arrest by U.S. authorities.

Today’s report outlines how Thailand’s sovereign AI push may have served as a channel to smuggle advanced Nvidia chips to China.

Authored by Stu Cvrk via American Greatness,

On April 23, the US Treasury Department announced that the IRS plans to revise Form 990—the annual information return filed by tax-exempt organizations—to improve transparency and strengthen oversight, specifically targeting reporting on government contracts, government grants, and fiscal sponsorship arrangements. The stated goals are to detect misconduct and hold wrongdoers accountable.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the matter bluntly: “We are ending the days of hiding fraud, abuse, and extremist activity behind complicated nonprofit arrangements. When bad actors misuse charitable structures, directors and officers should understand that transparency can lead to scrutiny, accountability, and liability under the law.”

The acting IRS chief counsel added: “If an organization receives public funds or tax-deductible donations, it should be prepared to show who controls the money and where it goes.”

Why is this seemingly innocuous regulatory requirement a really big deal, as most Americans have no idea what Form 990 is used for?

Let us answer that in some detail.

Bottom Line Up Front

Right now, enormous sums of money flow through nonprofit “umbrella” organizations to dozens or hundreds of sub-groups, and the paper trail essentially disappears. The IRS currently has no mechanism on the Form 990 to require disclosure of fiscal sponsorship arrangements. The new rules would force these pass-through organizations to reveal who is getting the money and what it’s being used for.

Think of this in the context of the Southern Poverty Legal Center indictments, which are only the tip of the iceberg of fiscal sponsorship arrangements and transactions.

The Problem: What Is Fiscal Sponsorship and How Is It Exploited?

Fiscal sponsorship is a legitimate and longstanding practice. In a typical fiscal sponsorship relationship, a nonprofit organization’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status is extended to groups engaged in activities that serve the fiscal sponsor’s mission, typically for a fee. Donations to the project are directed to the fiscal sponsor and are restricted to supporting activities of the charitable venture. The fiscal sponsor is responsible for assuring the activities of the project fulfill their charitable purpose. Here is how the left-wing Tides Foundation advertises fiscal sponsorships on their website.

The legitimate use case: a new charity that hasn’t yet received IRS 501(c)(3) status can operate under an established nonprofit’s umbrella while it goes through the process. The problem is what happens at scale when the model is weaponized.

Arabella Advisors (see below) and its affiliated entities utilized tax regulations in which groups who use a fiscal sponsorship arrangement do not have to file a Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service. Using “pass-through” arrangements, funding is passed from one organization to another, making it difficult to trace where a donor’s money ends up.

As noted in the Treasury Department’s press release, recent congressional oversight has raised concerns that some fiscal sponsorship arrangements may be used to obscure who is operating a project, who controls project funds, and how those funds are being used.

The key loophole: because the sponsored “project” is not a standalone legal entity, it files no independent 990. Millions of dollars can be directed to a group that, on paper, barely exists—perhaps just a website—with no public accountability whatsoever.

The Arabella Dark Money Network: Scale and Structure

Arabella Advisors, founded in 2005 by Clinton administration alumnus Eric Kessler, became the most sophisticated example of this model on the American Left. Arabella Advisors is a philanthropic consulting company that oversaw a handful of nonprofits, all of which oversaw a multitude of left-leaning projects and organizations. When accounting for the seven nonprofits in the Arabella Network, they provided nearly $1 billion in grants in 2023 alone. That buys a lot of elections and left-wing activism.

The scale is staggering. In the 2020 election cycle, Arabella’s nonprofits took in $2.4 billion, more than the fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined. In the 2022 cycle, Arabella’s fundraising rose to $3 billion.

The Arabella-managed nonprofits collectively paid Arabella over $200 million in consulting fees while creating hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations through “fiscal sponsorship” agreements that generate “pop-up groups” that operate under the umbrella of an Arabella-managed nonprofit, are not required to file independent financial disclosure forms, and often exist as little more than a website.

The core technique—the “pop-up group”—is essential to understanding how the opacity works. Since the Arabella network’s inception, it sponsored at least 340 such groups. These groups rarely disclose their relationship to Arabella Advisors or its in-house nonprofits; nevertheless, many of them accept donations from the public, funds that go to Arabella’s nonprofits. This system also allows these groups to hide their funders, since it’s virtually impossible to trace individual grants to Arabella’s nonprofits to any particular group.

The flagship funds within the network—the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, Windward Fund, and North Fund—shuffle money among themselves, compounding the opacity. The five funds sent more than $52 million to Arabella Advisors as payment for operational and management services. On numerous occasions, the funds wired millions of dollars to each other, further obscuring which issues and initiatives individual grants supported.

Foreign money has entered this network as well. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss was able to move $475 million into various organizations to influence US politics and elections through his nonprofits. The Arabella Network can be linked directly to $265 million from Wyss’s Berger Action Fund and Wyss Foundations. Keep in mind that US election laws bar foreign nationals from contributing to candidates or PACs, but no equivalent restriction applies to nonprofits operating in this manner.

What did Arabella fund specifically? Arabella played a major role in battles over Supreme Court nominations, abortion, women’s sports, school discipline, environmental policies, fake local news outlets, “Zuck Bucks” that manipulate election offices, and more. One particularly notable example: An Arabella-sponsored group funded entirely with Soros money—”Governing for Impact,” started in 2019—worked with Harvard Law School to develop legal strategy memos on how to overturn dozens of federal regulations, including Title IX.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund in particular served as an electoral vehicle. The Sixteen Thirty Fund was behind several groups that ran issue advocacy ads to benefit Democrats during the 2018 midterms. The group also funded Demand Justice, which spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. In 2020 alone, the Sixteen Thirty Fund donated $410 million toward defeating Trump and winning Democratic control of the US.

Arabella’s recent rebrand: Facing sustained scrutiny, Arabella announced it would be shuttering, to be replaced by a trio of successor organizations. The fiscal sponsorship division was acquired by Sunflower Services, a newly formed public benefit corporation. The remaining divisions of Arabella formed a new company called Vital Impact. Sunflower Services is at least majority-owned by the three biggest C3 charities in Arabella’s old empire—New Venture, Hopewell, and Windward Funds. Critics note this is a restructuring, not a shutdown; the same infrastructure continues under friendlier-sounding names.

The Tides Foundation: The Original Model

Tides predates Arabella by three decades and essentially invented the fiscal sponsorship model for the Left. Tides founder Drummond Pike envisioned using fiscal sponsorship for progressive political activism. Fiscal sponsorship uses a tax-exempt charity to provide financial support to a non-exempt project or organization, thereby lending it tax exemption as long as the charity retains control of the way its funds are spent.

Between 1996 and 2010, the Tides Center served as a fiscal sponsor to some 677 separate projects with combined revenues of $522.4 million; in 2010 alone, the Center was actively managing nearly 200 projects.

Tides founder Pike himself acknowledged the core purpose of the model: “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.” The Tides Center has been described as an organization that effectively washes away the paper trail between grants and the original donor.

The combined Tides network is enormous. The six Tides nonprofits saw combined total revenues of $785,605,823 in 2024. The Tides Center offers comprehensive fiscal sponsorship to projects that do not have their own tax-exempt status from the IRS. Again, note that Form 990 has no mechanism for disclosing fiscal sponsorship activities. Some current and past Tides Center projects include Fair and Just Prosecution, Palestine Legal, and the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that in 2023, the Tides Foundation gave $286,000 to the Alliance for Global Justice, a group best known for serving as the fiscal sponsor of Samidoun—subsequently sanctioned by the US Treasury as a “sham charity” for providing material support to a Palestinian terrorist organization that participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Tides has also used its fiscal sponsorship services to explicitly facilitate government grant-seeking. The fee for all funding from government sources is 15 percent, higher than standard rates because government grants entail significantly more paperwork and reporting—meaning Tides actively markets itself as a vehicle for its sponsored projects to access federal funding and takes a cut.

Government Money Flowing to Left-Wing Groups

This is where taxpayer dollars enter the picture directly—distinct from private dark money, but often intertwined with it. Here are some estimates and examples.

USAID awarded more than $800,000 to New Venture Fund—a dark money pass-through nonprofit that cloaks which donors give to which nonprofits—and $27 million to the Tides Center.

The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, one of the nonprofits that transported illegal aliens across the country under the Biden administration, reported receiving $284 million of its $289 million in revenue from government grants—98.2 percent government-funded.

The Solidarity Center has received over $86 million from the federal government since 2008; $61 million of that was given under President Biden. Three Solidarity employees joined Biden’s Labor Department. Solidarity receives 99 percent of its total revenue from American taxpayers and serves the AFL-CIO, which gave 86 percent of its 2024 political donations to Democrats.

On the climate front: Inflation Reduction Act funds set aside hundreds of billions for the green agenda. A former staffer from an environmental group called the Coalition for Green Capital joined the Biden EPA specifically to direct $27 billion in green funding. Under his tenure, $5 billion was granted to his former organization. Power Forward Communities received nearly $9 billion despite being only a few months old when it applied—and one recipient was a group affiliated with Stacey Abrams that had only $100 in the bank when it received $2 billion.

The Environmental Law Institute, which ran a “Climate Judiciary Project” to educate federal and state judges in favor of climate tort litigation against energy companies, received millions of dollars in grants and contracts from the EPA, the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and State, and the National Science Foundation between 2021 and 2024.

Regarding the SPLC specifically: Despite the SPLC reporting $132.7 million in revenue and nearly $770 million in net assets for 2021, the State Department still granted honorariums and speaker fees to SPLC officials. Additionally, a Biden-era Department of Labor approved a $6 million “employment training” grant for NextGen, a nonprofit that fights for “progressive policy change” through advocacy and civic engagement.

The SPLC itself is in the news for separate reasons: the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on federal fraud charges, alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups.

The revolving door between these funded NGOs and Democratic administrations is a key part of the story. Personnel from Open Society Foundations and associated left-wing groups cycled in and out of the Biden White House, Justice Department, and other agencies—the same people who had previously shaped grantmaking priorities then directed government money toward aligned organizations.

In just the first month of the Trump administration, 15 groups that had received federal cash from the previous administration sued the current administration, mostly to protect their funding, which totaled $1.6 billion. This is the feedback loop in miniature: government grants activist groups → activist groups lobby for more government → activist groups litigate against anyone who tries to stop it.

Concluding Thoughts

Several converging factors explain the timing of the Treasury Department’s April announcement:

1. Congressional pressure has been building. Multiple House hearings over the past year—the DOGE Subcommittee hearing “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild” and the Judiciary Subcommittee hearing “How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars”—have built an extensive public record and created political momentum for regulatory action.

2. The rebrand attempt flagged the problem. Arabella’s restructuring into Sunflower Services and Vital Impact in late 2025 was widely seen as an attempt to launder its reputation and escape scrutiny. The Treasury announcement signals that rebranding won’t be sufficient.

3. Form 990 has a structural blind spot. As noted in the Treasury Department’s press release, Form 990 has no mechanism for disclosing fiscal sponsorship activities. This isn’t a bug in enforcement—it’s a gap in the regulatory framework itself, one that has been known and exploited for decades. Treasury is finally moving to close it through regulatory action rather than waiting for Congress to act legislatively.

4. The SPLC indictment and related scrutiny. The indictment of the SPLC, combined with sustained focus on the Tides Foundation’s role in funding anti-Israel groups, has elevated the broader question of nonprofit accountability in the current political moment.

5. The “revolving door” has been documented. The Biden years produced extensive documentation of personnel moving between the dark money network and government agencies, with the explicit effect of directing public funds toward aligned organizations. The Trump administration is using every available tool—executive, regulatory, and prosecutorial—to dismantle these arrangements.

The bottom line is pretty straightforward: for decades, a small number of sophisticated nonprofit aggregators have used fiscal sponsorship to create a system in which billions of dollars—from private megadonors, foreign nationals, and American taxpayers—flow to politically aligned left-wing activist organizations with direct ties to the Democrat Party with essentially no public accountability. The sponsored groups don’t file their own 990s.

The pass-through organizations don’t have to disclose which projects their money supports. And the whole system is perfectly legal under current IRS rules. The Treasury announcement is the first significant regulatory step toward forcing disclosure of these arrangements, and its timing reflects both the political will of the current administration and the groundwork laid by over a year of congressional investigation.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” for the body politic!

Yesterday when discussing China’s unexpected flip-flopping on its decision to order local banks to ignore the latest US sanctions on Chinese, followed days later by a demand that they pause loans to sanctions refiners, we highlighted something remarkable: in the aftermath of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, which throttled the transit of ~10% of global oil and sent physical prices soaring to record highs (especially for Dubai crude), resulting in a windfall for European refiners thanks to soaring gasoline premiums… 

… the reaction in China was a mirror image, as already razor-thin independent refiner (teapot) margins plunged to record negative.

The reason for the margin collapse was China’s domestic fuel policy: it has long been Beijing’s policy to soften price hikes to help shield consumers and avoid social unrest; which while beneficial to end consumers is catastrophic to refiners and processors who are prohibited from passing on rising costs. In other words, Chna’s “energy security” was the dominant theme, and if it meant an entire industry has to suffer huge losses if it continues to purchase oil and process it into various product grades.

Ordered to process as much available inventory as possible, that’s what the refiners have done, and refining rates in Shandong province, China’s hub for smaller refineries known as teapots, ramped up over April to the highest level in almost two years, as processing margins cratered to record negative levels meaning refiners are losing record amounts on every barrel they process. 

“I would not be surprised if the teapots are prioritizing politics over economics with an eye to their long-term survival,” said Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “They may be calculating that if they do their part to help China weather the energy crisis, then maybe they will build up some goodwill in Beijing.”

While Downs is right, and teapots are prioritizing politics, they are also certainly keeping an eye on economics to the extent they can avoid Beijing’s wrath, and predictably the logical consequence of this centrally-planned policy to force “independent” refiners (who are not really independent if they have to do whatever Beijing instructs them) to make fuel at record losses to ensure energy security, is for them to slash purchases of Iranian crude.

Sure enough, Chinese crude oil imports have plunged: according to Vortexa, China’s April imports plunged to a multi-year low of just 8.2 million barrels a day, down by about a quarter from a prewar level of around 11.7 million. The 3.5-million barrels a day swing almost matches the total consumption of Japan and is double the amount supplied by the United Arab Emirates pipeline that circumvents Hormuz. 

As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas writes overnight, “simply put, it’s huge, perhaps the second- or third-largest factor rebalancing the oil market today, behind only Saudi Arabia’s own pipeline bypassing the strait and the use of the strategic petroleum reserves of the US and Japan.”

The import drop might make sense if Chinese commercial inventories were falling sharply, or if Beijing had tapped its strategic petroleum reserves. But neither appears to be happening. Instead, commercial stockpiles have continued to increase in recent weeks, according to satellite data (of course, China is well known to manipulate all data and with the bulk of its 1.4 billion in strategic oil reserves located underground, it is impossible to trace flows definitively)

Meanwhile, as imports have collapsed, inventories at sea have piled up: Kpler reports that there are now about 16 million barrels on ships anchored in the Yellow Sea off the Chinese coast, almost 40% higher than the level prior to a US blockade of Iran’s ports in mid-April as oil that was ordered previously remains unused. 

There has been another complication: after the Iran war broke out, Beijing banned exports of refined products, effectively allowing refineries to process less crude to meet domestic demand. But the policy has now been reversed, suggesting the country sees enough fuel availability.

In any case, in recent weeks, Blas writes that amid this collapse in Chinese imports, industry executives have noticed something odd: Chinese state-owned oil companies have been reselling some of their oil cargoes to European and Asian rivals. The behavior suggests surpluses, which is “odd” to say the least during a supply shortage. Where is this excess oil coming from (for the answer, see below).

The shift has not only capped benchmark oil prices, but also helped to trigger a collapse in the premia that traders pay above them to secure physical crude. The immediate outcome has been a very beneficial one: physical barrels that in early April went for $30 above benchmark prices are now changing hands at premiums as low as $1. Talk of discounts has even started to emerge.

Underscoring this point, North Sea oil traders don’t appear as desperate for crude for immediate delivery anymore, compared to the panic buying of late March and early April

While the collapse in refining margins is a clear clue to the plunging oil imports, other questions remain: chief among them how is China importing far less crude than before without running down stocks? In the past, the country clearly bought more oil than it needed, building a huge emergency stockpile. Today, China has nearly 1.4 billion barrels in its reserves according to media reports, well above the 400 million of the US and Japan’s 260 million. As we reported in late 2025, China probably bought one million barrels a day more than it needed last year. By simply stopping beefing up the reserve, China can cut imports a lot without affecting its underlying oil needs.

The shift can explain, perhaps, a third of the import cut. But the rest? Here’s where oil traders speculate with different theories. One argument says that Chinese economic activity is weaker than previously thought, and thus oil consumption growth is also lower. What’s the catalyst for that slowdown? Perhaps the impact of the war on several of China’s clients in the region, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand (just don’t look for validation in Chinese economic “data” – like everything else, it took is centrally planned and Beijing would never confirm its economy is being hit due to the Iran war as that would mean reduced political leverage).

Separately, the increase of electric vehicles, improved public transportation and the option of working from home have made Chinese households better able to cope with higher oil prices.

Unlike most other nations in the region, China hasn’t announced any emergency action to rein in demand, like adopting a four-day work week for government employees or promoting carpooling.

The IEA estimates that Chinese oil demand slipped into a modest year-on-year contraction in both March and April, down by about 110,000 barrels a day to about 17 million barrels. While the drop is impressive when compared with the exuberant growth of the country’s consumption in the past, it isn’t nearly enough to explain why imports have fallen so much.

It is certainly possible that Chinese oil demand has been contracting far more sharply than currently thought, The key, Blas reckons, is the inscrutable petrochemical industry – the sector that has contributed the majority of oil consumption growth over the last five years. In petrochemicals, China is unique. On top of its traditional industry that uses oil and natural gas as feedstock, it has parallel production that relies on coal.

Since the war started in late February, coal-to-chemicals profit margins have improved markedly. The industry had typically operated with plentiful spare capacity, so there’s room for a significant shift to coal from oil as a chemical feedstock. Hard data is scarce but, anecdotally, petrochemicals plants transforming coal into plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene and polyvinyl chloride have been running hard for the last 60 days, in turn reducing consumption of traditional feedstocks such as ethane and naphtha.

So perhaps China has managed to rely far more on coal-to-chemicals than previously thought. Another possible explanation is that it’s running down hard-to-track inventories of semi-finished plastics and other chemicals, making the recent drop in oil consumption in the petrochemical industry an unsustainable one-off unless there is a global recession which collapses end-demand for Chinese plastics exports. 

And then there are the more banal explanations. Although oil traders try to estimate Chinese inventory data with the use of satellite data, it is in fact possible that observers are missing locations and stocks are, in fact, falling. About two months ago, we hinted that Chinese drain of its SPR could more than offset a full Hormuz blockade for a long time. As we said on March 18, “China can avoid any Gulf imports for months and drain its SPR instead.” 

One relevant question: what is China’s pace of SPR drain if any. Recall for the past year Beijing was adding about 500-700K in daily SPR stockpiles; total is said to be ~1.4 billion barrels. China can avoid any Gulf imports for months and drain its SPR instead.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 18, 2026

Sure enough, Blas writes that the oil market has been full of chatter about China quietly tapping its strategic reserves, starting by using underground caverns that no one can see using satellites. Maybe. Time lags may also be playing a role; Chinese domestic oil production has been increasing, too, perhaps helping to plug any gaps.

But, as Blas concludes, “make no mistake, China is rebalancing the oil market today.” The bigger question is for tomorrow when the Strait is (eventually) unblocked: If China can reduce imports so drastically without having to take extreme measures, what does that say about the future of oil consumption there? Nothing positive for oil bulls, that’s for sure. 

An apparent large oil spill spanning dozens of square miles of sea has been spotted off of Iran’s main oil hub of Kharg Island, according to open source satellite imagery and reporting in both the NY Times and Reuters on Friday.

The reports cite images from Copernicus’s Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-3 satellites taken from monitoring May 6 through 8 which show a huge grey-and-white slick extending out to the west of Kharg Island.

“The slick appears visually consistent with oil,” said Leon Moreland, a researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, to Reuters. He believes it to be covering an area of approximately 45 square km (or nearly 18 sq miles).

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

The California Death Trip

“History records no pity for parties that choose purity over competence, vengeance over vision, pathology over pragmatism. The long night is not coming. It is here. . . . ”

– LHGrey on X

The Pacific Palisades fire ignited on January 7, 2025, in the very last days of the “Joe Biden” fake presidency.

6,837 total buildings destroyed plus about 1,000 damaged.

The Altadena fire across town in Eaton Canyon was arguably worse: 9,418 buildings destroyed.

A Year After the LA Fires

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana at the time to attend the inauguration of president John Dramani Mahama, part of a small U.S. presidential delegation sent by the “Biden” administration.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, Brian Williams, overseer of the Police and Fire Departments, was on administrative leave at the time due to an alleged bomb threat against City Hall that he reportedly made in September / October 2024. The FBI raided his house that December, and in 2025 he copped a plea deal (guilty) to making threats involving fire and explosives. So, he was out of action during the fires.

There you have the rectified essence of how the Democratic Party operates in America’s biggest state.

Is it not astonishing that Karen Bass is running for reelection? How could she possibly be forgiven?

A large number of people employed in the movie business got burned out of their homes in the fires, and then city and state regulatory nonsense prevented them from rebuilding — on top of insurance company hocus-pocus that left families financially wrecked.

Is it a surprise that the city’s flagship industry is dying now (film production down 32-percent on a five-year average)?

What is LA without Hollywood?

And yet the show-biz celebs are still coming out to pimp for Democratic Party politicians. This is the kind of thing that forces you to conclude that an epic madness burns as hotly through the minds of Californians as the fires that ripped through the canyons in 2025. I know from personal experience as a college theater major that actors can be exceptionally stupid, but that can’t wholly account for what we’re seeing.

Wednesday’s primary debates had these villains on florid display. Because LA’s ranked-choice mayoral primary race styles itself “non-partisan,” candidate Spencer Pratt (a registered Republican) was on-hand for the debate. When the subject of LA’s cataclysmic homelessness came up, drug addicts living (if you can call it that) in wretched, filthy encampments all over the public space of the city, Mayor Bass bragged that she’d significantly reduced the problem, which is obviously and mendaciously untrue. LA City Council member Nithya Raman, who labels herself “progressive,” bragged on putting the homeless into shelters (i.e., motel rooms at $100-K per person per year.)

Spencer Pratt attempted to inject a little reality into the discussion about putting the homeless into homes: “No matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth, they are on fentanyl. The DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] statistic says 93-percent of this is a drug addiction problem. These people do not want a bed — they want fentanyl or super meth.”

Pratt is currently running third in the polls. In ranked-choice voting, the top two winners in the primary will face off in the November election. Currently Bass is polling in the lead and Nithya Raman is running second. If the numbers stay that way, the winner in November could finish Los Angeles off. Blade Runner, here we come.

But there’s still a chance that Spencer Pratt might place well in the June 2 primary just as Golden Tempo shot from dead last to win the Kentucky Derby last week.

The seductions of the Marxist race hustle have worn a little thin, even for Angelenos. Karen Bass looks increasingly ridiculous grinning about her abject failures, which Mr. Pratt lays out relentlessly in plain talk. His reality-testing seems to be getting some minds right, gaining real traction. Nithya Raman has the charisma of a mung bean.

The gubernatorial debate was equally edifying, especially the spectacle of Democratic Candidates Katie Porter’s and billionaire Tom Steyer’s rousing lack of self-awareness. Ms. Porter, renowned for dumping a pot of steaming mashed potatoes over her ex-husband’s head, and for her crotchety way with the (friendly) news media and her own staff, made the astounding statement that “the public servants we have are focused on doing their job, which is not cooperating with the federal immigration authorities.” That’s their job? Hmmmm. Mr. Steyer went further and said he would arrest ICE agents going about their business. You think . . .? (I would think that a Governor Steyer would find himself arrested by the feds for attempting such a stunt.)

The governor’s race is also a rank-choice contest. So, Republican Steve Hilton was on-hand to break the reality-optional spell that shrouded the stage like a poisonous miasma. After several Democrats made a show of deploring the grotesque homeless druggie encampments from Nob Hill to MacArthur Park, Mr. Hilton said “[They] talk as if we’re in some parallel universe where Democrats haven’t been running the state for the last sixteen years.” He shares the lead in the polls in the large field at 18-percent with Xavier Becerra, who was “Joe Biden’s” Secretary of Health and Human Services, meaning, he presided over the vaxx mandates and lockdowns of the Covid operation.

California is ground zero for the death dance of the Democratic Party. Symptoms are popping up all over the country, of course. Just this week, the FBI raided the headquarters of Virginia State Senator pro tempore L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) — and also raided the marijuana shop she co-owns next door to her HQ. The SCOTUS decision on Congressional redistricting has thrown many states’ Democratic Party outposts into a fugue of terror as they stand to lose as many as a dozen seats in Congress. DOJ prosecutions are underway against prominent Democrats in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Many of their heroes could go to prison. Panic has set in. The Democratic Party as we know it these days is not long for this world.

Toyota expects a sharp decline in profit as rising material and shipping costs tied to the Iran conflict pressure its business, according to Bloomberg. 

The automaker projected operating income of ¥3 trillion for the fiscal year ending March 2027, well below both analyst expectations of ¥4.6 trillion and last year’s ¥3.8 trillion.

The company said supply chain disruptions are driving up costs for aluminum, resins, and other materials, while logistics issues remain unpredictable. Toyota estimates the regional conflict could reduce earnings by about ¥670 billion.

After the forecast was released, shares dropped as much as 3.5%. Analysts noted Toyota may be giving conservative guidance, but future performance will depend heavily on how long the conflict continues.

Julie Boote, an analyst at London-based research firm Pelham Smithers Associates Ltd told Bloomberg: “Toyota did not only miss consensus estimates, but also its own forecast, as auto unit sales came in much weaker than predicted by the automaker. It is still likely that Toyota is once again lowballing its guidance, with earnings upgrades possible during the fiscal year; much depends also on the development of the Iran war.”

Toyota expects vehicle sales to dip slightly this year, though hybrid sales are projected to surpass 5 million units for the first time. The company is also focusing more on after-sales services, which it sees as a major future profit driver.

Despite record annual revenue of ¥50.7 trillion, quarterly operating profit fell 49% due to tariffs and higher shipping expenses.

Meanwhile, Honda just posted an operating loss of 400 billion yen — its first in the company’s history, according to Nikkei. The loss was primarily driven by problems tied to its electric vehicle business and marks the company’s first operating loss since going public in 1957.

This is a major decline from the 1.2 trillion yen operating profit it reported the previous fiscal year. It would also be the second-largest operating loss ever reported by a Japanese automaker, behind Toyota Motor Corporation’s 461 billion yen loss during the 2009 global financial crisis, although accounting differences make direct comparisons imperfect, Nikkei writes.

In March, Honda said it expected an operating loss between 270 billion and 570 billion yen and announced it was canceling three planned EV launches in North America.

The company also projected up to 2.5 trillion yen in EV-related costs over fiscal years 2025–2027, including asset impairment charges and supplier compensation.

Despite these losses, Honda plans to return to operating profitability in the current fiscal year, supported by strong motorcycle sales in Asia, a weaker yen, and a broader turnaround strategy for its North American and Chinese businesses.

Nissan had also trimmed production due to the Iran war earlier in the year. 

President Trump announced Friday that the leaders of Russia and Ukraine have agreed to his request for a three-day ceasefire and a major prisoner swap. He hailed in a Truth Social post that this could be the “beginning of the end” of the long war between them.

He specified that the ceasefire would run Saturday through Monday – with Saturday being Victory Day celebrations in Russia. The Kremlin has been increasingly concerned that the major national holiday which commemorates its victory over Nazi Germany 81 years ago in World War II could be marred by drone attacks from Ukraine. There’s no doubt that President Putin is welcoming of such a ceasefire declaration, and backing by Washington.

“I am pleased to announce that there will be a THREE DAY CEASEFIRE (May 9th, 10th, and 11th) in the War between Russia and Ukraine,” Trump wrote. “The Celebration in Russia is for Victory Day but, likewise, in Ukraine, because they were also a big part and factor of World War II.”

This is to include a suspension of all kinetic activity and the exchange of 1,000 prisoners by each country, the US president also said. While direct talks between the warring countries have not been happening, these kinds of prisoner exchanges have actually been somewhat of a constant throughout the over 4-year long war.

The timing is interesting, given that the White House is clearly consumed with the Iran war, the Hormuz Strait crisis, and the expanding economic fallout globally and at home. 

Moscow has meanwhile been threatening to attack Kiev with an unprecedented bombing campaign should V-Day events be disrupted by drone fire out of Ukraine this weekend.

Putin it seems is seeking the opportunity to soften Washington’s stance toward Moscow’s perspective of the Ukraine war. Also, at the moment Trump needs a diplomatic ‘win’ that he can tout to the world, given the Iran situation is sliding into a bit of a quagmire which could have dire consequences for Republicans going into the midterms.

Despite that Iran remains a key regional ally of Russia’s, it remains that Moscow has benefited from both the easing of sanctions on its oil exports at sea, and rising global oil prices – both the result of the Iran war.

Previously, Kremlin leaders have offered a deal where Iran could keep its enriched uranium but hold it on Russian territory, to ensure the continuation of its nuclear energy. This, Moscow has reasoned, could serve as a basis for a grand deal with the US.