Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Wall Street Journal has conducted a poll with the most interesting results.

From 1998 to the present, the percentage of Americans who say that patriotism is an important value has crashed from 70% to 38%. The bulk of the fall has happened since 2019.

More results will be discussed in a bit but let’s first focus on this issue of patriotism.

The poll doesn’t define for the respondents what patriotism is but reflect on the word. It can mean love of country and homeland. It’s perhaps true that this has fallen. That’s believable since the U.S. in three years ceased to place freedom as a first principle.

Indeed, there is a growing cultural movement, extending from academia to the mainstream, that encourages loathing of American history and its achievements. No “Founding Father” is safe from being called the worst-possible names. Hatred of this country has risen to be an expected norm.

But the problem goes even deeper.

When you are locked in your home, your business is closed, your church is shut, your neighbors are screaming at you to mask up, then the doctors come at you with shots you don’t want, and you are further prevented from leaving the country to anywhere but Mexico, and the president calls the unvaccinated enemies of the people, sure, one can imagine that affections for the homeland decline.

Americans Have Lost Faith in Their Institutions

But there is another important pillar of patriotism. It is about trust in the civic institutions of the country. These include schools, courts, politics and all the institutions of government at all levels.

Civic trust in these are surely at rock bottom. The courts did not protect us. The schools shut, particularly the public ones, which are supposed to be the crowning achievement of Progressive ideology. Our doctors turned on us.

And let’s say that we consider the media to be part of civic culture. It has been that way since at least FDR’s Fireside Chats. It’s always been the mouthpiece for what we are supposed to be thinking about as a people.

The media too turned on regular people for three years, calling our parties super-spreader events, jeering pastors who held worship services, demonizing live concerts and screaming at everyone to stay home and stay glued to the tube.

Yet at the same time, they encouraged mass protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Think about the logic, or lack thereof.

Yes, such evil antics tend to lessen public respect for all the institutions involved, especially when objections to these policies were censored by all the institutions we were supposed to trust with our data and friend networks. They turned out to be wholly owned too.

The New Patriotism

All the while, public support for patriotism was abused to deny fundamental rights and liberties. Patriotism was supposed to mean staying home and staying safe, masking up, social distancing, complying with every random edict no matter how ridiculous and finally getting jabbed once, twice, three times and more forever, despite the lack of medical vulnerability for vast swaths of the public.

The Constitution became a dead letter for a time. It still is, as visitors from other countries cannot even enter our borders lest they too submit to the shots made and distributed by companies that provide half the budget of the agencies requiring everyone to comply.

And this was all supposed to be necessary because of what was obviously a seasonal respiratory infection, a fact we knew at least a month before the lockdowns began. We could read about it in all mainstream venues.

Don’t panic, they said, just trust your doctor. But with lockdowns, they also took away from the doctor the liberty of treating patients with therapeutics known to be effective against exactly this sort of virus.

Instead, we were expected to put all of normal life on hold and wait for the magic antidote that was supposedly on the way. When it didn’t arrive until after the hated president was unseated, it turned out not to be an antidote at all.

At best it was a temporary palliative against severe outcomes. It certainly did not stop infection or spread. All that happened anyway, which makes the point that the huge sacrifices made in the name of patriotism were all for naught.

Lost Faith

We should in no way be surprised that the public these days is not feeling very patriotic. And yes, this is very sad in many ways. But it is also what happens when patriotism is hijacked by the state and industry to shatter our hopes and dreams.

We tend to learn from our errors. So when the pollsters come around and ask if we are feeling patriotic, it’s hardly unusual that people would respond: Not really.

And we could say the same about the other poll result: The importance of religion has fallen from 62% in 1998 to 39% in 2022. Again the bulk of the crash happened after 2019. No question that the nation was already trending secular.

But what are we to think when two successive seasons of Easter and Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) were canceled by the civic elites with full cooperation from the mainstream of religious leaders?

The whole point of religion is to reach outside the mundane world of civic culture into the realm of the transcendent in order to see and live by truth. But when transcendent concerns are replaced by fear and secular compliance, then religion loses credibility.

If you want to find people who still believe, you can in groups that are truly serious about faith: the Hasidim, Amish, traditionalist Catholics and Mormons. But in mainline denominations, not so much. Like media, tech, and government, they turned out to be captured too.

Young People Don’t Even Want Kids Anymore

In the final results of the poll, the importance of having children went from 59% to 39% and the importance of community involvement peaked at 62 at the height of lockdowns to fall to an astounding 27%.

Again, the culprit here seems pretty obvious: it was the pandemic response. All the policies were structured to shatter human relationships. People are nothing but disease vectors. Stay away from everyone. Don’t become a super-spreader by daring to hang around others. Be alone. Be lonely. That’s the only proper way.

Finally, among the only things that are rising concern the importance of money. That’s probably because real income has been declining for the better part of two years and inflation is gutting our standards of living.

Once again, pandemic policies are the culprit. They spent trillions and the money printers matched that spending nearly dollar for dollar, watering down the value of a previously reliable currency.

We Need an Honest Accounting

The trouble with the survey is not the numbers but the interpretation. This is being seen as some weird fog of nihilism and greed that has mysteriously slipped over the population, as if it were an entirely organic trend over which no one has any control. That’s wrong. There is a definite cause and it all traces to the same egregious policies without precedent.

We still do not have honesty about what happened. And until we get it, we cannot repair the grave damage to the culture or the national soul.

We are living in crisis times but that crisis has an identifiable cause and hence solution.

Until we can speak frankly about it, the situation can only get worse.

It’s a good time to be a video game fan. Not only is the gaming industry booming and projected to grow to $320 billion by 2026, but every year is bringing new evolutions in the medium.

2022 saw massive launches in both games (Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök) and media based on games (the films Uncharted and Sonic the Hedgehog 2). 2023 has already seen the release of major flagship TV series based on a game, HBO’s The Last of Us, and the much-anticipated The Super Mario Bros. Movie is slated to release in April.

But which game is the best, or most successful? That debate may never end, but as Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao reports, from company reports and sales data aggregated by Wikipedia, Samuel Parker’s chart of the most-sold video games as of March 3, 2023 can at least tell us which ones have been the most popular.

Top Ten Video Games Sold in History

The best selling video game didn’t need multimillion dollar budgets, sixty-hour narratives, or celebrity voice actors and ad spots. The independently-developed (indie) Minecraft, with its pixelated blocks, takes the top spot on this list.

Minecraft sold more units than the combined forces of Grand Theft Auto 5 (#2) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (#8), both made by industry giant Rockstar. Its immense popularity has been credited to its simple gameplay (no goals), creative structure (build anything), and engaged community with player-run servers and additional feature creations (known as mods).

Another simple favorite, Tetris, comes in at third place with 100 million units sold of its 2006 re-release. Millennials continue to make up a large chunk of the video game playing demographic which might explain Tetris’ sales.

But newer games are making up the majority of sales records. PUBG: Battlegrounds, a battle-royale shooter game which helped popularize the genre (and eventually its competitor Fortnite) asserts its popularity at #5. That puts it well ahead of the better-known shooter Call of Duty, even despite PUBG being banned in a number of countries for the alleged impact on the mental health of gamers.

The oldest game to make the list is Super Mario Bros. (#7), apt considering it is credited with reviving the video game industry after it crashed in 1983. The original staple side-scroller has sold 58 million copies worldwide.

Developer Dominance

Though the top selling games span various series of games, a few developers managed to repeatedly find success.

Japanese video game titan Nintendo developed three games (Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, Wii Sport/Fitness) in the top 10 and another eight in the top 20. That’s not including its co-ownership of Pokémon, the world’s highest-grossing media franchise.

American publisher Rockstar Games also managed to score multiple hits, though its longer development cycle necessary to create cinematic games gives it fewer potential candidates. That might change with the much-anticipated GTA 6 reportedly in production.

Best Selling Genres

The most popular genres in the top 10 give players the freedom to impose their will upon the world and pursue objectives at their leisure:

Two games (Minecraft, Terraria) are classic sandbox games, where worlds are procedurally generated and there are no gameplay goals. Another two (GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2) are in the adjacent open-world genre, with a combination of sandbox elements and a narrative structure.

However, with new games launching and selling millions of units every year, new entrants to the top 10 list of best selling video games of all-time seems likely. How will these developers, genres, and games fare over time?

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the New York Post on the level of joy being expressed by many over the indictment of former president Donald Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey.

The thrill kill atmosphere ignores the blatantly political history behind this indictment.

In the Sixteenth Century, the poet John Lyly wrote “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.” It also appears equally true “in love and War Trump.”

Here is the column:

James Comey could not contain himself at the news of an indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Comey hopped on Twitter to declare, “It’s been a good day.”

The former FBI director, who has been teaching and speaking on government ethics, joined others in celebrating the upcoming arrest of Trump because nothing says “ethical leadership” like a patently political prosecution.

Comey declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton on her email scandal despite finding that she violated federal rules and handled classified material “carelessly.”

He declared, “Ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.”

Yet now Comey is heralding the effort of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who campaigned on a pledge of bagging Trump for some unspecified crime.

While the actual charges will not be disclosed until the release of the indictment, the underlying theory discussed for months is an effort to revive a dead misdemeanor offense of falsifying business records — years after the statute of limitations expired.

Bragg may try to accomplish this Frankensteinian feat by converting this into a felony.

The long-debated theory in Bragg’s office was whether they could effectively allege a violation of federal election laws even though the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission declined such charges.

Notably, Bragg’s predecessor declined to bring these charges.

Bragg himself declined to do so, and that led to two of his prosecutors resigning in protest.

Mark F. Pomerantz then proceeded to do what some of us view as breathtakingly unprofessional.

He wrote a book on what he learned in the investigation, which was still ongoing.

He made the case for indicting an individual who had not been charged, let alone convicted.

He continued to engage in this public campaign despite requests from his former office that he was undermining its ongoing investigation.

The public pressure worked.

Bragg caved.

Despite the widespread criticism of Bragg for reducing charges for an array of felonies by Manhattan criminals, he spent months working to convert a misdemeanor into a felony.

Trump would apparently have been better off robbing Stormy Daniels at gunpoint rather than paying her off for a nondisclosure agreement.

And yet Comey is not alone in his praise.

Various professors and pundits have declared that this unprecedented use of New York law would be perfectly legal and commendable.

They largely ignore that the misdemeanor is expired.

Instead, Georgetown Law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler declared, “Nobody is above the law, including Donald Trump.

“It doesn’t matter that this is kind of a minor crime compared to some of the other allegations.”

However, the law also protects people from selective prosecution and affords them protection through the statute of limitations.

One can debate whether Trump may have committed this misdemeanor.

That is a good-faith debate.

What is not debatable is that the window for such a prosecution closed years ago.

Unless this indictment reveals a previously undisclosed crime, the use of the long-debated bootstrapped offense would defy the rule of law. Nobody is above the law, but nobody is below its protections … including Donald Trump.

Dozens of criminal counts — it’s been reported there are as many as 34 — will make no difference if they merely replicate the same flaws.

There are reports, for example, that Bragg may bring charges based not only on the Daniels payment but money given to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to kill a story on another alleged affair.

However, that payment (from Trump’s friend at the National Enquirer) was also paid in 2016 and raises the same statute of limitations and other issues.

Bragg is operating directly out of Comey’s handbook on “ethical leadership.”

After all, it was Comey who joked about how he violated department rules to nail Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

He delighted audiences with how he told underlings “let’s just send a couple guys over” to trap Flynn.

It was Comey who was fired after former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein cited him for “serious mistakes” and violating “his obligation to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the traditions of the Department and the FBI.”

It was Comey who violated federal laws and removed FBI material (including reported classified material) after being fired and then leaked information to the media.

Despite those violations, Comey was heralded by the media and made wealthy on book and speaking tours.

Bragg knows that 62% of people view his case as “mainly motivated by politics,” but (like Comey) he is playing to an eager and generous audience.

The buildup to Trump’s booking has all of the appeals of a thrill kill for Democrats.

It will be another “good day” for Comey and others who put politics above principle in the use of the criminal justice system.

By Jake Lloyd-Smith, Bloomberg markets live reporter and analyst

Well OPEC+ certainly knows how to spring a surprise, especially at the start of the week. The substantial production cut — which totals more than 1 million bpd on paper — will tighten market balances into 2H, reinforcing the impact of an expected increase in demand from China. The combination of lower global supply and higher consumption will put more backbone into prices that just two weeks ago had hit the lowest since 2021.

To gauge the way the market’s pricing in the move’s expected impact it’s instructive to look at some of the favored timespreads, particularly Brent’s December-December differential. This measure — the gap between the futures for the final month of this year versus the end of 2024 — got crushed last month as the banking turmoil spurred a flight from risk. This morning, it spiked by as much as $1.57 a barrel, dwarfing the usual daily move of a few cents.

It’s worth remembering that the latest salvo from OPEC+ comes after the US has already drawn down the nation’s emergency crude stockpile, with the Biden administration unleashing a torrent of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Right now, the holdings sit at their lowest since the 1980s, effectively strengthening the hand of OPEC+.

Today OPEC+ woke up and chose scorched-earth war against the Fed.

That’s because while the US central bank is already trapped, and is desperately looking for any excuse to halt its tightening campaign now that inflation is accelerating to the downside not just because regional banks desperately need a lower Fed Funds rate to short-circuit the relentless deposit drain which won’t stop (and will lead to even more bank failures and resolutions) until their deposit rates can at least match those of the Fed, but also because various liberal rags have already thrown Powell, pardon, the “Trump-era holdover” under the bus for the coming recession…

The bus now is headed straight for Jay pic.twitter.com/cfa4GYHKFL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 26, 2023

… OPEC’s shocking shot across the Fed and Biden bow revealed in its intention to keep oil prices high even as central banks push the world into a recession, just made life for the central planners very difficult, as the sordid stench of stagflation is suddenly all over the place.

pic.twitter.com/Uoi7RHJkGT

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 2, 2023

But while much will be said about the monetary consequences of OPEC’s action, which may be viewed as sealing the fate of countless small banks in an act that any objective person would deem monetary warfare by the anti-Western alliance of China, Russia, and now Saudi Arabia, the complexity of which can be summarized as follows…

Does bitcoin drop from here because rising oil means more inflation and less cuts, or rise because Fed stuck means more banks fail and bank runs resume.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 2, 2023

… there is a much simpler, if far more impactful geopolitical consequence of today’s post-OPEC news price surge.

Readers may recall that one of the reasons why oil first exploded a year ago, then drifted ever lower before hitting a 16 month low just two weeks ago, is because it only gradually became apparent that despite the bluster and posturing, most Western nations – with the exception of a few truly stupid ones – realized that they never intended to truly sanction Russian  oil exports int he aftermath of the Ukraine invasion. Much to the chagrin of Zelensky, this meant that despite their dramatic, Oscar-worthy anti-Putin monologues, western leaders never actually intended to halt Russia’s commodity exporting machine as the consequences for the west would be far more dire.

That’s why when the Russian $60 export price cap was being debated a few months ago, the US quickly quashed any debate for lowering the cap even more as it would mean truly limiting how much oil Russia could export. You see, $60 was a perfect price: as long as Brent traded around $80, Russian Urals – which has traded with a 25-30% discount to Brent – would be comfortably below the cap and any and all Western countries that needed Russian oil could buy it, in the process explicitly funding the Russian military machine that they so vocally oppose by funneling money to the Kiev regime (knowing very well most of that money will be embezzled and will be never seen again).

But where things get problematic is if and when oil prices jump – like they did today – because a spike in Brent also means that Russian Urals will go right up with it. In fact, if Brent rises above $85 or so, Urals hits $60… and if it goes higher, it’s game over for the farce that has passed for Russian oil export sanctions.

Which brings us to today because as the chart below shows, Urals just hit $60 and any further increases in its price mean that virtually everyone in the anti-Russian west is suddenly cutoff from Putin’s oil.

What happens then? Will western nations follow sanction guidelines and stop buying Russian oil, which means sending the price of all non-Russian oil sharply higher (even as India and China step up and buy whatever western importers no longer desire), or will the anti-Russia alliance splinter?

While we are confident that many governments will do the former even if it means more hardship for their citizens, if only to signal their virtue and keep the US state department happy, some are already showing that the anti-Russian alliance isn’t worth the paper it is written on in carbon credits.

Japan is one such nation.

As the WSJ reports today, one of Washington’s closest allies in Asia is now buying oil at prices above the cap, in effect breaking with the sanctions regime imposed by US allies.

As the note adds, Japan got the U.S. to agree to the exception, saying it needed it to ensure access to Russian energy. The concession shows Japan’s reliance on Russia for fossil fuels, which analysts said contributed to a hesitancy in Tokyo to back Ukraine more fully in its war with Russia. It also shows why the price cap was imposed at a level where it doesn’t actually adversely impact Russian oil exports. But the current price surge means that unless the price cap is lifted, the U.S. alliance is about to shoot itself in the leg.

Going back to Japan, it’s the one country which – at a time when most European countries have at least claimed they are reducing their reliance on Russian energy supplies – has stepped up its purchases of Russian natural gas over the past year. Japan is the only Group of Seven nation not to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was the last G-7 leader to visit Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

In the first two months of this year, Japan bought about 748,000 barrels of Russian oil for a total of ¥6.9 billion, according to official trade statistics. At the current exchange rate, that translates to $52 million, or just under $70 a barrel.

Of course, Japan will never admit that Russia has leverage over its energy needs, and there has been a diarrhea of hollow rhetoric in recent days seeking to dispell speculation the Japan’s New PM Fumio Kishida is Putin’s bitch:

Mr. Kishida has said the G-7 summit he is hosting this May in his hometown of Hiroshima will demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine. Tokyo has said it is committed to supporting Kyiv and can’t send weapons because of longstanding export restrictions the cabinet has imposed on itself.

“We absolutely will not allow Russia’s outrageous act, and we are imposing strict sanctions on Russia in order to stop Russia’s invasion as soon as possible,” said chief government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno.

But empty rhetoric aside, the oil purchases which have been authorized by the U.S., represent a break in the unity of U.S.-led efforts to impose a global $60-a-barrel cap on purchases of Russian crude oil.

The cap works because oil-buying nations, even if they aren’t aligned with the U.S., generally need to use insurance and other services from companies based in the U.S. or one of its allies. The G-7, the European Union and Australia have agreed to rules forbidding those companies from furnishing services if a buyer of Russian oil is paying more than $60 a barrel.

The nations last year granted an exception to the cap through Sept. 30 for oil purchased by Japan from the Sakhalin-2 project in Russia’s Far East. An official of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Tokyo wanted to ensure access to Sakhalin-2’s main product, natural gas, which is liquefied and shipped to Japan. “We have done this with an eye toward having a stable supply of energy for Japan,” the official said.

He said a small quantity of crude oil is extracted alongside the natural gas at Sakhalin-2 and needs to be sold to ensure liquefied natural gas, or LNG, production continues. “The price is decided by negotiations between the two parties,” he said. Russia accounts for nearly one-tenth of Japan’s natural-gas imports, most of it from Sakhalin-2, and the quantity bought by Japan last year was 4.6% greater than in the previous year.

That marks a contrast with Germany, which relied on Russia for 55% of its natural-gas imports before the war and survived a complete cutoff through a quick remodeling of its import infrastructure. Germany’s economy grew last year faster than Japan’s, bucking forecasts of a German recession triggered by the cutoff of Russian gas. Of course, instead of being as reliant on Russian gas, Germany is becoming far more reliant on US LNG shipments. How long until the undue reliance on US goodwill for a country that is one of China’s largest trading partners comes back to bite it?

“It’s not as if Japan can’t manage without this. They can. They simply don’t want to,” said James Brown, a professor at Temple University’s Japan campus. Prof. Brown, who studies Russia-Japan relations, said Japan should move to withdraw from the Sakhalin projects eventually “if they’re really serious about supporting Ukraine.”

Guess they are not “really serious about supporting Ukraine.”

But they are not alone: and once Urals rises above $60 for all nations that buy the cheap Russian grade, we are about to find out how many other nations are also not serious about supporting Ukraine, and will promptly exit the anti-Russian alliance if it means access to Russian oil at just over $60 or paying Riyadh $80, $90, or $100 (or more) for the exact same cargo.

Japan has almost no fossil fuel of its own and relies on imported natural gas and coal for much of its electricity. Officials have said it would be self-defeating to give up access to the Russian liquefied natural gas because Russia could turn around and sell the LNG to China.

In addition to the price cap, the U.S. and many of its allies have largely banned the import of Russian oil into their own countries.

While US officials had said for months that the cap has been generally successful in pushing down Russia’s oil revenue while stabilizing global oil markets, that is about to change thanks to the surprise OPEC+ (where Russia is a key member) production cut, one which will inevitably lift Urals price above $60, triggering sanctions for anyone who buys it.

Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group in the overnight hours on Monday has claimed victory (or at least a partial victory) over Bakhmut by raising the Russian flag as well as its own PMC Wanger Group flag over central government administration buildings of Bakhmut. 

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin described that the key city in Donetsk is “ours” but only in a “legal sense”. He wrote on Telegram: “The commanders of the units that took city hall and the whole center will go and put up this flag,” he said in reference to a Russian flag being raised in the accompanying video. “This is the Wagner private military company, these are the guys who took Bakhmut. In a legal sense, it’s ours.”

Wagner chief declares ‘#Bakhmut captured’.
“April 2, 2023, 23:00 (MSK time), the administrative center of the city. Commanders of storming groups of the PMC Wagner will raise the Russian flag and flag of the PMC ‘Wagner’ on the city administration of Bakhmut.” pic.twitter.com/B60yzMhYqi

— Military Advisor (@miladvisor) April 2, 2023

About two weeks ago Prigozhin claimed that Wagner and Russian forces controlled 70% of the utterly destroyed town, and as the Ukrainians were mounting a stiff defense, pouring more resources into the months-long fight.

Hours prior to Prigozhin video showing the flag-raising against a dark night sky, the Ukrainian general staff acknowledged that “the enemy has not stopped its assault of Bakhmut… Ukrainian defenders are courageously holding the city as they repel numerous enemy attacks.”

The announcement was meant to convey that the Ukrainian Army still considers that it “holds” Bakhmut. Russian sources say Ukrainian fighters are still concentrated on the Western outskirts.

However, going into the weekend it was already clear that Wagner fighters were on the cusp of taking the city center…

#Bakhmut situation, March 31 21:00
– Wagner mercenaries reached the center of the city and raised its flag on one of the high-raise building there.#UkraineRussiaWar pic.twitter.com/JycdoEQCGD

— MilitaryLand.net (@Militarylandnet) March 31, 2023

On Sunday President Zelensky was still sounding somewhat optimistic regarding the fate of Bakhmut: 

“I am grateful to our warriors who are fighting near Avdiivka, Maryinka, near Bakhmut… Especially Bakhmut! It’s especially hot there today!” Zelensky said in his own post to Telegram.

Near Bakhmut, about 27 kilometres (17 miles) away in Kostyantynivka, a “massive attack” of Russian missiles left three men and three women dead and eleven wounded Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said.

Zelensky said the affected zones are “just residential areas”, where “ordinary civilians of an ordinary city of Donbas” were targeted.

A close-up map of the approximate situation around the city of Bakhmut.

have advanced deeper into the centre of the city and taken control of what was the city council building. pic.twitter.com/NtiaaCNPGH

— War Mapper (@War_Mapper) April 3, 2023

Zelensky in an interview last week suggested that he may be forced to negotiate with Russia if his forces are definitively defeated at Bakhmut, while also hinting at huge losses.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A U.S. judge on March 31 blocked a Tennessee law that forbids drag shows being held while minors are present.

“At this point, the court finds that the statute is likely both vague and overly-broad,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker, a Trump appointee, said in a 15-page ruling.

It’s not as if the trade we defined as the “Big Short 3.0″ needed help to plumb fresh record lows (as it has been doing virtually every day in the past month, see “New “Big Short” Hits Record Low As Focus Turns To $400 Billion CRE Debt Maturity Wall“), but it’s getting it anyway courtesy of an unexpected source.

While it is common knowledge by now that lower-tier and suburban office markets as entering the nine circles of hell…

… for reasons most recently and succinctly summarized by Chris Whalen…

Problem with #CRE goes like this. Occupancy falls, SQFT rental price falls, rent roll falls, then bldg value falls.reserves consumed. Lender seeks more equity to restore 50% LTV. Equity does numbas, walks away…. @blackstone

— Richard Christopher Whalen (@rcwhalen) March 31, 2023

… and visually by the IMF in this report from 2021…

… many were left with the opinion that the world’s top office market remains largely unscathed.

Unfortunately, that opinion was wrong: according to the latest report from brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle, which tracks about 470 million square feet (44 million square meters) of New York City offices, found a mere 4.6 million square feet of office space was leased in the first quarter. That means that Manhattan’s office-vacancy rate was at a record high as new developments add even more space to the struggling market. Specifically, 16.1% of space was empty as of the first quarter, with leasing is at its lowest levels since the second quarter of 2021. Other real estate companies found si   similar results: Colliers recorded a 16.9% vacancy rate in the fourth quarter and a 17.3% rate in the first quarter of 2021.

“You’re having this anemic leasing activity, more space is being added in the form of newly constructed or newly renovated space, but also sublease space continues to pile up,” said Andrew Lim, director of research at JLL.

According to the report, while the market was already struggling with excess supply, it was flooded with more than 1.5 million square feet of office space in the first quarter with the completion of 660 Fifth Ave.’s redevelopment.

Not all of that space will stay empty as landlord Brookfield Properties has signed leases with finance firms including Macquarie Group. The building – formerly known as the iconic 666 Fifth Ave – and the former home of hedge fund giant Millennium Partners until its recent move to 399 Park, has gained traction after undergoing $400 million in renovations that include a new lobby, elevators and facade.

There was some good news on the office front: one of the biggest leases to come to fruition in the first quarter was Citadel’s master lease of 350 Park Avenue. Ken Griffin’s firm is leasing 585,000 square feet from Vornado Realty Trust at the property for 10 years, where the initial annual rent will be $36 million.

Still, the increase in available space ramps up the pressure on landlords that own older buildings across the city. With the rise in remote work, tenants are more inclined to move to newer developments or towers that have been recently renovated, especially with the recent deluge of office space availability courtesy of the Hudson Yards project.

“We have to reinvent our office space,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg Thursday, adding that empty spaces should be converted to housing. “We have a housing crisis. We already have structures that are built.”

The silver lining is that despite the record number of vacant offices, average rents remained flat at $76.96 a square foot, buoyed by growing rates at top-quality buildings, especially newly built ones. That helped balance out falling rents at older spaces and offices up for sublease.

It’s not just New York: other key office markets are suffering similar malaise.

According to Commercial Observer, KBS sold the Union Bank Plaza tower in Downtown Los Angeles for a big discount to the Schreiber-run Waterbridge Capital after several rounds of descending bids (Joel Schreiber made a name as the first investor in WeWork and made several attempts to sell the former Broadway Trade Center downtown before filing for bankruptcy and succumbing to a foreclosure sale.) 

The 40-story, 701,888-square-foot office building sold for between $105 million and $110 million, according to sources familiar with the deal. KBS REIT acquired the same building from Hines for $208 million in 2010, records show, and also completed a $20 million renovation. In total, the loss on the sale was north of 50%.

Throughout the L.A. region, office activity has cooled significantly since the pandemic, especially in the central business district, and investor and lender appetite for office assets has collapse with the rise of hybrid work and rising interest rates. As reported previously, Brookfield, the largest office landlord in L.A., defaulted on $754 million in loans tied to two Downtown L.A. office towers, and other skyscrapers, including the PacMutual Building and the 62-story Aon Center, are hitting the market at major discounts.

To make matters worse and put more pressure on a potential sale, L.A.’s Measure ULA goes into effect April 1, which will increase transfer taxes by 5.5 percent on transactions over $10 million.

“Executing on large-scale office assets in today’s environment requires an ability to address the entire capital stack and think outside the box. Even with a high-quality asset, these are not easy deals to close,” Mark Schuessler, an executive vice president with Colliers, said in a statement.

Authored by John Murawski via RealClear Wire,

The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters – DEI – which goes a long way to explaining the fissures now tearing higher education apart.  

For progressives committed to social justice advocacy, academic freedom must shield the prevailing academic consensus on race and gender from outside political pressure. Nowhere is that academic consensus better represented in the modern university than in the campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which exists to advocate for students and faculty who identify as brown or queer, often by monitoring the campus culture for “whiteness” and “cisheteropatriarchy” —  the social dominance of white, heterosexual men.   

Conservative reformers also see themselves as defending academic freedom by challenging the progressive campus orthodoxy that’s enforced by DEI functionaries in the name of social justice. Critics of DEI say that these are overzealous bureaucrats who stifle the academic freedom of anyone who dares to dissent from their monocausal, moralistic metanarratives about race and gender.   

These critics note numerous studies that show the climate of fear and self-censorship on campus today is worse than it was during the Cold War McCarthyism of the 1950s. The free speech advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), for example, reported in February that about half of faculty reported being worried “about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, takes it out of context, or posts something from their past online.”   

Conservatives link the rise of campus illiberalism and censoriousness to the expansion of DEI offices during the last decade, which they say politicizes the campus through a DEI apparatus that exerts its administrative power through bias hotlines, sensitivity workshops, and speech codes.  They condemn DEI statements in admissions, hiring and promotions decisions as de facto “political litmus tests”; these diversity statements “have become a mainstay of application processes for faculty jobs,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.   

“We cannot live up to our mission as a university unless we attend to inequity, both past and present,” said Mimi Chapman, the faculty chair at the University of North Carolina, at a recent board of trustees meeting.  

Today, half of faculty support the practice of requiring job applicants to commit to DEI advocacy in their teaching and research, according to FIRE. And progressive faculty are not troubled about political homogeneity, as long as it aligns with their politics: 57% of liberal faculty say that advancing race and gender diversity is more important than promoting political viewpoint diversity.  One such professor is Stacy Hawkins, vice dean and professor of law at Rutgers Law School, who wrote an opinion piece last month for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Sometimes Diversity Trumps Academic Freedom.” Hawkins contends that conservative opposition to CRT is not a legitimate exercise of academic freedom because “the opposition to CRT is designed to silence, further marginalize, and diminish the value of minority voices and experiences.”   

“Some people’s right to express themselves cannot come at the expense of other people’s right to dignity, safety, and equal participation in the academic community,” Hawkins wrote. “Rather than willingly cede DEI wholesale to academic freedom, perhaps it is time to reshape our understanding of academic freedom.”  

High school seniors across the political spectrum are so aware of the ideological divides on campus that one in four has ruled out attending a higher education institution because of its political climate, according to a survey reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.   

The U.S. campus has been transformed in recent years by the explosion of diversity offices and diversity jobs, said Ilya Shapiro, the director of Constitutional Studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who is working on a book about the ideological capture of the nation’s law schools through the bureaucratization of DEI initiatives.   

Shapiro is among those who say that university administrators are more politically radical than the professoriate, and that their ideological commitment corrupts the core mission of higher education. Based on his research, between 1987 and 2012, the nation’s universities added more than a 500,000 administrators, so that around 2010, universities started employing more administrators than full-time instructors, and in some elite institutions the administrators now even outnumber the students. Most administrators are not DEI bureaucrats, but DEI is now the fastest-growing segment of the educational bureaucracy, Shapiro found, so that the average college has more people devoted to DEI – exceeding 45 per campus – than the number of professors teaching history.   

“In any bureaucracy, bureaucrats are incentivized to justify their positions, grow their authority, increase their budgets,” Shapiro said. “So in the DEI space, they have to search for dragons to destroy – cases of racism, sexism, transphobia – all of these -isms and -phobias.”  

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education’s 35-page antiracism guide confirms this picture, stating that “Higher education systems are a complex web of practices, policies, and procedures steeped in White normativity.”   

The organization’s brochure encourages “using critical race theory as a framework for making sense of racism in curricula, instruction, and assessment in education.” And the DEI trade group warns: “DEI cost-cutting sends a powerful message that BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of color] students, faculty, and staff are expendable.”  

The explosion of DEI employment opportunities and growing budgets is leading to a proliferation of DEI certifications, DEI minors, and even DEI majors at the university level. One example is the DEI major launched in 2021 by Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., to train chief diversity officers and chief inclusion officers for in-demand careers in a growing field.   

Bentley’s course catalog is imbued with activist jargon and revolutionary rhetoric. In an introductory course, “Students will understand and critically analyze issues of oppression, power and privilege as they intersect with themselves as well as others.” In a course about race relations, “Students will leave this class with a heightened awareness of the racism in all of your own everyday lives and how to resolve it.” A course about the legal system “examines law as both an instrument of institutionalized oppression and a tool for liberation.”   

Bentley also offers a course linking the monstrosities of slavery to capitalism, a claim also made by the self-described “antiracist” advocate Ibram X. Kendi in his 2019 book, “How To Be an Antiracist,” and “The 1619 Project” published in 2019 by The New York Times and reissued as a book last year. All of these claims and arguments have been advanced by critical race theorists for decades, “centering” racism, oppression, and violence as the defining features of the United States.   

“A long history of scholarship in sociology ties U.S. slavery to the development of capitalism and modern business and finance,” the course description states. “This course is designed to give students a framework for appreciating the centrality of the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the U.S., and translating that into new ways of understanding how tacit racism, hidden and unacknowledged, is structured into business and society today.”  

At the same time, grant funding from federal agencies is increasingly contingent on diversity and equity commitments. For instance, starting in FY2023, U.S. Department of Energy grant applications require applicants to describe how they’ll incorporate diversity and equity into their research projects, and those strategies will be evaluated as part of the merit review process.   

DEI is also becoming part of the accreditation process required by the U.S. Department of Education for universities to qualify for federal funding, including federal student loans and other forms of financial aid, such as Pell grants. Medical schools are now required to provide faculty training in DEI and cultural competency, according to a 2022 City Journal article, pressuring the schools to expand their DEI bureaucracies. And regional accreditors that certify undergraduate colleges and universities now endorse or mandate DEI training and DEI offices, according to a Heritage Foundation report issued in February.   

However, universities are not limited to a single accreditor and can apply to multiple accrediting agencies if they run into conflicts.   

Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which currently accredits the universities in Florida that Gov. DeSantis is seeking to reform, said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations that of the seven regional accrediting agencies, her organization is the only one that doesn’t require DEI to earn accreditation. But she said SACS is moving forward with adopting a DEI mandate that would be effective in January 2024. She said that SACS allows universities to define “diversity,” so that it does not have to be based on race and gender and can be defined as “viewpoint diversity.” Wheelan noted that SACS has issued accreditations to three private conservative Christian colleges: Patrick Henry College, Liberty University and Bob Jones University.   

DEI practitioners say their jobs focus on making universities more representative and more welcoming to first-generation students, disabled students, and returning military veterans, not just advocating for people who identify as brown and queer.   

Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, who headed the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence at New College of Florida, granted an interview to The Washington Post after getting fired from her $135,000-a-year job by the newly constituted board of trustees. Rosario-Hernandez, who identifies as BIPOC and transgender and uses ze/zir pronouns, described the conservative critique of DEI mandates as coming from a position of “white supremacy.”  

Rosario-Hernandez categorically rejected the conservative accusation that DEI divides people into two groups – the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.”   

Instead, DEI promotes reconciliation between two groups – “people who are harmed” and “people who have harmed them.”  

Authored by Alan Dershowitz via New York Sun,

The protection of secrecy is as applicable to President Trump as it is to anyone else…

It is likely that a serious felony has been committed right under District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s nose and he is not investigating it. Under New York law, it is a felony to leak confidential grand jury information, such as whether the jurors voted to indict. The protection of secrecy is as applicable to President Trump as it is to anyone else. 

We know that the information was disclosed while the indictment itself remains sealed and before any official announcement was made or charges brought. It is unlikely that the leak came from the Trump team, which seemed genuinely surprised.

The most likely, though uncertain, scenario is that a person in Mr. Bragg’s office or a grand juror unlawfully leaked the sealed information. That would be a class E felony, subject to imprisonment.

It is possible of course that an investigation is underway, but it seems more likely that Mr. Bragg is too busy making up a crime against the man he promised in his campaign to get than investigating a real crime that took place on his watch.

In my new book, “Get Trump,” I predicted that partisan prosecutors would try to get Trump regardless of the lack of evidence or law. That prediction has come true. Since the indictment itself has not been leaked — at least not yet — we don’t know its specifics. We do know, based on leaks, that it involves multiple counts, almost certainly involving the payment of hush money to a porn actress.

Under Mr. Bragg’s likely theory, Mr. Trump should have disclosed in his public corporate records that he paid the hush money to avoid his adulterous affair from becoming public. But no one in history has ever publicly disclosed the reason he paid money for a non-disclosure agreement.

Why would Mr. Trump pay the money in the first place if he had to publicly disclose the embarrassing reason? Furthermore, no one in history has ever been indicted for listing “legal expenses” for setting a potentially embarrassing payment of hush money.

Thus, even the misdemeanor allegation involving false entries is unprecedented and represents selective prosecution. It is also almost certainly barred by the two-year statute of limitations. In order to elevate this bookkeeping case into a felony, Mr. Bragg must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the reason Trump made the false entry — if he himself did it — was solely as a campaign contribution to help him win his election.

If Mr. Trump was motivated in part by his desire to protect his wife, children, and business interests from harmful disclosures, that would not constitute the crime of making an undisclosed campaign contribution. So this too is a stretch.

It is a fundamental tenet of American law that criminal law should not be stretched to fit targeted defendants. Criminal statutes must be clear and unambiguous. If there is any doubt, the age-old concept of “lenity” requires that these doubts be resolved in favor of the defendant.

Thomas Jefferson once quipped that for a criminal statute to be valid, it must be so clear that a reasonable person could understand it if he read it “while running.” A nice image!

I intend to read the text of the indictment, while sitting, with 60 years of experience behind me. I doubt I will find that it meets the constitutional criteria for “fair warning,” although I maintain an open mind until I have studied it carefully.

The important point is that when a district attorney ran for office as a Democrat pledging to get Mr. Trump, who is a candidate for president against the incumbent Democrat, that district attorney must have an airtight case.

A weak, questionable, unprecedented, and novel stitching together of two inapplicable statutes, will not, and should not, satisfy the American public that this is not a partisan targeting of a political opponent.