By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“Look, we don’t need more digital currency,” said the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, attempting to somehow justify his agency’s aggressive actions against the crypto industry as a whole.

“We already have digital currency: it’s called the US dollar. It’s called the euro, or it’s called the yen; they’re all digital right now. We already have digital investments,” continued the regulator, expressing a rather strong opinion for an unelected civil servant leading an agency whose mission is “protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.”

But of course, the SEC is just one of many US financial regulators, which in aggregate have helped foster the conditions necessary to host the world’s deepest capital markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is another regulator. The Federal Reserve too. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The Financial Industry Regulatory Association. And then myriad US state banking, insurance, and securities regulators.

With such a tangled web of overlapping bureaucracies, there are naturally countless individual ambitions, political agendas, inter-agency tensions, territorial disputes, land grabs, you name it.

And the whole thing rests upon the great American foundation of democracy, rule of law, property rights, due process, and at least in theory, free market capitalism. Traditionally, such agencies have been agnostic to technologies, recognizing that while the nature of markets and humans are eternal, the tools we invent to connect them advance through time.

The technologically driven financial market efficiencies made in the past century have been utterly extraordinary, helping fuel American dominance. And yet, here we are, with one of the nation’s most powerful regulators apparently believing it knows better than other regulators and the wisdom of free markets, taking aim at a specific technology and a nascent industry.

While our nation’s competitors and adversaries take full advantage of the opportunity created by such hubris.

* * *

Anecdote

“The internet now carries the flag of being subversive, possibly rebellious, chaotic, nihilistic,” said David Bowie in a 1999 BBC interview [here].

“I embrace the idea that there is a new demystification process going on between artist and audience,” continued the visionary, peering over the horizon, glimpsing a world of peer-to-peer connection, synergy, exchange.

“Up until the mid-1970s, we were still living in the guise of a single and absolute created society, where there were known truths and known lies. And there was no duplicity or pluralism about the things we believed in.” The BBC interviewer remained skeptical throughout, often smug.

“That started to break down rapidly in the 1970s. And the idea of a duality in the way that we live – there are always two, three, four, five sides to every question. The singularity disappeared,” explained Ziggy Stardust, iconoclast, genius.

“And I think that has produced a medium such as the internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.”

The interviewer clung to his small mindedness, a harmless man. Helpful in fact, because such people remind us of the profound dangers we face when allowing such characters to ascend to positions of power, governing our activities, telling us what we can and cannot build, explore, limiting human potential.

“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re on the cusp of something invigorating and terrifying,” said Bowie. “It is an alien life form. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here,” explained the Space Oddity.

“The context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between user and provider will be so sympatico that it will crash our ideas of what mediums are all about.” Great artists help us imagine our many possible futures, and we then collectively conjure one from the nothingness.

“It is happening in every form. The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle,” explained Bowie. “That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.”

Blow Outs

Binance withdrew its bid to acquire FTX on Nov 9th last year. Sequoia wrote down its $210mm investment to $0 that day. The SEC and DOJ opened investigations. The NYT ran this headline: “Is this Crypto’s Lehman Moment?” Markets plunged. There was no TARP. No lender of last resort. No Fed bailout. In fact, nearly every central bank on the planet was proceeding with a historic rate-hiking cycle. Bitcoin fell to around $15,800 on that scary day in Nov. Ethereum hit $1,100. Basically, the lows. They’re now up 63% and 59% respectively.

Researchers in Wuhan, China working with the Chinese military were genetically manipulating the world’s deadliest coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus right around the time that the Covid-19 pandemic began, according to the Sunday Times, which has reviewed hundreds of documents, “Including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started.”

The Times also interviewed the US State Department investigators, including experts specializing in China, emerging pandemic threats and biowarfare – who conducted what the outlet describes as “the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.”

[O]ur new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars. –Sunday Times

The Mojiang mineshaft strain which killed several people are now recognized as ‘the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic,’ and were transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After that, “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” said one US investigator. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to US investigators, the WIV embarked on a classified program to make the mineshaft viruses more transmissible to humans, which they believe led to the creation of Covid-19, which then leaked into the city of Wuhan following a lab accident.

“It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said one of the investigators, who found evidence that researchers working on said experiments were hospitalized in November 2019 with Covid-like symptoms, just one month before the West became aware of the pandemic. One of the victims’ relatives died as well.

“We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza,” said an investigator.

Meanwhile, a separate analysis reveals that the epicenter of the original Covid-19 outbreak was close to the WIV, not Wuhan’s “wet” wildlife market as previously thought.

“I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said one of the investigators, who said they had evidence that the WIV was also working on a Covid-19 vaccine before the pandemic. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”

Rutgers University microbiologist, Richard Ebright, called the experiments “by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses — or indeed on any viruses — known to have been undertaken at any time in any location.”

Humanized mouse tests

Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina is a pioneer in cutting-edge experiments which use a technique to fuse together different pathogens by combining their genes. To test the effects of these chimeric coronaviruses, Baric created “humanized” mice, which were injected with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to those of a human.

“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” Baric wrote in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”

Meanwhile, by 2012, campaigners and scientists were beginning to push back against gain-of-function research due to its inherent dangers.

“About 30 labs now are working with live Sars virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high,” wrote Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Would one in ten escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high.”

In 2013, WIV researcher Shi Zhengli called Ralph Baric to ask for his help in growing sufficient quantities of a Sars-like virus found in a cave, SHC014, in order to conduct testing. Baric agreed, and the WIV provided him with the genetic sequence for the strain so that he could recreate genes from its spike proteins. Baric’s team inserted SHC014s’s “spike gene” into a copy of the original Sars virus they created in North Carolina and tested out the new chimeric virus on humanized mice.

Meanwhile in May 2014, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $3.7 million from the US National Institutes of Health – of which over $500,000 went to fund lab equipment purchases at the WIV, and $130,000 went directly towards Shi and her assistant.

Then, the Obama administration banned gain-of-function research, but a ‘loophole’ allowed the practice to proceed if deemed ‘urgent and safe.’ Baric argued just this to the NIH, which granted approval.

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. -Sunday Times

And in May, 2016, Daszak told a New York conference that She was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people.”

By 2017, She wrote in a paper that her team had sought to create eight mutant coronaviruses based on strains found in the Shitou cave – two of which were found to infect human cells. The research had been carried out in BSL-2 laboratories, while US guidelines for such research require BSL-3 precautions, which include self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision, the Times writes.

We talk a lot about inequality.

Well try these numbers:

20 million people dead.
1 billion sickened
8 billion lives put into a deep freeze.

All because 1 lab wanted to do audaciously dangerous virus experiments.

And 1 US official insisted on funding it. https://t.co/i5EXAKiDOx

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) June 11, 2023

Enter smoking gun

As Shi was creating her eight mutant viruses, the WIV took ‘another perilous leap forward’ with their work on the Shitou cave viruses – in what Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken – which was funded in part by EcoHealth’s grant money.

The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.

The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked. -Sunday Times

In his April 2018 annual progress report the WIV, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak omitted the mice deaths. He also failed to mention them in his grant renewal application filed with the NIH later that year. In fact, he said they had only experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs.“

“What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted?”

“Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report”https://t.co/6P2CzACMLP https://t.co/dfB12nqNTL pic.twitter.com/jdkpZHcjJe

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) June 11, 2023

So Daszak lied, as the experiment had actually killed six of the eight infected humanized mice.

Daszak eventually came clean, but says that his statement about “mild” illnesses was based on preliminary results (despite the fact that the mice had died months before he issued his statement).

US State Department weighs in

As the global lockdowns were coming to an end, the US State Department’s investigators were given access to secret intelligence on China’s coronavirus experiments in the months and years before Covid-19 emerged. Over a dozen investigators, given unparalleled access to “metadata, phone information and internet information” from US intelligence intercepts, published a report in early 2021 which made two assertions; that the WIV was experimenting on a strain, RaTG13, found in the Moijang mine, and that covert military research – including experiments performed on animal test subjects, was being conducted right before the pandemic.

“They were working with the nine different Covid variants,” said one of the investigators, adding that they think one virus at the WIV was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13.

“We are confident they were working on a closer unpublished variant — possibly collected in Mojiang.”

And of course, others believe that Covid-19 was largely a US production…

Scientists exposed the US created the COVID virus in a US Lab in the recent COVID Summit. pic.twitter.com/CtsE9mDpKJ

— Alexander #LM8 (@HaalandGoalKing) June 11, 2023

Either way, there you have it. Apologies from the MSM, fact checkers, social media companies, and the Biden administration can be submitted to tyler@zerohedge.com.

Authored by Robert Stark via Substack,

So far the 2020s seem more chaotic than previous decades. Based upon current events, economic and sociological data, and looking at historical cycles like the 4th turning theory and Peter Turchin’s research, it looks like there will be a major historical crisis this decade. In contrast, the 2010s felt very stagnant, despite the recession at the beginning of the decade, and political movements such as Occupy Wall Street, nationalism and populism in Europe, the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders movements, and the beginning of the Great Awokening. Looking specifically at years, 2016 was a turning point with the election of Trump, 2017 was somewhat chaotic with political strife between antifa and the alt-right, then both 2018 and 2019 felt very stagnant. Obviously 2020 was a chaotic year with the pandemic, as well as the BLM riots and acceleration in woke politics and cancel culture, with certain moments feeling apocalyptic. However, with the exception of Jan6th, 2021 was another stagnant year, with covid easing and the peak of the stimulus bubble and market euphoria. Also in 2021, the right was totally demoralized and cancel culture had become the new normal. There was some return to chaos in 2022, with the onset of inflation and the Ukraine war. While this year has seen a banking crisis, dept default scare, migrant crisis, more political turmoil such as the inditement of Trump, and increased political instability overseas, overall things feel stagnant again, or perhaps a calm before the storm.

The perma bulls just won’t give up

Source: Maverick of Wall Street

It initially seemed that the Silicon Valley Bank crash would put an end to copes about economic recovery. Despite recent fear of a debt default, major vulnerabilities in the financial system, higher interest rates, unprecedented levels of debt, sticky inflation, and the worst yield curve inversion in over 30 years, there is still a lot of bullish propaganda. For instance talk of a mild recession, soft landing, a new bull market, and that we may have even dodged a recession altogether. The bulls’ basis for optimism is a combination of the debt ceiling deal, official unemployment stats still being low, a slight dip in inflation, and hope for a pause in Fed rate hikes. Not to mention the new cope of an AI boom saving the economy and ushering in a new bull market, which is just creating another bubble in stocks, on top of the existing super bubble. This propaganda is in line with Janet Yellen’s infamous statement that we will never have another financial crisis again in our lifetime, the arrogance that the system is perfected to withstand collapse. The cringiest bull take so far, is that the economy is doing great because of the exorbitant prices for Taylor Swift concert tickets, as obviously there are many affluent girls who use Daddy’s credit card to buy tickets. If anything this just further shows the scope of the debt bubble, and high levels of income inequality. The current vibes remind me a lot of January’s bullishness before the banking crash, though we will probably see some repeat of cycles of coming close to the imminent crash, followed by more copes of a recovery, before the inevitable big crash.

Source

While bears have been vindicated, looking at the overall trajectory of the economy, there have been times over the past few years, when bears appeared wrong or overshot their predictions about the severity of an impending crisis. For starters, expecting that covid would cause a depression, which did not anticipate stimulus propping up the economy, at least for the time being. There was also concern, including from the mainstream media, that the Ukraine war was going to cause a global famine, the worst in modern history, by last fall. However, there was a successful deal, negotiated by Turkey between Russia and Ukraine, to allow the safe shipments of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea. The question is whether a prolonged conflict, delaying Ukraine’s planting season, will mean a global famine within the next few years. There were also expectations that Europe would have a catastrophic energy crisis last winter, which also did not pan out. Even Russia limiting oil production did not spike oil prices as high as anticipated. Europe lucked out by having a mild winter, and enough petrol and natural gas saved up in their reserves, and extra help from America, as Biden depleted America’s strategic petrol reserves. Overall it was a combination of certain supply chain issues getting resolved from the pandemic and war, but also a decline in global demand, and just kicking the can down the road.

In order to have a healthier economy, it is necessary for super bubbles to pop, and a similar case can be made for social and political ills. Since the pandemic mostly exacerbated the worst trends of the 2010s, such as social atomization, the mental health crisis, the sex recession, income inequality, the establishment consolidating power, cancel culture, cultural decay, and overall cringe, the question is whether a severe economic collapse would clear out societal bullshit or just make these problems worse. An economic soft landing or stagnation scenario would likely exacerbate the worst existing trends, so I totally get the doomers and accelerationists who cheer on the collapse. However, dissidents, who are often in despair, or feel that the current system is stacked against them, have this fantasy cope, that when the big collapse occurs, either they or their ingroup will do better or be liberated from systems of oppression, which is incredibly naïve. Dissidents have no institutional power and this doomer mentality is very passive, primarily fulfilling a psychological need. If one’s life and inner psyche is in chaos, one tends to want to see the cold indifferent society around them collapse as well. 

Doomers rely upon this fantasy that one external shock to the system, or Black Swan event, will cause the entire system to come crashing down like a house of cards, but the system has shown itself to be much more resilient than that. California shows that a one party liberal hegemonic system can last much longer than one would think, though it has been sustained by Silicon Valley revenue, and the exodus of the middle class acting as a safety valve for discontent. The financial propagandists who talk of a soft landing are partially correct, in that it is a soft landing or no recession for those at the top. In fact, America is working great for the people who run it, but not for those with no power and influence. The incoming severe recession may just mean more urban blight, homeless encampments, increased deaths of despair, and widening income inequality, but not necessarily a collapse of institutional power.

Anonymous 4chan post from 2013

The prophet of despair, Michel Houellebecq, has been totally vindicated in his prediction from the beginning of the pandemic that post pandemic life would be “the same but worse.” Collapses are often gradual and not overnight, and not necessarily a Mad Max scenario, but rather collapse just means a lower quality of life for most people. This is even true for third world nations that have collapsed, like Sri Lanka, or with the current high levels of inflation in Turkey and Argentina. “The nightmare is not the “collapse.” The nightmare is that they pull off the End of History, and things just gradually get worse – more crime, more poverty, more degeneracy, fewer services, and a population incapable of anything other than demanding larger doses of the poison,” tweets VDARE’s James Kirkpatrick. Basically a gradual decline in people’s quality of life or a frog in the boiling pan scenario, where people just get used to degradation, and may never actually reach that breaking point but rather merely adjust their expectations and standards. Dissidents rely upon this fantasy of the masses awakening and rebellion, but with lower wages and higher unemployment, there is just greater leverage to those in power and less to the people. The political elite must factor in that some type of economic crash means that people will be desperate enough to work for little or nothing and give up their freedoms and autonomy. The question is whether Americans, especially middle class Whites, can psychologically handle the decline and transition to a post-American order?  

Federal Reserve Chart of change in Foreign Exchange Reserve

Source

A probable scenario is where the US economy has a quasi-soft landing but at the expense of the rest of the world, by abusing the reserve currency to export inflation abroad. For instance, nations being forced to play catch up with the Fed’s rate hikes in order to save their currencies. This will accelerate the migrant crisis and increase resentment against America, with the potential for retaliation against the dollar. America would go into a depression, if it lost its reserve currency status, but the dollar still dominates foreign exchange reserves, with no clear competitor. On a similar note, an AI boom could turn the economy around after the recession, perhaps even a period of rapid economic expansion, but would also exacerbate income inequality and gradually erode the value of labor.

While there will likely not be a debt default anytime soon, the main danger now is the Treasury being forced to sell treasury bills and bonds, which would drain liquidity in the financial markets, thus exacerbating the banking crisis, push commercial real estate over the edge, and cause a pension solvency crisis. Not to mention, exacerbating the financial trap that the Fed is in, where if the Fed pivots or bails out the banks, inflation resurges, but if rates are kept high, there will be a liquidity and debt default crisis. Whether this will be the financial event that causes the big crash is hard to say. Overall, the main vulnerability in the economy is the sheer levels of debt, both public and private, in which the response will likely be inflating the dollar to pay off massive debts.

The crash has taken much longer than anticipated, like watching paint dry, and I am done trying to guess when this mega crash will occur. Generally I take the view that the economic bubble is just being propped up further, and that the inevitable is being delaying, which will lead to a much worse economic crisis. However, what if this is all part of a successful managed decline, or manufactured stability, which is really depressing and demoralizing. America is in decline but it is a stretch to say collapse, but rather a long term multidecade process, a slow motion decay, analogous to Rome’s decline as a late stage empire, which took a very long period of time to fall. America has both advantages over other nations and major vulnerabilities.

*  *  *

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Police in Philadelphia can keep fighting back over being fired or suspended due to allegedly “racist and violent” social media posts, an appeals court ruled late last week. 

A Federal appeals court ruled this week that the officers can file a lawsuit against the city claiming their First Amendment rights were violated due to their terminations, according to WHYY. 

In total, a dozen offers were fired for their social media posts, the report says. Their social media accounts “were included in a database, published in 2019, that catalogued thousands of bigoted or violent posts by active-duty and former police officers in several states”, WHYY reported.

About 200 officers were disciplined and 15 were taken off the job, the report says. 12 of those 15 ultimately went on to file a civil rights lawsuit against the city, but it was dismissed last year, with the presiding judge ruling that “the officers’ posts had undermined public trust in the department and violated the city’s social media policy”.

U.S. District Judge Petrese Tucker wrote in his ruling last year that the officers “played racist bingo, mocking as many ethnic or religious groups as possible”.

But on Thursday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was too early to throw out the case, citing “a lack of clarity over the provenance of some of the posts”. The appeals court did, however, write that: “Posts like the officers’ have the capacity to confirm the community’s worst fears about bias in policing.”

The 3rd Circuit said it doesn’t “condone the officers’ use of social media to mock, disparage, and threaten the very communities they were sworn to protect.”

The appeals court said the plaintiffs “undoubtedly face a steep uphill climb in ultimately proving their case”, but sent the case back to the lower courts nonetheless. 

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is as corrupt as Hunter Biden’s laptop. Few people of either party trust it, nor should they…

There is a reason that, since before the time of the emperor Tiberius, treason trials have been a favorite tool of totalitarians. Such proceedings allow them to get rid of nearly anyone they dislike. Successfully brand someone a “traitor,” an “enemy of the state,” and, bang, into the oubliette they go. 

I think the treason trial is the appropriate heuristic for what is happening, and what has been happening to Donald Trump ever since 2015 when he descended the escalator. 

The charge that Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” a “Russian asset,” etc., during the Russia collusion hoax was a sort of treason trial. And remember how elaborate it all was, a veritable glass onion, thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton, whose campaign concocted, paid for, and disseminated the infamous fantasy “dossier” fabricated by former MI6 spook Christopher Steele. And it was Hillary, remember, who first broadcast the charge that servers in Trump Tower were secretly communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank. The Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services—all were in on that game. 

Trump’s two impeachments were episodes in the long-running treason trial, as was Liz Cheney’s January 6 show trial, as are the still unfolding series of indictments that have dogged his footsteps with increasing ferocity as the 2024 election looms and Trump’s poll numbers stubbornly refuse to recede. 

A lot of legal hermeneutical ingenuity has been lavished on the current criminal indictment, a 37-count blockbuster revolving around charges that Trump mishandled classified documents he had stuffed away at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach. I think those analyses are mostly beside the point, so much wasted foolscap. The indictment, which histrionically relies heavily on the 1917 Espionage Act, is, when looked at with a sufficiently jaundiced eye, an amusing performance. Macbeth would have said it was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

You, dear reader, know differently. You know it is the latest writ of attainder pronounced against Trump by the regime. 

For what, when you come down to it, is Trump’s crime? Please don’t tell me it has something to do with his possession of classified documents or “obstruction” of an official proceeding. Former presidents have very wide latitude with respect to managing documents, as was set forth explicitly by the Presidential Records Act in the late 1970s. 

It’s a different matter with the 1,800 boxes of documents that Joe Biden glommed onto in his days in the Senate and as vice president. I believe they are still moldering under his Corvette in the garage of his Delaware residence, having wound up there after a trip through D.C.’s Chinatown and the Penn Biden Center, a facility paid for, as was Biden’s $900,000 stipend at the University of Pennsylvania, by China. 

This is the moment we return to Hillary Clinton and her “home-brew” email server through which she ran all manner of classified correspondence. According to disgraced former FBI Director James “Higher Loyalty” Comey, “no reasonable prosecutor” would go after Hillary, even though she deleted thousands of emails and destroyed mobile phones and hard drives after being subpoenaed. 

If you are hearing the winds murmur “two-tier system of justice” you are not imagining things. Donald Trump, as president, could declassify anything he wished. Neither Joe Biden nor Hillary Clinton had that authority. Yet Trump has to show up in Court on Tuesday to face criminal charges, while Hillary and (so far) Joe Biden skate. 

I say “so far” with respect to Biden because things are heating up for the Senescent One. Margot Cleveland, writing at The Federalist, noted the curious timing of the Trump indictment: “The news of the indictment quickly suffocated coverage of a confidential human source’s claim that the Ukrainian founder of Burisma had paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden.” Hmm.

Nothing to see here, gents, move along please. 

But Cleveland is right. “The entire case [against Trump] was a set-up from the start.” Yet one wonders, set up by whom? And what was the supposed predicate? I ask again, what was Trump’s crime? 

I think it was a dual manifestation of one crime. His original sin, his unforgivable or eternal sin, was being elected president in 2016. The regime endeavored to expiate that sin by hampering Trump, then by impeaching him. But here he is, persisting in his folly, seeking to commit the same tort again. Conclusion: he must be destroyed. Hence the treason trial masquerading as a legitimate judicial proceeding.

Reflecting on the latest chapter in the tale we might call “The Persecution of Donald Trump,” the Wall Street Journal noted that this is “a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President.”

Donald Trump is currently, and by a large margin, the front runner of the opposition party in the 2024 presidential campaign. The party in power is attempting to silence him, to take him out of the running, by mobilizing the police power of the state against him. This is the sort of thing one expects from banana-republic regimes in Africa and Central America. It could never happen, one would have said only a few years ago, in America. 

But here we are. The indictment against Trump was formally brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. But the Journal is right. Smith is just an errand boy. “Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment,” they noted, “and they are right to think so.”

Indeed. Elon Musk, no fan of Trump’s, put his finger on an essential element in this saga: “There does seem,” he wrote on June 8, responding to the indictment, “to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics.” 

How’s that for understatement? Almost as good, I’d say, as his deployment of the future tense in his follow-up sentence:

“Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust.”

That ship has sailed, I regret to say.

Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is as corrupt as Hunter Biden’s laptop. Few people of either party trust it, nor should they. What we need now is a bold new Hercules who can cleanse the Augean stables on the Potomac. It seems unlikely, I know, and perhaps supremely ironical, but the name of that cleansing hero may just be Donald J. Trump. 

Update (1919ET): 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will declare a “disaster declaration” on Monday to tap federal funds to rebuild a bridge on Interstate 95 in Northeast Philadelphia that was destroyed by a tanker fire, according to NBC 10. 

During a press conference on Sunday evening, Shapiro said the bridge rebuild could take “some number of months.” PennDOT officials and engineers have yet to give specifics on a timeline for reconstruction. 

“To expedite this process and to cut through the red tape, tomorrow morning I plan to issue a disaster declaration, allowing the Commonwealth to immediately draw down federal funds and move quickly to repair and reconstruct this roadway.

“I’ve spoken directly to Secretary Pete Buttigeig of the United States Department of Transportation, along with Senator Casey, Congressman Boyle and other federal officials,” the governor said. 

With regards to the complete rebuild of I-95 roadway, we expect that to take a number of months.

We will know more about that exact timeline once the engineers and PennDOT have completed their review. pic.twitter.com/WBVb5AOXTU

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) June 11, 2023

Shapiro said officials are creating alternative routes for motorists during the rebuild.

Early this AM a vehicle fire under I-95 in Philly caused part of the highway to collapse.

While this is still an active scene, I completed an aerial view of the site and was briefed by first responders, law enforcement and transportation experts on the ground with @PhillyMayor. pic.twitter.com/g4rHy5NTMM

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) June 11, 2023

 I-95 is a major artery for transporting people and goods, and the bridge’s closure is already sparking traffic chaos. 

*   *   * 

Interstate 95 in Philadelphia closed on Sunday after a tanker truck burst into flames underneath an overpass, causing a portion of the bridge to collapse. 

All lanes on 1-95 are shut down in both directions nearing Cottman Avenue exit due to large fire. Smoke is visible. Avoid 1-95 approaching Northeast Philadelphia and expect delays. https://t.co/DydujHbkqr

— Philadelphia OEM (@PhilaOEM) June 11, 2023

NBC’s Randy Gyllenhaal reported the ‘accident’ broke out around 0630 ET on the off-ramp to Cottman Avenue, right underneath I-95, in the Tacony neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. 

Major fire on 95 North approaching Cottman @FOX29philly @CBSPhiladelphia @NBCPhiladelphia looks like the grass is on fire pic.twitter.com/PKbUYkrWLn

— Sgt. Mark Fusetti (Retired) (@MarkFusetti) June 11, 2023

All north and southbound lanes are closed for 3 to 4 miles between Bridge Street and Academy Road. Traffic chaos has erupted across that section of the city, as per traffic data via TomTom. 

Gyllenhaal said officials are on the scene and investigating the accident and the state of the bridge. He said the southbound side is “compromised” while there could be structural issues with the northbound section. 

All lanes of I95 closed in both directions between Woodhaven and Aramingo exits due to fire/road collapse. Other streets closed for the response. Avoid area. Plan and seek alternative travel routes. pic.twitter.com/myNyH0nCiq

— Philadelphia OEM (@PhilaOEM) June 11, 2023

Officials told Gyllenhaal, “The roadway is gone.” 

The runoff from the tanker is also causing underground explosions, explained Captain Derrick Bowmer of the Philadelphia Fire Department. There have been multiple reports of exploding manholes around the area. 

“We will be here for awhile,” Bowmer said. “We have fire coming out of those manholes.”

He said the ‘highways isn’t expected to re-open anytime soon,’ and this could spark significant traffic delays on Monday morning, considering the I-95 highway is a major interstate through the Mid-Alantic corridor. 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro tweeted he has been briefed on the tanker explosion and bridge collapse. 

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” – could that be Bud Light’s latest genius marketing move?

The beer brand, still under intense fire and a suffering a sales collapse that came as a result of its embrace of ‘trans’ influencer Dylan Mulvaney, is (or was) reportedly co-sponsoring an “all ages drag show party”, according to a report from Fox News. 

In what appears to be a full embrace of its new target audience, Bud Light may have co-sponsored an “all-ages Pride event” in Flagstaff, Arizona, Fox News writes. The event is called “Pride in the Pines” and includes drag queens.

Bud Light was previously listed as co-sponsor for the event on posters, which is also being described as a “family festival event” and a family-friendly, “safe space”. Old Navy, Toyota and Coca-Cola USA are also sponsoring the event, Fox News reported. 

Flagstaff Pride’s Twitter account wrote this week that Bud Light was not a sponsor, despite appearing on a poster for the event: “We put out an incorrect promotional poster which included Bud Light as a sponsor.”

Meanwhile, Anheuser-Busch commented that “Bud Light is not a sponsor of this event. The event organizers have issued a corrected version of the poster.”  But while Anheuser-Busch appears to be contesting that it is involved in the event, Flagstaff Pride’s website still prominently displayed “Bud Light” as a sponsor as of Sunday morning. 

As Fox notes, its unclear if Bud Light was previously a sponsor and then decided to pull out of the event or if Flagstaff Pride was in error.

George Soros is handing control of his $25 billion empire to his son Alex – who in recent years has been seen flying around the world to conduct business on behalf of his family’s Open Society Foundation.

In doing so, the 92-year-old Soros is passing over the family’s one-time ‘heir apparent,’ Jonathan Soros, 52 – the third child from George’s first marriage, and a Harvard-trained lawyer who stabilized the Soros investment firm after a tumultuous period saw several investment chiefs come and go.

“I expected Jonathan to be the one,” said former Open Society Foundation president Aryeh Neier, who ran the organization from 1993 to 2012.

Jonathan Soros thought he was the one as well, telling the Wall Street Journal; “I always knew he could change his mind,” adding “As a trader, it’s the thing he’s most famous for.”

Their differences upended the succession plan. George was impulsive. Jonathan was analytical and contemplative. Jonathan was respectful of George but pushed back when he disagreed with his father’s decisions, according to people who worked with them. When they butted heads about two senior hiring choices, George felt his authority challenged. Jonathan felt undermined.

Looking to keep peace in the family, Jonathan left the Soros’s investment business in 2011, he said. His father soured about picking him to lead the foundation. “We didn’t get on on certain points,” George said. “That became evident to both of us, particularly to him, and he wanted to be out on his own.” -WSJ

“We ended our business relationship on pretty good terms,” said Jonathan of his father. “I was disappointed but not regretful.”

Enter Alex – the oldest of two sons from George’s 2nd wife, Susan Weber, who was elected chairman of the Open Society Foundation in December and is now responsible for directing political activity as president of Soros’ super PAC.

Alex – once an unlikely choice to lead the family – cared little about finance and instead loved football and philosophy. He’s described by the Journal as a once-introverted fat kid who was embarrassed by his family’s wealth who blossomed into a red-shoe wearing party animal.

He cared little about finance and couldn’t persuade his father to watch football. Instead, they spent hours discussing ideas and global politics. His thesis topic, “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature,” thrilled his father. For Alex, “it’s football, philosophy and politics, in that order,” said Svante Myrick, one of his friends. -WSJ

But now, it’s all business.

“I’m more political” said Alex, who recently met with officials from the Biden administration, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and heads of state such as Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss affairs related to the Open Society Foundation – which donates roughly $1.5 billion per year to various causes and groups around the world.

Foundation money also goes to universities and other educational organizations. The Soros super PAC, Democracy PAC, has backed the election campaigns of district attorneys and law-enforcement officials seeking to reduce incarceration rates and racial bias in the justice system, among the efforts that have riled the right.

…

The selection of Alex, a hip-hop fan and New York Jets devotee, was once a long shot. Early on, Alex barely spoke up in meetings and was best known for his highflying social life. “Gorgeous models, NBA pals and hide-and-seek at his mansion: Welcome to the lavish life of investor George Soros’ playboy son,” said one Daily Mail.com online headline in 2016. -WSJ

Alex is also the sole Soros on the investment committee overseeing Soros Fund Management – which will migrate most of its $25 billion to the Open Society Foundation in the years ahead. Approximately $125 million has been set aside for the super PAC.

Between 2004 and 2006, Alex worked part time at the foundation. According to people who worked there, he didn’t make much of an impression – much less as a likely successor.

“Alex used to come to board meetings, but he hardly spoke,” said Neier.

Orange Man Bad

According to Alex, he’s concerned about the prospect of Donald Trump retaking the White House in 2024 – and has suggested a ‘significant financial role’ for the Soros organization in the effort to defeat him.

“As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too,” he said, as if his Super PAC didn’t employ Marc Elias, the Democrat superlawyer who worked tirelessly to change election laws leading up to the 2020 election.

According to Elon Musk – who recently compared George Soros to supervillain Magneto, the selection of Alex was “just a formality,” as “Alex has been de facto in charge for several years.”

Just a formality. Alex has been de facto in charge for several years.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2023

The Journal cites Alex as suggesting that speed had become too constrained on college campuses and elsewhere, saying: “I have some differences with my generation in regard to free speech and other things—I grew up watching Bill Maher before bed, after all.”

If @AlexanderSoros is serious about freedom of speech, then we have common ground.

But destroying public safety by electing DAs who won’t prosecute violent criminals needs to stop.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2023

 Not everyone has sharks with lasers on their heads, Alex…

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Among the many grim memories of lockdowns were boarded-up local shops.

Meanwhile, long lines outside the big-box stores like Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods and Home Depot. For very strange reasons, small business was universally declared to be nonessential whereas the big chains were deemed essential.

This amounted to a massive industrial subsidy to large companies, which emerged from the pandemic period richer and more bloated than ever. Meanwhile, millions of small businesses were utterly wrecked.

Nearly every day, my inbox fills with tragic stories of family businesses that were just getting going when the lockdowns came and destroyed everything. Not enough of these stories were ever told.

Major media were not interested.

The government loans (PPP), later mostly forgiven, could not possibly make up the difference for the losses from old-fashioned revenue. In addition, their supply chains were wrecked because they were either starved for business or gobbled up by the large companies.

There are no firm numbers but it is possible 25–40% of small businesses closed permanently. Dreams were shattered and millions of jobs were disrupted or destroyed.

As a result, retail trade (declared nonessential except for chosen businesses) has yet to recover in employment, despite the frantic hiring. Neither has hospitality. However, the information sector (declared essential across the board) is larger than ever.

A Brutal Attack on Free Markets

It was a brutal attack on commercial freedom but what a way to gain an industrial advantage!

The American economy is supposed to rest on competition as an ideal. This was the opposite.

Lockdowns were the bolstering of industrial cartels, particularly in the information sector. Even today, all these companies benefit from this period in which they were able to deploy their unfair advantages against their smaller competitors. The entire disaster was an attack on property rights, free enterprise and the competitive economy.

Incredibly, the regulators offered a public-health rationale. They were issuing every manner of edict concerning ventilation, social distancing, plexiglass, silly stickers everywhere and capacity restrictions. Later these companies added vaccine mandates.

These all benefited the large corporations and exterminated the small businesses that could not afford to comply or could not risk alienating labor with shot demands.

Consider the capacity restrictions alone. If you are a restaurant that serves 350–500 people, a capacity limit of 50% isn’t going to hit the bottom line too hard. It’s rare even in normal times for these places to fill up.

But across the street, you have a family-owned coffee shop with seating for 10. It is almost always packed. Cutting that by half is devastating. It cannot survive.

It was the same with the distancing requirements. Only the largest businesses could implement and enforce them.

Big Business Is Often the Biggest Enemy

I can recall standing outside waiting in lines to be chosen to be the next person entitled to go into the store. As I approached the door some masked-up employee would sanitize a shopping cart and push it my way so as to maintain six feet of distance.

Smaller and local shops could not afford to hire extra employees for such ridiculous jobs and needed to serve everyone who showed up. Only the well-heeled places could afford such antics.

And that is precisely why the large corporations did not complain too much about lockdowns.

They watched their bottom lines swell even as their competitors were crushed. It was the perfect embodiment of Milton Friedman’s dictum that big business is often the biggest enemy of genuine capitalism. They far prefer industrial cartels of the sort created during the lockdowns.

If we look back at 20th-century commercial history, we observe that in totalitarian societies, such cartels thrive. This was true in the Soviet Union, which featured state-owned companies that held a full monopoly not only in its stores but also for the products they would sell: one brand of everything you need.

The principle of essential and nonessential thrived under Soviet communism like never before.

The Real Meaning of Fascism

But it was the same in fascist-style economic structures too. The German economy under Nazi rule privileged the largest industrial players who became agents of state power: This was true for Volkswagen, Krupp, Farben and a host of munitions manufacturers.

It was the opposite of a competitive economy. It was socialism with German characteristics. Italy, Spain and France did the same.

Prevailing intellectual opinion in the 1930s celebrated the cartelization of industry as more “scientific” and less wasteful than competitive free markets. Fashionable books at the time cheered on the way such cartels made possible scientific planning for the whole of society.

Reading through Benito Mussolini’s manifesto on fascism today prompts the question: Once you replace nation with globe, what precisely would the WEF disagree with here?

Fascism asserts not the rights of commerce but its fundamental duty to serve the state. What can be more consistent with this view than the claim that some businesses are essential to state priorities and others are not?

This is what was created during lockdowns in the U.S. and around the world. I’ve tended to think that this was all an outgrowth of disease panic and bad thinking. Well-intentioned policy that went very badly.

But what if it wasn’t? What if the whole point of the industrial segregation and cartel creation was to run a real-time test of the full vision of a corporatist state? It’s not a crazy speculation.

Amazon Loved Lockdowns

The case of Amazon is particularly intriguing. It benefited massively from lockdowns. Meanwhile, its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, had already bought The Washington Post, which very aggressively and daily pushed the lockdown narrative throughout the entire period.

There is nothing wrong with gratitude for Amazon’s performance throughout but the involvement of its founder and CEO in actively pushing for lockdowns, anxious to prolong them as long as possible, raises alarm bells.

Or have a look at the March 2020 viral article called “The Hammer and the Dance,” pushed hard by all the major social-media outlets. The man who signed it is Tomas Pueyo, an educational entrepreneur pushing digital learning. He and the industry he represents made a windfall from lockdowns.

The companies that massively benefited from lockdowns have been forced to pull back in hiring due to higher interest rates, but they are still much larger than they were pre-lockdown. They will cling to their power and market domination through all means fair and foul.

How to dislodge them and restore competition?

We Need Another Ludwig Erhard

The historical precedent is postwar Germany. When Ludwig Erhard took over as finance minister following the destruction of the Nazi government, he worked to dismantle industrial cartels but faced massive resistance.

The richest and most powerful corporate actors pushed back against his introduction of competition. You can read his story in the great 1958 book Prosperity Through Competition.

His priority focus was on decentralization, deregulation, cuts and eliminations of taxes that are barriers to business formation, bolstering property rights, ending subsidies, stabilizing the current and otherwise encouraging as much freedom in the economic sphere.

“Freedom for the consumer and freedom to work must be explicitly recognized as inviolable basic rights by every citizen,” Erhard wrote.

“To offend against them should be regarded as an outrage against society. Democracy and a free economy are as logically linked as are dictatorship and State controls.”

His efforts produced the “German economic miracle,” during which time the German economy grew an annual average of 8.5% between 1948 and 1960, and caused the nation to be the most prosperous in Europe. And this happened at the same time that the U.K. was adopting ever more socialist and corporativist forms of governance.

The point is that industrial cartelization is not an unusual pattern. Big business has traditionally loathed competition and free enterprise. It would be naive to believe that they had no role in the destruction of American liberty and rights in those fateful days of lockdowns.

Freedom Is the Historical Exception

The norm in commercial life from the Middle Ages through the modern era has not been competition and freedom but cartelization and despotism, with some exceptions beginning in the late 18th century through the Great War, also known as the great age of liberalism or the Belle Epoque.

What followed in the 20th century in many countries — coupled with economic crisis and war — was an egregious public-private partnership and the regulatory state that benefited the largest corporate players at the expense of startups and local companies.

The introduction of digital commerce in the late 20th century threatened a new age of commercial freedom that came to a screeching halt with the lockdowns of 2020.

In this sense, lockdowns were not “progressive” at all but profoundly conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the term. It was an establishment fighting to preserve and entrench its power.

Perhaps that was the whole point all along.

All those crazy mandates, protocols and recommendations served some purpose and they sure weren’t disease mitigation. They benefited those institutions that could afford to implement them while punishing their lower-capitalized competition.

The response should be obvious: reparations for small business and the restoration of real commercial competition along the lines of postwar Germany.

We need our own Ludwig Erhard. And we need our own miracle.

The modern social narrative is that men have always held all the cards, held all the control and kept the good life locked up tight behind an almost supernatural barrier of male privilege and patriarchy.  Not only do men hoard power like sleeping dragons hoarding treasure, but they are also supposedly maliciously “toxic”;  driven insane by a dangerous and mysterious radioactive energy called “masculinity.”  They are unstable creatures with a hair trigger, ready to rape and pillage without warning.  Men need to be subdued, observed and conditioned from childhood to be more like women.

These beliefs have become so ingrained into progressive culture that they are now doctrine.  The patriarchy is a fact, even though they have no proof of its existence.  Male privilege is a fact, even though women have all the same rights as men under the law in the western world.  And all men are violent and vicious towards women if given the chance, though, if that were true then feminism would not stand a chance of survival in America or Europe.  It would not be allowed to exist.

But what if the leftist perception is actually the opposite of reality?  What if women enjoy far more privileges than they could ever know?

Libs Of TikTok gives us some insight into the conundrum with a recent post of a woman who “transitioned” into manhood, only to discover that being a man is so hard she now understands why men are much more likely to commit suicide…

This is really sad. Trans man realizes how hard it is to be a man when you’re really a woman.

Males and females are different and no matter what you do to your body, you can’t be the opposite sex. pic.twitter.com/Ib2in2vJrb

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 10, 2023

The video is revealing on multiple levels.  The woman above tries to express the difficulties of becoming a trans-man while still clinging to the precious victim status of womanhood.  She’s incapable of reconciling the two dynamics, and even suggests at one point that such pain could be solved by people providing even more attention and kindness to women.  

It is very reminiscent of other female attempts to prove that men “live on easy mode,” such as writer Norah Vincent’s famous experiment in 2006 of living as a man for 18 months.  The project was supposed to last for two years, but Vincent found being a man so difficult and intolerable that she ended it early (the stress of pretending to be someone else was also a factor).  The writer discovered how cold women can be towards men and found she started to develop negative opinions of women as a whole.  Sadly, Vincent would go on to commit assisted suicide in 2022. 

First and foremost, it’s not enough to wear the costume of a man – Men are fundamentally and biologically different from women in every way, including how they process the world and deal with adversity.  Women enjoy the comfort of collective support and group affirmation, that is how they cope with hardship.  Men are far more likely to deal with the struggle alone; in fact, men often prefer to be alone in order to mentally regenerate.  Here is comedy legend Patrice O’Neil to explain the simple psychological differences between men and women:

No matter how much a woman wants to become a man due to the illusory privileges she thinks they have, she will never be a man in the head.  It’s not possible.

A second factor to consider is that men tend to be more isolated and more dangerous for a reason – Men are expendable, by design.  From the beginning of recorded history men have been the cannon fodder for keeping civilization intact.  When the saber-toothed tigers attacked the tribe or the village was threatened by marauding armies it was the destiny of each able-bodied man to risk almost certain death to keep the women and children safe.  To provide and protect is an integral part of almost every man’s circuitry.  

However, in first world societies government and bureaucracy has taken over the role of provider and protector, with numerous monetary and security safety nets for women.  With men’s primary biological role now treated as peripheral and unimportant, men are left to search for new meaning with very little in the way of social support.  In the feminized west, masculine men are seen as potential powderkegs; walking time bombs without a purpose that could wreak havoc at any moment.

But the truth is, as soon as disaster erupts and those first world safety nets disappear women come running back to men for safety, expecting them to fulfill their job as cannon fodder once again.  As the venerable Bill Burr notes “There are no feminists in a house fire.”

At bottom, masculine men end up in leadership roles more often because they are built for the job.  They are inherent risk takers and are more capable of self sacrifice for the good of the tribe.  Feminists believe that women can take on these responsibilities while also enjoying the privileges of collective emotional support and the coddling that modern society provides, but the two things are mutually exclusive.  They can’t have both, and some “trans men” are slowly starting to discover this, to their horror.