Politics

The Countries Where The Most People Buy Organic According to the Statista Market Insights, more than 15 percent of food sales in Denmark are of organic products, making the country the biggest market for organic food in relative terms. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows in the chart below, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland are the only other countries achieving a share above 10 percent, showing that in a global context, food marketed as organic is still a somewhat of a niche despite all the hype surrounding it. You will find more infographics at Statista Taking into consideration only foods marketed as organic (and not those which are not sold as such, for example in countries with less formalized food markets), the global share of organic products in total food revenue was just 1.9 percent. With Germany in rank 7, a strong preference for organic food in German-speaking countries is visible. …

California’s Perpetual Drought Is Manmade And Intentional Authored by Roger Canfield via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.” Lake Shasta Dam in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Feb. 14, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times) Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority. There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really? Over several decades, the public has been deceived into voting for water bonds that have little new water in them—phony promises to build new water storage and aqueducts. About 12 percent of bond …

A Low Sodium Diet May Be Stressing You Out Authored by Jennifer Sweenie via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), There is a link between salt intake and stress, and it’s probably not what you think. While we are well aware of the purported dangers associated with a high-sodium diet, many of us are not aware that too little sodium comes with its own set of issues. When it comes to stress, salt plays an important role in helping flush cortisol from the body. Soho A Studio/Shutterstock A study published in Clinical Endocrinology in 2020 showed that an increase in salt consumption leads to a rise in cortisol levels in your urine and lower cortisol levels in your bloodstream. What does this potentially mean? Restricting your sodium intake may lead to higher levels of circulating cortisol. Salt is often vilified, and many physicians instruct their patients to …

US Imposes Sanctions On Chinese Companies Vital To Russia’s Defense Industry The Biden administration and US Treasury on Wednesday unveiled nearly 300 new anti-Russia sanctions which especially target third party entities which are said to help Moscow in sanctions-busting activities. “The almost 300 targets being sanctioned by both Treasury and the Department of State include sanctions on dozens of actors that have enabled Russia to acquire desperately needed technology and equipment from abroad,” the Treasury Department said in a press release. So-called dual-use items out of China are a key focus of the action, which is being hailed as one of “the most wide-ranging actions against Chinese companies so far in Washington’s sanctions aimed at Russia.” 20 companies based in China and Hong Kong were named. …

Study Finds Elevated Risk Of Eye Inflammatory Disorder Following COVID-19 Vaccination Authored by Megan Redshaw, J.D. via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), People with a history of uveitis may experience a recurrence of the eye inflammatory disorder following COVID-19 vaccination, especially in the early postvaccination period. (MicroScience/Shutterstock) A recently published study in JAMA Ophthalmology found that about 17 percent of nearly 474,000 vaccinated individuals with a history of uveitis experienced a recurrence within one year after vaccination. Uveitis is inflammation inside the eye that occurs when the immune system is fighting an infection or attacks healthy tissue in the eyes. It can cause symptoms including pain, redness, and vision loss while damaging the uvea and other parts of the eye. Researchers collected data on all individuals diagnosed with uveitis in South Korea between January 2015 and February 2021 to determine the risk of recurrence after COVID-19 …

House Approves ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act’ Aimed At Cracking Down On Campus Protests Late in the afternoon Wednesday the House approved a bill which seeks to crack down on antisemitism on college and university campuses following days of protests and unrest driven by pro-Palestinian activists. The Antisemitism Awareness Act has been approved in a 320-91 vote and will now head to the Senate. But the central question is: how and by what measure will federal authorities crack down on speech deemed “antisemitic”? Will criticism of the government of Israel be deemed antisemitic? Will highlighting alleged war crimes or human rights abuses by the IDF be considered so? Will involvement in the BDS movement be deemed anti-Jewish? Will slogans such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” be illegal according to federal law? Will criticizing the US $3+ billion in annual foreign aid be considered anti-Jewish?  And what …

Title IX Rules: 6 More States Sue Biden Admin Over “Radical And Illegal” Changes Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times, A group of six Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over what they said were “radical and illegal” changes to Title IX rules. The lawsuit, led by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. In their legal filing, the GOP attorneys general argued that the department overstepped its authority when rolling out new updates to Title IX rules that expanded protections to students by incorporating gender identity into the legal text. They further claimed the changes to the rules override state laws and will harm Tennessee students, families, and schools. The attorneys general called on the …

Biden’s Dollar Weaponization – Growing Backlash Could Kill The Economy Authored by Peter Reagan for Birch Gold Group, President Biden’s decision to participate in the Ukraine-Russia conflict back in February 2022 has taken a new and dangerous turn this year. The U.S. dollar could suffer dramatically as a result. Before we explore that new development, we’re going to start by quickly summarizing some of the events that led the United States to this point. Let’s begin… In the February 28th, 2022 issue of Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column for Bloomberg, Levine wrote about the sanctions placed on Russia: the U.S., the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Singapore and other countries announced harsh sanctions against Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. There are a lot of these sanctions – banning Russian flights through European airspace, limiting Russian banks’ access to the SWIFT interbank messaging system, etc. – but the most …

“Throw ‘Em A Rager”: GoFundMe Donations Surge For UNC Frat Defending ‘Old Glory’ From Marxist Protesters Law-abiding, freedom-loving Americans are finally catching on. The chaos spreading across the nation’s colleges and universities is a direct result of failed woke ideologies pushed by radical Marxist teachers, school groups, and school administrators. These schools have brainwashed an entire generation of ‘useful idiot’ youngsters in classrooms, otherwise called ‘indoctrination camps.’  Let’s begin with one Marxist extremist preaching the quiet part out loud to hundreds of youngsters this week:  “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the USA.” The X user who posted the footage wrote, “This isn’t just about Israel/Palestine. It’s an attempt of the Marxist takeover of America. Our colleges have become indoctrination camps.”  An extremist on the mic says: “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist …

A white man shot black law enforcement officers this week, ultimately killing four of them and wounding four more, and he did it as they were attempting to arrest him for breaking “gun control” laws. Where are all the stories about “white supremacy” and “assault weapons bans”?

Wait, never mind. The suspect is black and all four victims are white. Nothing to see here, after all!

It’s interesting how that works. Just shy of four years ago, our national news media and Democrats in general declared it time for a “racial reckoning” because one erratic fentanyl addict died of a heart attack in custody after a cop attempted to wrestle him under control. We haven’t stopped hearing about it since. But on Monday, Terry Clark Hughes Jr., 39, under warrant for illegal firearm possession and evading arrest, allegedly greeted police arriving to take him into custody by raining rounds of bullets on them using his rifle from the second story of a nondescript suburban home.

Hughes was killed in the shootout, but so were officers Sam Poloche, Alden Elliot, Joshua Eyer, and Thomas Weeks. Did I mention they were simply trying to arrest Hughes for illegally owning a gun, a breach of laws I’m promised by the media are vital to the safety of every man, woman, and child in America?

Without being too blunt here: It’s because Hughes is BLACK.

Not even a month ago, the media had us on the verge of Floyd 2.0 after a 26-year-old man allegedly initiated gunfire on police from his SUV. Authorities were pulling Dexter Reed over for a traffic violation and commanding that he open his window when he allegedly pulled the trigger, only to receive a barrage of bullets from police in return, striking him 13 times total.

But hey, none of the police involved were killed, so no biggie! The real issue is that Reed himself died — because he’s BLACK.

Washington Post: “Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop.”

CNN: “The family of Dexter Reed, a 26-year-old Black man who was killed in a hail of bullets fired by police during a traffic stop…”

Associated Press: “Video shows the 26-year-old Black man briefly lowering a window and then raising it and refusing to exit the vehicle as more officers arrived…”

Guess who didn’t mention the race of the black man who just allegedly killed four white cops with an illegally owned gun. Answer: None of the above. Neither did The New York Times, CBS, NBC, or ABC. Nor did the Times, the Post, or the AP post a photo of Hughes.

To their credit, ABC, CBS, and CNN at least published Hughes’ mugshot from a previous offense, one of many on his extensive criminal record. Meanwhile, the Times’ only mention of the word “black” in its coverage was to describe the color of the SWAT team vehicles outside the house where he was hiding.

But I can promise you this article is the last thing you’ll hear of Hughes, at least so far as his race is concerned. Sure, it’s an election year, but even though he allegedly killed four officers, injured an additional four, and did so with an illegally owned gun, it’s not quite what the media are looking for in their next George Floyd. If only he hadn’t killed and wounded nearly 10 people while running from the cops with an unlawful firearm, he might have been the media’s next hero.

A Disappointing First Year For Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org, Nearly one year ago, Chicagoans cheered Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s removal from office. Gone was her toxic attitude. Her flippant dismissal of the city’s many crises. Her abrasive politics. In her place was Brandon Johnson, who promised a more inclusive approach to building a “better, stronger, safer Chicago.”  It hasn’t turned out that way. Today, there’s little disagreement that Mayor Johnson has disappointed on most key issues. On crime. On policing. On migrants. On education. On governance. Even on foreign affairs.  Two recent polls show Chicagoans have a low opinion of Johnson and his performance so far. A January poll by Tulchin Research found just 21% of registered Chicago voters approved of Johnson. And a new Harris poll shows just 9% of city residents rated Johnson’s performance as above average while 50% rated …

Yen Soars After Japan Intervenes To Prop It Up For Second Time In 3 Days Two days after the yen soared after crashing to a 34 year low of 160 against the US, when the Japanese Ministry of Finance reportedly spent around 5 trillion yen, or just over $30 billion, to push the imploding Japanese currency to levels not seen in … about 48 hours, moments ago with much of the impact from the first intervention having fizzled, the Japanese Ministry of Finance appeared to step in again when moments after the US cash market close, USDJPY cratered in seconds in the second Japanese intervention in as many days. Of course, one can’t help but be amused by the sheer amateur hour at the BOJ where the second consecutive intervention, one which will cost the MOF another $30 billion or so, has managed to push …

The Steady Slide Towards Tyranny: How Freedom Dies From A To Z Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute, “As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.” – Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross The American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism. The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State. This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation. Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s …

Exxon To Win FTC Approval For $60 Billion Pioneer Deal, Creating Energy Supergiant Having adversely intervened in virtually every other M&A deal in the past 3 years, the Biden FTC will reportedly allow Exxon’s $60 billion purchase of Pioneer to go through after the companies agreed to minor concessions, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter. The announcement of the deal will likely come any moment, and the resulting deal will make Exxon – a company which Biden once said makes money money than god – far and away the biggest oil and natural gas producer in the Permian Basin, North America’s largest US oil field, and also the biggest energy company in the US. Pioneer shares that had been down more than 2% on the day reversed those losses and were trading up as much as 0.9% on the news. Hess Corp, the target of a takeover bid …

Taper ‘Tantrum-ette’ – Stocks Pump’n’Dump As Fed ‘Eases’ Balance-Sheet Pressure Powell to traders today… h/t @ForexLive The bigger than expected QT taper announcement juiced markets (stocks and bond prices up, dollar down) into Powell’s press conference, then got spooked lower as he admitted “inflation has shown a lack of further progress… and gaining confidence to cut will take longer than thought.” But that dip didn’t last long and yields puked, stocks soared, gold rallied and the dollar puked… Source: Bloomberg The market shrugged off Powell’s comments about “whether rates are at their peak will depend on data” which opened up the path of possible rate-hikes, but he dd add that “he doubts next move will be a hike.” CNBC’s Steve Liesman asked the big question that everyone should be …

Starbucks On Brink Of Worst Crash Since Dot Com After “Stunning” Earnings Miss  Starbucks shares plummeted by 16% during the early cash session, approaching the -16.2% level last seen during the Covid crash. If intraday losses surpass 16.2% and remain above this level at closing, it would mark the company’s worst single-day loss since the Dot Com crash in early 2000. “Starbucks reported what’s perhaps the worst set of results of any large company so far” this quarter, analyst Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge wrote in a note. William Blair downgraded the coffee chain, citing last quarter’s “stunning across-the-board miss on all key metrics.” Starbucks reported a 4% drop in same-store sales in the second quarter compared with the same period last year, while analysts tracked by Bloomberg were expecting growth. In China, same-store sales plunged 11%. The company’s top geographic segments are showing a pullback in consumer spending.  On Tuesday evening, …

Left-wing dark money networks are funding the outbreak of anti-Israel protests spreading at college campuses across the country.

Last week, Fox News reported the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), “a national organization affiliated with around 200 independent chapters” including Columbia University, raked in “a six-figure donation from a nonprofit bankrolled by the George Soros network.”

According to Influence Watch, the group orchestrates student activism on university campuses, accuses Israel of committing genocide, and compares Palestinians to black Americans under the Jim Crow era.

“In addition to Columbia, NSJP has been protesting and setting up encampments at other universities across the country, including UCLA and USC in California and at the University of Texas in Austin, where over 50 people were arrested this week,” Fox News reported.

The University of Texas said in a statement Tuesday that 45 of the 79 people arrested on the school’s Austin campus Monday “had no affiliation with UT Austin.”

“These numbers validate our concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the University, including groups with ties to escalating protests at other universities around the country,” the university said.

The New York Post reported Tuesday that police have arrested more than 1,000 demonstrators across more than 25 U.S. campuses. At Columbia University in Manhattan, which became the epicenter of anti-Israeli encampments when school leadership testified about antisemitism to Congress, police arrested nearly 300 protestors Tuesday night.

According to Fox News, “Another group active at Columbia, Jewish Voice for Peace, has brought in at least $650,000 from Soros-linked groups since 2016. JVP has also taken in hundreds of thousands from the billionaire-fueled Rockefeller Fund, which is boosted by millions of dollars from a dark money funding network.”

“Another Soros-backed group, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, has paid what it calls ‘fellows’ to organize and attend anti-Israel protests across the country,” Fox also said, citing New York Post reporting.

On Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the People’s Forum, another non-profit in New York that “received more than $12 million from Goldman Sachs’ charitable arm[,] encouraged anti-Israel activists to re-create the violent protests of ‘the summer of 2020.’”

The sustained demonstrations breaking out across American campuses have led some schools to cancel in-person classes and have jeopardized graduation ceremonies. Columbia University has shifted to a hybrid model for the remainder of the semester and announced final exams will be held remotely.

At the University of Southern California (USC), officials announced the school’s primary graduation ceremony will be canceled. The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) also canceled classes Wednesday after fighting erupted on campus.

FOMC Leaves Rates Unch, Says (Bigger Than Expected) QT Taper To Start In June Tl;dr: The Fed just told the market that ‘yields are too damn high’. *  *  * Since the last FOMC meeting, on March 20th, gold has been the biggest outperformer (interesting along with dollar strength), while stocks, bonds, and crude (and crypto) have all been sold (with bonds and oil equally ugly)… Source: Bloomberg And since March 20th, US macro data has serially disappointed… Source: Bloomberg More problematically, since the last FOMC meeting, inflation data has dramatically surprised to the upside and growth data to the downside – screaming stagflation in the face of the Fed… Source: Bloomberg Rate-cut …

Lu-Lu-Leveraged: Lululemon Founder Pledges Shares For Margin Loan Lululemon’s founder is taking on some lu-lu-leverage – and it’s coming at a time when Lululemon’s stock is more than 20% off its recent highs.  Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, has reportedly used a significant portion of his stake in the company to secure financing from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to a new report from Yahoo/Bloomberg.  According to a recent regulatory filing, an investment firm representing the Canadian billionaire pledged 1.8 million Lululemon shares, nearly 20% of his total holdings, as collateral for a $200 million margin loan from the US bank. Wilson’s stake, valued at approximately $660 million based on Tuesday’s closing price, comes at a challenging time for Lululemon, with its stock declining by 25% since late March due to disappointing US sales and sales projections. While representatives for Lululemon and Wilson declined to comment, this transaction sheds …

Robert Mueller’s Right Hand Man Warns SCOTUS: You’re “One Vote Away From… The End Of Democracy” Authored by Jonathan Turley, When Robert Mueller appointed Andrew Weissmann as one of his top advisers, many of us warned that it was a poor choice. Weissmann seemed intent to prove those objections correct in increasingly unhinged and partisan statements. This week, he ratcheted up the rhetoric even further in claiming that the nation is “one vote away” from the end of democracy if the Supreme Court does not embrace the sweeping claims of Special Counsel Jack Smith. At the time of his appointment, many Republicans objected to Weissmann’s status as a democratic donor, including his reported attendance of the election night party for Hillary Clinton in 2016. My objection was not to his political affiliations but to his professional history, which included extreme interpretations that were ultimately …

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are scheduled to have their first presidential debate after election officials have started mailing absentee ballots to voters in some states and after early voting has opened in Pennsylvania.

Biden recently committed while on Sirius XM’s “The Howard Stern Show” that he would be “happy to debate” the former president, amid skepticism the gaffe- and confusion-prone incumbent would not go head-to-head with Trump. Trump responded via Truth Social that he was ready to debate “ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, ANYPLACE.”

Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles had previously called on the commission to move up the debates “to ensure more Americans have a full chance to see the candidates before they start voting.” The campaign also argued for “adding more debates in addition to those on the currently proposed schedule.”

But the Commission on Presidential Debates told Fox News on Tuesday it would continue with its original schedule that was released last November.

“The CPD’s criteria […] will be applied in early September; afterward, the Commission will extend debate invitations to qualifying candidates,” the commission told Fox News.

The first debate is scheduled for Sept. 16 at Texas State University, followed by an Oct. 1 debate in Petersburg, Virginia with a third debate scheduled for Oct. 9 in Salt Lake City.

But states like Delaware and North Carolina send absentee/mail ballots out 60 days before the election, which means those ballots will go out before the first scheduled debate, which falls 50 days before the election. Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin send mail-in ballots to voters “more than 45 days before the election,” and 11 additional states send ballots out 45 days before the election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The second debate, on Oct. 1, will take place 35 days before the election — at least 10 days after about two-fifths of states have started mailing voters their absentee ballots.

Additionally, early in-person voting starts as early as 50 days before the election — the same day of the debate — in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, for example. The presidential debate is scheduled to start at 9:00 p.m.

LaCivita and Wiles rebuked the commission’s refusal to schedule the first debate prior to ballots being sent out to voters.

“The Presidential Debate Commission’s schedule does not begin until after millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots. This is unacceptable, and by refusing to move up the debates, they are doing a grave disservice to the American public who deserve to hear from both candidates before voting begins,” LaCivita and Wiles said in a statement. “President Trump has stated he will debate Joe Biden anytime, anywhere, anyplace, and Joe Biden himself just agreed to debate.”

“We are committed to making this happen with or without the Presidential Debate Commission,” the statement continued. “We extend an invitation to every television network in America that wishes to host a debate, and we once again call on Joe Biden’s team to work with us to set one up as soon as possible. The American people deserve it.”

During the 2020 election cycle, the first presidential debate was held Sept. 29, only 35 days before Election Day.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Israel Won’t End War On Hamas As Part Of Hostage Deal, Bibi Tells Blinken It seems like once again that the Biden White House has almost zero sway, and that Israel is going to do whatever it is going to do, despite continued Washington pressure to halt and avoid the planned Rafah ground assault, with over a million refugees in harm’s way. A deal is still reportedly on the table, with with no breakthrough being reported amid negotiations mediated by Qatar and Egypt. The deal would reportedly see less than 40 Israeli hostages freed but Hamas wants a permanent, lasting truce that would involve an IDF troop withdrawal from Gaza while Tel Aviv only envisions a temporary pause in fighting. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has blamed Hamas for lack of a breakthrough in achieving a deal, saying alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem on Wednesday, “No delays, …

If Treasury Bonds Hit 5%, You’re Gonna See Some Serious Sh*t Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance Almost as if all of us Austrian Economists (read: any carbon based life form using common sense when it comes to finance) live in an echo chamber together, a third expert I respect came out over the last few days and has warned that 5% on the 10 year treasury would be the breaking point for markets and the economy. If my calculations are correct, when this thing hits 5%…you’re going to see some serious sh*t. Peter Schiff now argues that the Federal Reserve and US Treasury are being forced to confront the reality that inflation is persistent, which has led to an increase in yields, recently reaching 4.7% on the 10 year, the highest since November. The thought process, for financial neophytes, is that bond traders will continue to sell bonds, driving …

Feds Scrutinizing Block’s Square And Cash App, Eyeing If Transactions Funded Terror And Skirted Sanctions Federal prosecutors are investigating compliance issues at Block, the fintech firm co-founded by Jack Dorsey, according to a new report from NBC, citing “two people with direct knowledge”.  Questions about the company started swirling back in March 2023 when short seller Hindenburg Research released a report called “Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion”.  In it, they concluded that “the ‘magic’ behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.” Now, a former employee has shared documents revealing insufficient customer information collection, transactions involving sanctioned countries, and cryptocurrency dealings with terrorist groups, the latest report from …

Fed Policies Turn The Wealth Gap Into A Chasm Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, In an op-ed for the Washington Post on November 5, 2010, Ben Bernanke did a victory lap, praising the Fed’s efforts in stemming the financial crisis. In the article, he discusses how QE and other Fed policies eased financial conditions, bolstering investor confidence. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.  If Bernanke wants credit for his Fed policies that boosted stock prices, he should also take responsibility for the costs. Those same monetary policies, which have been repeated many times since 2008, have played an important role in exacerbating the wealth gap in America. Accordingly, we should question his use of the term “virtuous circle” to describe how …

AMD’s Muted AI Sales Forecast Fails To Unleash Bulls  Advanced Micro Devices, the second-largest maker of computer processors, disappointed investors with its sales outlook for processors used in data centers. The company also reported weak demand for chips used in gaming hardware, which could serve as a warning for Nvidia bulls as they await the company’s earnings report in three weeks. On Tuesday, AMD reported first quarter earnings that were in line with Wall Street’s expectations. However, this wasn’t enough to overly excite bulls as shares traded down 6.7% in the early cash session.  First-quarter earnings, excluding certain items, were 62 cents per share on revenue of $5.47 billion. This report exceeded the estimated profit of 61 cents per share and projected revenue of $5.45 billion. AMD’s computer chip division had around $1.4 billion in revenue, compared with a $1.29 billion estimate. Datacenter chip sales were $2.3 billion, which is in line with Wall …

Job Openings Tumble, Quits Plunge, Hires Unexpectedly Crater To January 2018 Levels After several months of relatively boring JOLTS prints, this morning Janet Yellen’s favorite labor market indicator once again got exciting, and not in a good way. Starting at the top, according to the March JOLTS reported, job openings unexpectedly tumbled by 325K – the biggest drop since October 2023 – from an upward revised 8.813 million in February to just 8.488 million, far below the 8.690 million expected – and the lowest number since February 2021 when it last printed below 8 million. The 192K miss to estimates of 8.690 million, was the biggest since last October. According to the DOL, in March job openings decreased in construction (-182,000) and in finance and insurance (-158,000), but …

WTI Extends Losses After Bigger Than Expected Crude Build Oil prices extended losses overnight (3rd day lower in a row) following API’s report showing an unexpected crude build. Rising stocks would add to bearish headwinds for prices driven by hopes that peace (or some such variant of it) may break out in the Middle East. “The potential for a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas has eased concerns of an escalation of the conflict and any possible disruptions to supply,” ANZ Banking Group Ltd. analysts Brian Martin and Daniel Hynes said in a note. “Continued signs of inflation also raised concerns about demand for crude oil” ahead of the US driving season, when gasoline consumption rises. Additionally, OPEC’s crude production stayed steady last month, leaving the group’s latest cutbacks incomplete. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pumped 26.81 million barrels a day in April, about 50,000 a day less than the previous month, …

Whoopi Goldberg “Enraged” By Donald Trump Saying There Is An “Anti-White Feeling” In America Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via modernity.news, The View host Whoopi Goldberg said she was “enraged” over Donald Trump asserting that there is “an anti-white feeling in America.” Goldberg made the remarks as she angrily glared at the camera. “This is my favorite, and I’m gonna tell you before I say it that it enraged me,” she said before going on to quote Trump, who said, “There is a definite anti-white feeling in the country right now.” ‘The View’ Whoopi Goldberg has a MELTDOWN and says she is “enraged” by Donald Trump saying that “There is a definite anti-White feeling in the country” “Yeah, Sir. Nobody in your family was hung. Nobody in your family was chased because of the color of their skin. How dare you?… pic.twitter.com/jZoeWW5QUD — Unlimited …

More Stagflation Signals As Manufacturing Surveys Show Soaring Prices, Orders Tumble While ‘hard’ data has been improving recently (albeit then downwardly revised a month later), it is the ‘soft’ survey data that has collapsed amid Bidenomics. Source: Bloomberg And this morning continued that trend as S&P Global’s US Manufacturing PMI (survey) fell from 51.9 in March to 50.0 as the final print for April (49.9 flash). ISM’s Manufacturing survey also missed, dropping from 50.3 to 49.2 (contraction). Source: Bloomberg Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: “Business conditions stagnated in April, failing to improve for the first time in four months and pointing to a weak start to the second quarter for manufacturers. Order inflows into factories fell for the first time since December, …

MTG To Force Mike Johnson Ouster Vote Over Ukraine Money, But Top Dems Vow To Save Him Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Wednesday announced that she’ll force a vote next week over whether to oust Speaker Mike Johnson (R?-LA), however Top Democrats have vowed to save him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) makes an announcement about her motion to vacate resolution against Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, outside the Capitol. (Photo: Greg Nash via The Hill) Speaking of Johnson’s decision to lean on Democrats in order to send billions to Israel and Ukraine, Greene said: “I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may. And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate.” Marge Greene with Thomas Massie announces she will call for a vote …

CVS Shares Dump On Earnings Miss, Outlook Slashed On Rising Medical Costs CVS Health shares plunged in the premarket trading session in New York after first-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings missed Wall Street’s average expectations. The drugstore chain also slashed its full-year profit outlook, citing rising medical costs in its Medicare insurance unit.  Here’s what CVS reported for the first quarter compared with average Wall Street analysts’ expectations tracked by Bloomberg: Adjusted EPS $1.31 vs. $2.20 y/y, estimate $1.69 Comparable sales +5.3% vs. +11.6% y/y, estimate +3.95% Net revenue $88.44 billion, +3.7% y/y, estimate $89.33 billion Healthcare Benefits revenue $32.24 billion, +25% y/y, estimate $30.49 billion Health services revenue $40.29 billion, -9.7% y/y, estimate $40.64 billion Pharmacy network revenues $20.46 billion, -26% y/y, estimate $23.86 billion Mail & specialty revenue $17.26 billion, +6.9% y/y, estimate $14.6 billion  Total pharmacy claims …

Ahead Of The Fed – Will Powell’s ‘Inner Dovishness’ Shine Through? Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities, Ahead of the Fed There is very little excitement about this meeting, as the range of possible outcomes seems relatively narrow. We all know there will be no cut this meeting. There should be an outline of how the Fed will “taper” quantitative tightening. It should be a mild positive for stocks and bonds, , but unless it is surprisingly aggressive it has been largely priced in. We could see some tweaks to the language. They could highlight any signs of economic weakness (GDP was surprisingly low, after all). That would be positive for stocks and bonds. Far more likely are concessions to inflation being stubborn. So much is priced in, on that front, it shouldn’t be market moving. The real show will be the press conference. …

ADP Employment Report Strong In April, But Tech Sector Lost Jobs Thanks to an upward revision in March (from +184k to +208k), April’s ADP print was lower at +192k (beating expectations of +183k)… Under the hood, practically everything was solid, with only the Information sector losing jobs… “Hiring was broad-based in April. Only the information sector – telecommunications, media, and information technology – showed weakness, posting job losses and the smallest pace of pay gains since August 2021,” said Nela Richardson Chief Economist, ADP. Wage growth slowed for both Job-Changers and Job-Stayers (but the former remains elevated)… Finally, as a reminder, the ADP headline data has under-estmated the BLS magical print …

USAF F-16 Fighter Jet Crashes In New Mexico  A United States Air Force F-16 fighter jet crashed near Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico on Tuesday afternoon. A U.S. Air Force F-16 from the 49th Wing crashed west of #HollomanAFB near White Sands National Park this morning. The sole pilot on board ejected and was treated and released from a medical facility with minor injuries. https://t.co/B0o0i8j86B — 49th Wing (@HollomanAFB) April 30, 2024 Air Force Col. and 49th Wing Commander Justin Spears told Fox News the pilot safely ejected from the aircraft and was transported to the hospital in ‘good condition.’  Spears said the F-16 crashed about five miles west of the base near White Sands National Park.  🚨#BREAKING: Emergency and military rescue recovery crews are responding to an F-16 fighter jet has crashed outside Holloman Air Force Base ⁰⁰📌#OteroCounty | #NewMexico⁰ Emergency and military Air Force rescue recovery …

Sometimes an old-fashioned, Nazi-killing romp is just what the movies need. And that’s exactly what “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” brings to the cinema. The film, very loosely based on the real-life exploits of World War II British special operators, eschews politics in favor of humor, action, and plenty of Nazi-centric violence.

It tells the story of Operation Postmaster, a scheme to undermine the Nazi U-boat menace by interdicting some of the critical supplies that enabled them to prowl the Atlantic for months at a time, sinking the merchant vessels that kept Britain in the war. To do so, the motley crew that was the early British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was tasked to disrupt German supply lines by going after a key Italian tanker in the neutral Spanish port of Fernando Po, an island off the west coast of Africa.

The plot takes many action-oriented liberties with the historical facts — the death toll of Operation Postmaster was zero, compared to the scores of Nazi killings in the movie, for instance — but the changes keep the film moving forward at a highly enjoyable pace.

The film stars Henry Cavill as the semi-disgraced Major Gus March-Phillipps, potentially one of the real-life inspirations behind the character of James Bond, with his crew of talented misfits filled out by Captain Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), the Danish commando Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), March-Phillipps’ Irish protégé Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), and the demolitions expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding).

These men are chosen to undertake the dangerous, unofficial mission — unsanctioned by the British government due to its violation of Spanish neutrality — because of their reckless past conduct, ranging from willful disobedience of orders to criminal arson and unsanctioned field executions. That makes them expendable, but also quite proficient in irregular warfare. In essence, they are something of a World War II Suicide Squad.

In a throwback to the ’90s and aughts movie landscape, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a film that never takes itself too seriously, despite being a war picture. All too often these days, historical war movies are heavy-handed, modern-day message-laden, and outright antiwar in tenor and plot. Think Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” and essentially anything about America’s modern conflicts. Ritchie’s take on the genre is refreshing: It eschews moral complexity for a strong moral compass, clearly takes a side (the right one, I might add), and is quite humorous and lighthearted, despite the graphic violence.

The film is staunchly pro-British and anti-Nazi, painting the protagonist antiheroes as genuinely justified in their bloodlust for the foe. The main German villain, Heinrich Luhr (played very well by Til Schweiger), is a severe antisemite who gets his rocks off torturing, sexually abusing, and killing local women. In short, he isn’t humanized in the fashion of Quentin Tarantino’s Colonel Hans Landa from “Inglourious Basterds,” in many ways a more highbrow version of this movie.

That may make the film less compelling to discerning cinephiles, but it makes it a lot more fun for the average viewer. The morality of killing Nazis in war is never questioned, nor are our protagonists forced to wallow in post-slaughter emotion. Instead, they crack wise, compete for high scores, and essentially act like tigers playing with their food. The humor is darkly funny, including a scene where Lassen goes after a roomful of Nazis with an axe and an ear-to-ear grin.

In another throwback to an earlier era of film, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is diverse without being woke. That may seem like a bit of a paradox, but it makes perfect sense in the context of the plot. Many characters who aid our Fearsome Fivesome are black, including a British special agent and local entrepreneur, Heron (Babs Olusanmokun), and a small army of African toughs led by the Eton-educated cricketer, status-seeker, and local noble Kambili Kalu (Danny Sapani).

In other movies, this casting would be used to bash the viewer over the head with modern race dialogue or take him out of the historical frame. In “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” however, race is barely mentioned at all, and the casting makes sense given the primary location of the action in West Africa. Similarly, the female protagonist, Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), is set up as a weapons ace, a slick talker, and an integral part of the mission. She is a strong female character without being a walking feminist talking point, but she isn’t a mere love interest either. She is treated as an indispensable member of the team and pulls her weight fully.

Another powerful aspect of her character particularly resonates in 2024: her Jewishness. In the film, Stewart’s particular beef with the Nazis is the fact that her German-Jewish family was one of the first taken to the concentration camps, but she isn’t portrayed as a powerless victim or a damsel in distress. Nor is she shown as an oppressor, as Jews are often portrayed in leftist cultural circles.

Instead, she is a powerful woman who can fend for herself, has a drive to defeat the odds, and never gives up, all of which are proven throughout the film. After the national trauma of Oct. 7 and the subsequent leftist attacks on Israel as a genocidal state for the crime of simply defending itself, this portrayal of a self-reliant and righteous Jewish woman is a much-needed riposte to the prevailing Hollywood culture. Plus, she is very adept at killing Nazis.

The film’s more minor characters, including the future James Bond creator Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) — in reality, a prime player in the early SOE — and the spymaster “M” (Cary Elwes), are well-acted and are able to keep the roaring pace of the movie going even in expository or connective scenes.

As with most Guy Ritchie flicks, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is incredibly stylish and is full of visual panache. The tropical island of Fernando Po is visualized beautifully, action scenes are well-directed and choreographed, and the costuming is inventive and fun. Ritchie’s trademark snappy dialogue and witty banter permeate the script and bring both levity and a heist-movie feel to this war picture, differentiating it from much of the overly self-serious fare in the genre.

One of the only negatives in this otherwise enjoyable film is Rory Kinnear’s portrayal of Winston Churchill, who is an active character throughout. The writing for the great statesman is fine, but Kinnear looks nothing like him and puts on a terrible impression more fit for parody. It’s a shame, as Kinnear is a good actor and Churchill is, well, Churchill.

Still, that lone item of detraction does nothing to diminish the fact that “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a highly enjoyable movie. Its lack of politicization beyond the positive embrace of the obvious good-versus-evil dichotomy of World War II allows the story to flourish and keeps the viewer in the well-paced and tightly written narrative arc.

When diversity enters the film, it is either perfectly appropriate for the historical setting or used to bolster the characters in compelling ways. The portrayal of Jewish people as a powerful force for good hits home, especially now.

Ritchie’s directing brings style, violence, and humor to the film, adapting a fascinating but somewhat banal historical footnote into a thrilling, action-packed romp with interesting characters and a properly staked plot. “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” feels like nothing else in theaters. In that, it is truly a return to an earlier, better era of movies.

Mike Coté is a writer and podcaster focusing on history, Great Power rivalry, and geopolitics. He has also written for National Review and The National Interest, blogs at rationalpolicy.com, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.

The scenes unfolding at America’s most prestigious colleges are horrific. Antisemitic mobs preaching genocide — at times crossing the line into actual violence — have rendered campuses unsafe for Jews. Faculty members cheer them on, advocating for full-on pogroms.

Top administrators flounder. Columbia had protesters arrested and suspended, then stood dumbfounded as a larger, more belligerent wave took their place. Unable to guarantee the physical safety of its students, the school moved all classes online. Copycat mobs on campuses across America formed to emulate that “success.”

Most Americans find these scenes shocking, and many administrators claim to be stunned. Yet those of us who’ve been following the disastrous decline of American higher education have been warning for years about the inevitable. America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display.

Years ago, America’s most prestigious academics made a conscious choice to elevate indoctrination over education. Training activists became their highest goal. Radical ideologies that began in Ethnic and Gender Studies swallowed once-proud social science and humanities disciplines.

Their influence surged into administration, as new DEI offices redefined diversity, equity, and inclusion to mean their opposites, then spread their toxin throughout university operations. Wildly generous foreign money — with Qatar and China in the lead — anchored this noxious brew in place.

Unwitting parents sent America’s top students into four-year immersive environments saturated with division, hatred, mindless obedience, contempt for dissenting views, and zealotry. Their idiosyncratic notion of social justice, like so many of its morally degenerate predecessors, singled out the Jews for particular opprobrium. For those of us who’ve been watching this corruption unfold, nothing about the current moment seems surprising.

Over the past five years, however, the scope of the problem has grown to the point that both the broad American public and our political leaders understand the need for action. President Trump’s executive orders recognizing Jews as a protected class under civil rights law and banning DEI training from the federal workforce laid important groundwork.

Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis positioned Florida’s public colleges at the forefront of the long overdue drive to reform American higher education. He placed New College of Florida, where I am privileged to work, at its vanguard.

New College became the first college to eliminate its DEI office. We took steps to curb a gender studies program that had involved a stunning 40 percent of our faculty. We instituted an athletics program that emphasized teamwork, discipline, character, and community.

Immediate results included record-breaking enrollment, a significant increase in minority students, a male/female balance closer to parity, and a far healthier campus environment. Applications poured in from reform-minded faculty eager to join an institution recommitted to true education. In a year marked by campus riots across the country, New College has been a model of calm, civility, and collegiality.

Our Socratic Stage Dialogs have tackled Israel’s war with Hamas and the meaning of academic freedom in an open and respectful forum. Returning students who had eyed both the new reform leadership and the newly arrived athletes warily have discovered that far from finding the ideologues they’d been warned to expect, we’re delivering the genuine diversity of perspectives central to a liberal arts education.

Earlier this year, in response to Harvard alum and donor Bill Ackman’s open letter to the leadership of his alma mater, I declared our campus a haven for Harvard refugees. Shortly thereafter, DeSantis offered asylum at Florida’s colleges to students facing religious discrimination on their home campuses — including waivers to ease their transfer and arrival in the state.

Because Jewish students are currently bearing the brunt of such discrimination, we’re particularly proud of the steps we’ve taken to ensure that they feel safe, welcome, and appreciated at New College.

Next fall, for the first time since the pandemic, we’ll have a Hillel director. A local Chabad rabbi who joined our students for Chanukah programming is eager to offer more instruction. We’re working to accommodate incoming students who’ve requested Kosher food, just as we accommodated the needs of our Muslim students during Ramadan. By next fall, we’re expecting to see a few yarmulkes on campus, and we’re excited about additions to our Judaic Studies faculty.

Our outreach and commitment to these students who are clearly no longer welcome, appreciated, or even safe on far too many prestigious campuses is representative of the broad movement to reform higher education. We’re eager to attract proud, confident young members of America’s many communities. We encourage them to express their identities openly. We invite them to relish every campus interaction as an opportunity to learn and to teach. We challenge them to represent themselves in the most positive light so that anyone who gets to know them will emerge with an elevated impression of the communities to which they belong.

That’s the true meaning of our reform movement. We’re out to build the colorblind melting pot America strived to be during many of its finest years. The process begins with education. New College is training students in critical thinking, civil discourse, the free exchange of ideas, pride and confidence in self, and acceptance and appreciation of others. We call upon all decent Americans of good faith to join us: Send your students where they can become educated in safety rather than indoctrinated through hatred.

Richard Corcoran is the interim president of New College of Florida.

Prices are rising again — but for once, Joe Biden is not to blame. Unsurprisingly, however, another Democrat is.

Recent surveys have revealed the extent to which restaurant prices have skyrocketed in California since that state’s new minimum wage for chain restaurants took effect. Even though Biden had nothing to do with this latest bout of rising costs for residents, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-French Laundry) and Golden State lawmakers helped bring it about.

Soaring Prices

Research published in The Wall Street Journal provided visual evidence of how the required higher wage, which took effect on April 1, had raised prices of meals in California restaurants by as much as 10 percent over the past two months alone:

The Journal interviewed one Los Angeles resident who said “his usual $16 meal that he picks up weekly at the Chick-fil-A in Hollywood … now costs $20.” To most Americans, the idea of paying $16 for a fast-food meal already seems like highway robbery, let alone after tacking on a 25 percent increase. But now, as the Journal noted, the state that already had some of the highest fast-food prices in the country will have to suffer even more inflationary pain.

Governor’s Businesses Exempt

The minimum wage mandate began causing pain months before it went into effect. As I previously noted in The Federalist, establishments began laying off drivers just before Christmas in anticipation of higher wage costs, and businesses told customers they would have to raise prices to keep up. (You can’t say they didn’t warn you.)

While the mandate has obvious inflationary effects, it also has distortionary ones. Because it only applies to fast-food restaurants, businesses in other industries — even large-scale behemoths like Amazon — will not face a government requirement to raise wages. So it will make restaurants more lucrative for workers and less profitable for owners when compared to, say, grocery stores, most of which now sell prepared food similar to that prepared in fast-food establishments.

Moreover, as the Journal noted, “the California wage law doesn’t apply to restaurants with fewer than 60 national locations.” While it may sound nice to cut “mom-and-pop” operations a break from the new mandate, government has no place picking winners and losers in such a manner. More to the point: What do you think the odds are that a growing business with 59, or even 55, establishments will expand further to cross that 60-establishment threshold and expose itself to higher wage costs across all its California locations? Two words: fat chance.

There’s a further irony, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it involves Newsom. As a recent Journal editorial reported, a branch of the wine shop Newsom founded three decades ago recently advertised for a busboy opening — one that pays $16 an hour, not the $20 hourly wage required by the new law. Despite offering a $28 wagyu burger and a New York strip steak costing $67, this establishment can’t afford to pay its workers the “living wage” Newsom claims restaurant workers need.

Out-of-Touch Elites

Newsom told the Journal that he put his business “into a blind trust after he was elected Governor in 2018 and doesn’t run its restaurants on a daily basis.” (Of course he would say that.) But it’s yet another instance of politicians not even attempting to live by the standards they impose upon others. Perhaps if the chi-chi French Laundry started complaining to Newsom about the cost of labor, he would actually listen.

It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg for a family to afford an inexpensive night out at a local quick-service establishment — one of the few treats some families get to enjoy on a semi-regular basis. But that dream, like so many others, continues to grow out of reach for so many California households, which might explain why so many of them are moving elsewhere.

US Treasury’s Funding Mix Will Be Pivotal For Fed’s Next Moves Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist, How the Treasury intends to meet its borrowing requirements – the mix between shorter-term bills and longer-term coupons – will strongly influence liquidity and thus the performance of risk assets. Quantitative tightening is thus on borrowed time, and the Federal Reserve’s next move this year is still likely to be an interest rate cut, despite the re-emergence of inflation. On Wednesday the Treasury will announce how it intends to borrow $243 billion in Q2 and $847 billion in Q3, the amounts it announced on Monday that it wanted to raise. Q2’s figure was above the previous estimate, while Q3’s number was toward the upper end of expectations. The consensus is leaning toward the increase being made up for by issuing bills rather than coupons. The distinction is important. Treasury has increased its issuance …

Thankfully, There Are No Russia-EU Fertilizer Pipelines For West To Blow Up  The chief executive of Yara International, Europe’s largest fertilizer producer, warned the bloc is quickly “sleepwalking” into over-dependence on Russian fertilizers. This caution comes as Yara significantly reduced its production last year. Additionally, radicals in Brussels are advancing a green agenda that could undermine Europe’s stability long before it achieves its climate change objectives. “Fertilizer is the new gas,” CEO Svein Tore Holsether told the Financial Times in an interview, adding, “It is a paradox that the aim is to reduce Europe’s dependency on Russia, and then now we are sleepwalking into handing over critical food and fertilizing power to Russia.” To cut Europe’s reliance on cheap natural gas from Russia, it only took a highly secret CIA operation with assistance from an elite Norwegian intelligence unit to blow up the Russia-Germany Nord Stream pipeline, according to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh.  The good news: There …

It’s The End Of The Foreign Exchange Reserves As We Know It… Don’t Feel Fine About It Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog, “Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, Boom!” — R.E.M. The world we’ve known is over. The US Congress finally pushed the big red button. When the West froze around $300 billion of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves in March 2022 it was the first step in breaking down the system of foreign exchange reserves that makes up the global economy. Freezing assets of countries they are mad at isn’t new behavior from the locusts that run the G-7 countries. We still have to listen to conservatards whine about Obama giving Iran back “pallets of cash” for signing the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) in 2015, when all he did was unfreeze assets we’d frozen in 1979… … 1979, folks. Seriously. …

Democrat election officials in Arizona and Nevada are using taxpayer resources to register and turn out Democrat-favorable young voters ahead of the 2024 election.

On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, announced that his office is partnering with the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge to launch the “Arizona Campus Voting Challenge.” According to an office press release, this allegedly “nonpartisan initiative” is designed to increase voter engagement among students attending accredited universities throughout the state.

Young voters (18-29) broke for Democrat House candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin during the 2022 midterms, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Participation in the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge is free and allows participating colleges to become “eligible for awards based on voter turnout and registration rates on their campuses for the November 5, 2024 election.” Federal law makes it illegal to “make[] or offer[] to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote.”

Students who join will also be “provided guidance and tools to create an action plan for increasing student engagement on their campus,” according to Fontes’ office.

“By signing up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge, all accredited, degree-granting higher education institutions across the state can improve, measure, and celebrate efforts to institutionalize nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement and informed voter participation,” the presser reads. “Institutions that sign up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge will also be automatic participants in the nationwide ALL IN where awards are issued for highest voter turnout, most improved voter turnout, and highest rate of voter registration. As well as state-specific awards for meeting objectives mapped out in an institution’s nonpartisan democratic engagement action plan.”

Despite being marketed as “nonpartisan,” the initiative appears to be anything but. As I previously wrote in these pages, ALL IN is an enterprise of Civic Nation, a left-wing nonprofit headed by Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The initiative has previously produced Democrat talking points, such as the baseless claim that “strict voter ID requirements” are “barriers” to voting.

ALL IN’s leadership team is also comprised of Democrats. Founding advisory board member Alicia Kolar Prevost, for example, previously served in the Clinton administration and worked at the Democratic National Committee.

Not Democrats’ First Rodeo

Fontes is hardly the only left-wing election official using his office to turn out a demographic favorable to Democrats.

Earlier this year, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, also a Democrat, announced his office would be accepting applications to join his “Youth Advisory Task Force” to engage young voters ahead of the 2024 election. According to an office press release, the task force’s priorities include “identifying and proposing programs that support participatory democracy and solutions to any problem concerning the level of participatory democracy of young voters,” and “supporting projects … that encourage and advance participatory democracy of young voters.”

Task force members were appointed by Aguilar earlier this month and include “high school and college students, as well as non-students, between the ages of 17 and 24.” There are roughly 118,000 students enrolled in Nevada colleges, according to Univstats.

Michigan Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson launched a similar task force in October.

Democrats Use Taxpayer Dollars to Target Young Voters

At the same time Democrat officials like Fontes and Aguilar target young voters with taxpayer dollars in their respective states, President Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal government to take these efforts nationwide.

Signed in March 2021, Executive Order 14019 directed hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer funds to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Agencies were instructed to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the White House to provide “voter registration services on agency premises.” Of course, many of these “nonpartisan” groups have been identified as extremely left-wing, such as the ACLU and Demos.

As part of its compliance with the “Bidenbucks” order, the Department of Education issued a memo in February announcing that Federal Work-Study funds — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — may be used to employ students by government agencies for work such as “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.” The agency also released a “toolkit” that included guidelines for universities on how to increase voter registration and turnout on their campuses.

A Nationwide Strategy

Through the use of these taxpayer-funded GOTV operations and voter registration drives conducted by left-wing nonprofits such as the Voter Participation Center, Democrats are hoping young voters can make the difference for Biden in the battleground states needed to win the presidency this November.

In the 2020 election, for example, Biden won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, or 0.4 percent. The Grand Canyon State also experienced close elections in the 2022 midterms, in which Democrat Kris Mayes defeated Republican Abe Hamadeh in the attorney general’s race by just 280 votes.

Given these slim margins and college students’ history of (mostly) backing Democrats, it’s no surprise Biden and Co. have made them a major focus of 2024 GOTV operations. With many students living near or on university grounds, campuses make for the perfect Democrat Party registration hubs and offer the party an opportunity to expand their chances of electoral success.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

The Four Key Reasons Why The US Will Never Stop Targeting Russia’s LNG Sector Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com, LNG has become the most important swing energy source in an increasingly insecure world. Energy exports remain the foundation stone of Russia’s essentially petro-economy. Russia’s LNG industry is closely associated in Russia with President Vladimir Putin personally. Perhaps even more than its targeting of Russian oil exports, the U.S. has been laser-focused on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector as they key area it wants to effectively destroy over the long term. Last week’s suspension of Russia’s flagship Arctic LNG-2 project by lead operator Novatek is the latest of Washington’s trophies in this regard, but it is very unlikely to be the last. As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt said on 24 April: “[Novatek] has recently had to suspend production at its Arctic LNG-2 …

Pentagon Chief Engaged In Pressuring EU Countries To Give Up Their Patriot Systems America’s top defense official is engaged in efforts to pressure European countries to give up their own US-made anti-air defenses for Ukraine. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday he’s been actively encouraging countries to donate their Patriot missile systems to Ukraine. “There are countries that have Patriots, and so what we’re doing is continuing to engage those countries,” Austin testified before a House Armed Services Committee hearing. “I have talked to the leaders of several countries… myself here in the last two weeks, encouraging them to give up more capability or provide more capability,” he said. Via Reuters Last Friday Austin announced that as part of a massive new $6 billion aid package for Kiev, the US will provide additional Patriot missiles. This is part of the first approved roll-out in the wake of …

The left is mourning the activation of Florida’s heartbeat law this week, which will protect the lives of 50,000 unborn children annually. With a constitutional amendment up for a vote that would undo the lifesaving law, Democrats like state Sen. Lauren Book are in full fearmongering spin mode. As Book recently told CBS Miami, “Women and girls will die.”

Kamala Harris will be in Jacksonville on Wednesday when the law takes effect with the same message, following her boss’s visit to Tampa, where Joe Biden made the sign of the cross during a speech calling for unlimited abortion.

Between now and November, the media will try to obscure the facts on the heartbeat law and the exceptions that exist by calling it a “near total ban.” This is despite the fact that Florida’s law not only has a life of the mother exception that allows pregnant women to receive the emergency care they always have, but also rape, incest, fetal anomaly, and human trafficking exceptions.

The media will also fail to acknowledge that the heartbeat law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis one year ago follows both science and public opinion. The law is popular with 62 percent of Floridians supporting, including 58 percent of women and 76 percent of Hispanic voters. Around six weeks, a baby’s heart beats about 110 beats per minute. Once a heartbeat is detected, a baby has over a 90 percent chance of surviving to birth. 

On the other hand, the abortion ballot measure to amend the state Constitution would leave Florida with what DeSantis rightly calls a California-style abortion amendment. The broad language of this measure creates a right to abortion during all nine months of pregnancy. 

As confirmed by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times, girls who aren’t old enough to get their ears pierced on their own will be able to obtain an abortion without a parent’s consent. The health and safety requirements for abortion facilities would be eviscerated by this amendment. Abortions won’t need to be performed by doctors, and abortion facilities won’t need to be near hospitals or have hospital admitting privileges, putting women at serious risk. If anything, Florida’s abortion industry needs more regulation, not less. A Pensacola facility was shut down after sending multiple women to the hospital in 2022, and 25 percent of the industry was fined last year during annual inspections. 

The ballot measure serves the abortion industry’s profit motive by removing everything that impedes them from making money at the expense of babies’ lives and women’s safety: taking the consent of parents out of the picture, undoing all health regulations on their industry, and allowing abortions to occur whenever — first, second, and third trimesters. 

It’s no wonder that Mona Reis, owner of a large abortion facility, is behind this radical measure and that a number of abortionists and those who collect a paycheck from Planned Parenthood are funding it. Nearly one-third of the total money raised for this initiative comes straight from the abortion industry, which can afford to pour millions into ballot measures like Florida’s because they will see an ROI. When Planned Parenthood makes $1.9 billion in a year, it’s just a line item in their marketing budget. 

The activation of the heartbeat law marks an enormous victory in the human rights battle of our time, in Florida and the nation as a whole. We can celebrate the boys and girls who will live because of Florida’s heartbeat law and the ways they will bless their families, friends, and communities.

Florida is already the home to one little boy whose life was saved by a heartbeat law. In the neighboring state of Georgia, a woman named Neesha chose life because when she called to set up an appointment for an abortion, she was told she was passed the cutoff under the state’s law protecting unborn children. As a result, she gave birth to a sweet baby boy who was adopted by a family in Florida, and she says she’s thankful the law was in place and that she gave life to her son.

Florida is providing more help to mothers like Neesha who experience an unplanned pregnancy through the heartbeat bill’s allocation of $25 million for pregnancy centers. These centers offer free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, medical exams, counseling, parent classes, financial classes, and resources such as food, diapers, clothing, and financial assistance for housing and utilities. Florida’s pregnancy centers serve tens of thousands of women and will be able to expand their services to moms thanks to funding from the heartbeat law.

Democrats will do everything they can to prevent a repeat of Florida’s 2022 red wave, and they think abortion is their golden ticket. As one CNN headline put it, “Biden looks to use abortion rights to put Florida in play.” The reality is Republicans in Florida need to be as invested as their opponents on the issue of abortion, or they will lose. Candidates must defend babies with a heartbeat by telling stories like Neesha’s, emphasizing the pro-life safety net, and contrasting their pro-life position with the all-trimester abortion amendment. If Republicans do this right in Florida and elsewhere, they will be victorious up and down the ballot.

Kelsey Pritchard is a mother of three and the state public affairs director for SBA Pro-Life America.

Eurozone Exits Recession By Maartje Wijffelaars and Elwin de Groot of Rabobank Eurozone leaves recessionary territory The Eurozone economy grew by 0.3% q/q at the start of the year, exceeding expectations. Growth follows two quarters in which the economy mildly contracted. Among the largest member states, Spain again took the lead, growing by a stunning 0.7% q/q, while Germany, France and Italy all grew at about the same speed. Italy posted 0.3% q/q and France and Germany 0.2% q/q. Notably, growth in Germany follows a downwardly revised -0.5% q/q in 2023Q4. A breakdown into expenditure components is not yet available, but incoming data from the largest member states suggests that at least net foreign demand contributed positively. Meanwhile, overall investment grew in France and Spain, while Germany’s national statistics office highlighted construction investment as a bright spot. At the same time, consumption made a decent contribution in both France and …

At Least 30 Men Have Died Trying To Flee Ukraine Draft Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, some Ukrainian 30 men have died trying to sneak out of the country and avoid being forced into a war that looks increasingly futile — and increasingly deadly for those on the losing side.  That grim tally was shared by Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service leader Andriy Demchenko in a Monday interview with Ukrinform, a Ukrainian state news agency. The fact that this was disclosed in a state outlet suggests that it was meant to serve as a cautionary tale, to dissuade other Ukrainian men from attempting to leave the country.  “Overall, since the full-scale invasion began, about 30 people have died attempting to illegally cross the border,” Demchenko told Ukrinform. He also said that the government had identified 450 criminal groups that have helped facilitate escapes — for hefty fees. The …

Senate Passes Ban Of Russian Uranium Imports, Risking Market “Havoc” And Soaring Prices With shares of CCJ tumbling earlier today after the company reported soggy Q1 earnings, despite its recent initiating coverage report by an enthusiastic Goldman Sachs which sees the Uranium company at the forefront of the “Next AI trade” and slapped it with a $55 price target (as we reported previously), the uranium trade suddenly found itself in need of a miracle. It got that after hours, when the Senate voted late on Tuesday to approve legislation banning the import of enriched uranium from Russia – the same Russia which supplies 25% of the uranium used by the 90 US commercial nuclear reactors – and sending the measure to the White House which has said it supports efforts to block the Kremlin’s shipments of the reactor fuel and is expected to sign the deal, guaranteeing that uranium prices …

Meet The Lawyers Taking Big Government To The Supreme Court… And Winning Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), As the administrative state implements more regulations on Americans, a team of legal veterans has come together to fight the expansion of unelected government agency power. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock, Getty Images) Sometimes, they even win. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which consists of a team of 27 lawyers and support staff, including former judges, had four of the cases they litigated go before the Supreme Court in 2023. One case was decided in their favor, the remaining three are pending. Founded by Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger six years ago, the NCLA targets cases where they believe federal agencies have blatantly overstepped their authority or violated civil liberties.. “Normally, administrative power is understood as a separation of powers question, …

Meet The Lifelong Felon Who Killed Four Cops In North Carolina  A neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, was transformed into a warzone on Monday afternoon when a lifelong felon, illegally owning firearms, ambushed a US Marshals Fugitive Task Force and police officers as they were serving a warrant.  Three US Marshals and an officer from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department were killed in the shootout. Additionally, four police officers and one Marshal were injured. During a Monday evening press conference, police identified lifelong felon 39-year-old Terry Clark Hughes, Jr., who was also killed in the shootout.  Meet the deceased Charlotte shooting suspect: Terry Clark Hughes, Jr. pic.twitter.com/UjOjVZ33Si — Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) April 30, 2024 Has leftist corporate media identified the felon? Maybe not, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.  CNN has not. Fox News has.  According to police, US Marshals attempted to serve Hughes a warrant for firearm possession. He …

Health Canada Asked Pfizer For DNA Fragments Size In COVID Shots, Linked To ‘Probability’ Of Genomic ‘Integration’ Authored by Noé Chartier via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Canada’s drug regulator asked Pfizer to provide data on the size of DNA fragments in its COVID-19 vaccine, due to genomic integration concerns, shortly after learning the pharma giant withheld information on DNA sequences contained in its product. “Concerning the residual plasmid DNA in the drug substance, provide data/information characterizing […] the size distribution of the residual DNA fragments [and] residual intact circular plasmid,” says a request for clarification Health Canada issued to Pfizer on Aug. 4, 2023. A sign is displayed in front of Health Canada headquarters in Ottawa in a file photo. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press) The information was released as part of records obtained through an access-to-information request. It shows, in part, that a Health Canada …

Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy Caught Trafficking Fentanyl For Sinaloa Cartel A former Riverside County Sheriff’s deputy, who was apprehended last year as part of an investigation into the Sinaloa cartel, has been found to have been working for “El Chapo” himself.  25 year old Jorge Oceguera-Rocha resigned from his position with the Sheriff after being caught with over 100 pounds of fentanyl pills and a firearm during a traffic stop in Calimesa, in September of last year, KTLA reports. Authorities did not specify how they discovered his alleged involvement in drug trafficking, but he was identified as a “corrupt Riverside County Correctional Deputy” mentioned in a press release about Operation Hotline Bling. Operation Hotline Bling “culminated last week with 15 arrests and significant drug seizures, including methamphetamine and quantities of fentanyl that potentially could produce 10 million lethal doses,” according to the DEA: In …

First Cases Of HIV Transmitted Through Cosmetic Needles Identified: CDC Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Multiple people contracted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) through cosmetic needles after receiving facials at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An ampule with Botox, with the European name “Vistabel,” at a cosmetic treatment center in Berlin in this Jan. 29, 2007, file photo. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) Three women who received platelet-rich plasma (PRP) microneedling facials, also known as vampire facials, at the spa contracted HIV and an investigation pointed to the facials as the method of transmission, a new paper from CDC scientists states. The spa in question, the since-shuttered VIP Salon, was dubbed spa A in the paper. “This investigation is the first to associate HIV transmission with nonsterile cosmetic injection services. A common exposure …

Independent Candidate RFK Jr. Clinches Spot On California Presidential Ballot Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times, Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. secured his spot on the California presidential ballot after receiving a nomination from the American Independent Party (AIP). Mr. Kennedy said in a video released Tuesday that he and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, are officially qualified to appear on the ballot in California, the most populous state in the United States. Huge news! Kennedy-Shanahan on the California ballot! Watch the video below to hear how it happened ⬇️ #KennedyShanahan24 pic.twitter.com/wV2R4P9y8Q — Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 29, 2024 He said that “ironically” the AIP was initially the party of Alabama’s former Gov. George Wallace, known for his segregationist politics in the 1960s, but that the party had undergone “its own rebirth” before he came along. “It’s …

South Korea’s Central Bank Says May Buy Gold In The Mid To Long-Term Back in 2011, around the time gold hits its previous cycle high, South Korea surprised the fiat world when it revealed that it had spent more than a billion dollars in its first gold purchase in more than a decade, as uncertainty about global growth and sovereign debt push central banks around the world to diversify foreign reserves. It then proceeds to buy a lot more gold (relatively speaking) for the next year and a half before halting purchases indefinitely once again in 2013. It now holds 104.4 tonnes of gold in its foreign exchange reserves, or $4.8 billion, accounting for 1.1% of its total $419.3 billion in reserves at the end of March. That may change soon, however, because with gold hitting a new all time high in recent weeks, South …

Appeals Court Says State Health Policies Excluding Transgender Surgeries Violate Constitution Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against two state-level health policies that exclude so-called “gender-affirming” treatments, teeing up potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court… Judge Roger Gregory, an appointee of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote in his majority opinion that the policies’ exclusion of surgeries such as vaginoplasties for certain diagnoses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. “The coverage exclusions facially discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity, and are not substantially related to an important government interest,” he said. The 8–6 decision affirmed lower court decisions against West Virginia’s Medicaid policy and the North Carolina State Health Plan for Teachers and State Employees. Both aimed to preclude coverage of procedures …

DoJ Charges ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ With Tax Fraud Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com, The early crypto investor, often called ‘Bitcoin Jesus,’ faces extradition to the U.S. after being charged with evading nearly $50 million in taxes. Officials with the United States Department of Justice announced charges against early Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, known by many as ‘Bitcoin Jesus.’  In an April 30 notice, the Justice Department said authorities in Spain had arrested Ver based on criminal charges in the United States, including mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns. The U.S. government alleged Ver defrauded the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) out of roughly $48 million with his failure to report capital gains on his sale of Bitcoin and other assets. According to the indictment filed on Feb. 15 but unsealed …

Blackrock’s Larry Fink Jumps On “Next AI Trade”, Warning World Will Be “Short Power” At the start of April, we penned a lengthy report for premium subs discussing why artificial intelligence data centers, the electrification of the economy, and onshoring trends will result in a major upgrade of the nation’s power grid. We followed the note up on Monday with a report titled Everyone Is Piling Into The “Next AI Trade.”  Now , BlackRock Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Fink has jumped on the “Next AI Trade” theme at a World Economic Forum event on Monday.  “I do believe to properly um build out AI. We’re talking about trillions of dollars of investing. So data centers today could be as much as 200 megahertz – and they’re now talking about data centers being one gigawatt. That powers a city,” Fink told the audience.  He pointed out that he spoke with the head of one tech company, who said their data centers currently require about 5 gigawatts of power. By 2030, the person told Fink …

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt from left-wing organizations to have the court reconsider a ruling that found unelected bureaucrats were wrong to accept thousands of undated or incorrectly dated ballots during the 2020 election.

A three-judge panel for the 3rd Circuit ruled in a 2-1 decision in March that any mail-in ballots that arrive in envelopes missing a date or with an incorrect date are invalid, upholding a state law and overturning a lower court’s decision.

Several left-wing organizations appealed the ruling by petitioning the court to review the decision en banc, a petition which was denied on Tuesday. It’s a big blow for Democrat operative and Russia hoaxer Marc Elias, whose group supported the lawsuit against the state law and which called it a “crucial” and “critical” case ahead of 2024.

Pennsylvania adopted universal mail-in balloting in 2019, with the law requiring voters to “fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on [the] envelope” before returning their ballot. But thousands of ballots mailed in during the 2020 presidential election and 2022 midterms “did not comply with the date requirement” as they were either missing dates entirely or had incorrect dates, the 3rd Circuit panel ruled in March.

Years earlier, a panel of judges for the court had ruled the date requirement was in violation of the Materiality Provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which stipulates a voter cannot be denied their right to vote due to a paperwork issue that is “not material in determining whether such individual is qualified.” That decision was later vacated after the Supreme Court issued its 2022 decision in Ritter v. Migliori.

The issue then ended up in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court where the judges ruled the ballots were invalid under state law and found they should not be counted. The court, however, was split as to whether tossing the ballots entirely would violate the Materiality Provision, so the judges directed county election boards to “segregate and preserve” those ballots — though they were still not to be counted.

Left-wing groups filed a suit last year which resulted in Erie-based U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter ruling that ballots with missing or incorrect dates should be counted so long as they are received by Election Day. Republican organizations, including the Republican National Committee, appealed the decision. The panel for the 3rd Circuit overturned Baxter’s ruling, admitting that while their immediate reaction would be to find that a “failure to date a return envelope should not cause his ballot to be disqualified,” their role was simply to determine when the Materiality Provision can be applied.

“We hold that the Materiality Provision only applies when the State is determining who may vote,” Judge Thomas Ambra wrote. “In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place. The provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Unification Of CBDCs? Global Banks Are Telling Us The End Of The Dollar System Is Near Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us, World reserve status allows for amazing latitude in terms of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve understands that there is constant demand for dollars overseas as a means to more easily import and export goods. The dollar’s petro-status also makes it essential for trading oil globally. This means that the central bank of the US has been able to create fiat currency from thin air to a far higher degree than any other central bank on the planet while avoiding the immediate effects of hyperinflation. Much of that cash as well as dollar denominated debt (physical and digital) ends up in the coffers of foreign central banks, international banks and investment firms where it is held as a hedge or used to adjust the …

Patrick McHenry Slams SEC’s Gary Gensler For Misleading US Lawmakers Over Ether Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com, United States House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry has alleged Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler “knowingly misled Congress” over the regulator’s alleged attempts to classify Ether as a security. In an April 30 X post, Representative McHenry claimed that Gensler intentionally misled lawmakers in testimony before the Committee. The U.S. lawmaker referred to claims made in a recent court filing by software development firm Consensys, which filed a lawsuit against the SEC on April 25. Source: Representative Patrick McHenry Consensys’s initial complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas highlighted public inconsistencies in the SEC’s approach to digital assets as securities, specifically Ether. Unredacted sections of the filing …

Florida lawmakers showed their willingness to crack down on third-party organizations who break the law when registering voters — and in response, the groups have significantly slimmed down their operations in the Sunshine State, according to a report from WUSF.

Florida’s legislature passed SB 7050 in 2023. The law increased fines on third-party voter registration groups who deliver a registration application after the deadline, return incorrectly filled out registration forms, alter a voter’s registration form, or deliver applications to the wrong counties. The law also prohibited third-party groups from pre-filling registration forms and harvesting voters’ data from their registration forms. Additionally, it barred illegal aliens and other foreign citizens from collecting voter registration forms, though that portion of the law was struck down in March by an Obama-appointee.

Fines are capped at $250,000 per year.

Since the legislation went into effect, counties have seen a “dramatic reduction” in the number of registrations returned, according to WUSF. Left-leaning Leon County saw voter registration applications go from 10,000 in 2021 and 2022 to just six since last year, according to the report.

“The volumes are much lower,” Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told WUSF. He attributed the drop “mostly” to organizations concluding “it’s just not worth the risk because they can be held personally liable for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in fines.”

Mi Vecino Florida was one of a handful of groups that registered more than 36,000 voters in 2021, according to the local outlet. The group is now just focusing on “educating voters,” according to their state field director Verónica Herrera-Lucha.

Republican Secretary of State Cord Byrd said the law was necessary to hold accountable some third-party groups that are “frequent violators,” because “when they mess up it disenfranchises a voter.”

Byrd fined third-party voter registration organization Hard Knocks Strategies $34,400 in 2023 for what the state said were “repeated violations” of the law. The state reviewed 2,868 registration applications collected by the organization that “were submitted to election officials after the statutory deadline.”

“Of these registrations, at least 116 were collected before — but not delivered until after — book closing deadlines, subjecting Florida voters to potential disenfranchisement,” the Department of State found. “Hard Knocks Strategies, LLC also repeatedly turned in registrations to the incorrect county supervisors of elections, and in one instance, submitted 21 Florida voter registrations presumed to be from Texas residents.”

Several of Hard Knocks Strategies’ collection agents were also arrested in Charlotte and Lee Counties after they allegedly submitted “a large number of fraudulent” applications between 2021-2022, according to the State Department.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

WTI Extends Losses After API Reports Unexpected Crude Build WTI ended April on a down-note (closing lower on the month, as opposed to Brent which saw its fourth straight monthly gain) as hopes for cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas dampened fears of a wider conflict that could threaten crude supplies. The recent declines come as a “relief to both central bankers and consumers alike,” Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, told MarketWatch. There’s been a notable decrease in speculation about the possibility of U.S. benchmark WTI surpassing the $100-a-barrel threshold, at least for now, he said. This shift in sentiment can be attributed, in part, to “reduced concerns about disruptions to Iranian production, following Israel’s measured response to previous drone attacks.” Meanwhile, “attention should also be directed towards peace talks, as progress in this area could further contribute to a decrease in oil prices,” said Innes. But, …

Amazon Swings Wildly After Reporting Blowout AWS Results But Revenue Guidance Disappoints Heading into Amazon’s Q1 earnings, we said earlier that the investment thesis is driven by i) ecommerce share, ii) margin expansion and iii) the potential for AWS growth recovery through the year. We also noted that the key bogeys for this extremely popular – among hedge funds – position were the following: Q1 Total Sales: high end of guide $138-$143.5 bn Q2 Total Sales: $150 bn high end Q1 AWS Growth: 15%-16%+ Q1 EBIT: $13 bn Q2 EBIT: $14 bn high end So with that in mind here is what Amazon – whose stock furst tumbled then spiked after hours, reported moments ago: EPS 98c vs $1 q/q, and beating estimates of 83c Net sales $143.31 billion, +13% y/y, beating estimate of $142.59 billion Online stores net sales $54.7 billion, +7% y/y, in line with estimates of $54.77 …

“There Is No Crime”: Dershowitz Says Bragg’s Case Against Trump Will Fail Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said on April 28 that he believes that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump could fail because prosecutors have charged the former president with fake crimes. Alan Dershowitz and former President Donald Trump in file photos. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) “There is no crime,” Mr. Dershowitz said during an interview on Fox News on April 28, referring to the case in which Mr. Bragg’s office has charged the former president with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide so-called hush money payments that prosecutors allege amounted to a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Dershowitz argued that making nondisclosure payments is not a crime and that …

Gold Flowers Amid April ‘Stagflation’ Showers; Stocks, Bonds, & Crypto Crushed The final day of April was really ugly: ECI way hotter than expected (spooked markets), Case-Shiller home prices soared far more than expected (spooked markets more), Chicago PMI puked (while prices paid increased), Consumer Confidence crashed, and Dallas Fed Services slumped… all of which left stocks, bonds, gold, crude oil, and bitcoin all languishing into month-end while the dollar rallied. Stocks puked into the month-end close today ahead of AMZN earnings… April was a disaster from a macro perspective… Source: Bloomberg …with soft survey data collapsing while ‘hard’ data limped modestly higher… Source: Bloomberg …and worse still growth surprises slumped as inflation …

Former Binance CEO ‘CZ’ Sentenced To Only Four Months In Jail For Money Laundering  Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) was sentenced to four months in jail on Tuesday in a Seattle federal court, according to The Wall Street Journal. Late last year, CZ pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges and relinquished his position as the head of Binance. He was also fined $50 million, while the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading company was fined $4.3 billion.  🚨 BREAKING: CZ SENTENCED TO FOUR MONTHS IN PRISON. YES, ACTUALLY. 4. pic.twitter.com/InaK5fWilq — Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) April 30, 2024 “You had a responsibility to comply with United States regulations. Not some but all,” US District Judge Richard A. Jones said, noting, “You failed at that opportunity.”  The 47-year-old billionaire, who ranks number 38 on the Bloomberg Billionaire list, pleaded guilty in November to violating US anti-money laundering charges. Prosecutors alleged that Binance failed to report over 100,000 suspicious …

Fani Flees Fulton County Primary Debate, Leaves Opponent Facing Empty Podium Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is handling former President Donald Trump’s election interference case, skipped a debate against her Democrat primary challenger on Sunday. The debate was held by the Atlanta Press Club and was the first Democratic Party debate in the county. It was supposed to feature Ms. Willis and her Democrat challenger Christian Wise Smith, an attorney and author. However, Ms. Willis was absent from her podium when the debate began, leaving Mr. Smith alone on the stage. After providing a brief introduction of Mr. Smith, the moderator announced that Ms. Willis “declined to participate in the debate and is represented by an empty podium.” Fani Willis “declined to participate in the debate and is represented by an empty …

What To Look For When Amazon Reports After the solid results from Microsoft – the world’s largest company whose market cap is now flirting with $3 trillion – investors have been incrementally more positive on the Amazon’s AWS cloud setup into today’s earnings, with the investment thesis driven by ecommerce share, margin expansion and the potential for AWS growth recovery through the year. Of course, since everyone is well-aware of this thesis, UBS trader Kelsey Perselay notes that “the amount of debate/dialogue has really died down.” Not surprisingly, everyone and their kitchen sink, is long the stock: according to Goldman, client positioning is a 9 on the bank’s 1-10 scale, and “most investors feel relaxed/confident into this quarter.” Goldman thinks that people expect a beat and further acceleration on AWS (vs cons ~13% y/y and ~13% y/y last qtr), a slight beat on online sales (vs cons 7%) …

Cannabis Bears Squeezed On Report DEA Is Preparing To Reclassify Marijuana The Associated Press has learned the US Drug Enforcement Administration is moving to reclassify marijuana to a less dangerous drug category. Shares of cannabis-related companies erupted on the news.  Here’s more from AP news:  The DEA’s proposal, which still must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, would recognize the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. However, it would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use.  The agency’s move, confirmed to the AP on Tuesday by five people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive regulatory review, clears the last significant regulatory hurdle before the agency’s biggest policy change in more than 50 years can take effect.  Once OMB signs off, the DEA will take …

China Threatens To Retaliate Against US Over Taiwan Aid And TikTok Ban Authored by Eric Lundrum via American Greatness, On Monday, the Chinese government threatened to retaliate against the United States after a $95 billion foreign aid package was signed into law, which included aid for Taiwan and a provision to ban the Chinese social media app TikTok. As reported by Fox News, the bill signed into law by Biden on Wednesday included $2 billion to restock American weapons provided to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific, in a direct attempt to deter Chinese aggression in the region. Additionally, the law demands that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sell the popular app to another company within nine months, or else the app will be banned from use in the United States. “China firmly rejects the U.S. passing and signing into law the military aid package containing …

WeWork Snubs Co-Founder Neumann As It Targets Quick Turnaround From Bankruptcy After years of enriching himself to the tune of billions from his failed company WeWork, co-founder Adam Neumann is finally getting a small dose of karmic payback. It was reported yesterday by Bloomberg that WeWork and its main backers, including SoftBank, have reached a new agreement to pull the struggling workspace provider out of bankruptcy, rejecting a rival proposal from co-founder Adam Neumann to buy back the company. Under the deal, senior lenders will provide about $450 million in financing, gaining equity in the reorganized business. Additionally, SoftBank and other creditors may convert their debt into stock post-bankruptcy. This marks a significant step for WeWork, aiming to emerge from court protection with reduced debt and more efficient leases. And to not be at the behest of, or enriching, Adam Neumann, will really mark a shift in strategy for WeWork… A lawyer backing …

I did a lot of stupid things in college. Skipping my commencement ceremony on the National Mall is not one of them. As the class of 2024 prepares for another wave of ceremony cancellations this year, here’s some advice: skip them.

George Washington University (GW) is the only institution with the privilege of holding its university-wide graduation ceremony on the roughly 150 acres known as “America’s front yard.” Every student in D.C. is taught to revere it. At American University, where I spent my freshman year before I transferred, an introductory writing course focused almost exclusively on the National Mall’s importance to American heritage.

Once at GW, students could often be found honoring such heritage with frequent trips to the nation’s “grand avenue,” whether it be a sunrise run or under a midnight stupor. Fraternities and sororities take their pictures there. Students visit with their parents there, and tourists from everywhere focus their entire trips there.

The university proudly advertises exclusive access to the Mall “offering graduates this #OnlyAtGW opportunity of a lifetime each May.” Yet for all of the fanfare associated with graduating with a political science degree in the iconic heart of the nation’s capital, blowing off the commencement ceremony turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I graduated from GW in 2019, when NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie was the commencement speaker. I reacted to the announcement with a shrug. My problem with commencement was never the alum chosen to speak. Every year, Young America’s Foundation (YAF) releases a survey of university commencement speakers and they’re always near-unanimously leftist.

Out of 100 schools analyzed last year, YAF reported, “only a single conservative voice made its way to the podium.” Instead, the problem for me was the pageantry.

I started my final semester at GW with two options: sit in a $15 folding chair on the National Mall in the sweltering D.C. heat so I can listen to a bunch of self-righteous administrators speak about how important they are, or head out in my final few weeks of unemployment with all the tip money I could save by working overtime at a nearby bar. I chose the latter. The largest American festival for electric dance music, Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, was the same weekend, and I was not going to miss it.

If I ever write a memoir, (and everyone should in old age, even if no one reads it), I’ll include the pictures. But my cap and gown felt far more practical in the windy nighttime desert than the outfit would have in the swampy D.C. spring heat. The random people with whom I rented a house in Las Vegas helped me decorate my cap for the second day of the festival, which was the same day as commencement in D.C.

As anyone who has ever been to an electronic music festival knows, these events are filled with some of the kindest, most well-meaning people, even the ones not on drugs (um, just don’t bring up politics). Every random person who saw me in my cap and gown walking through the crowd that second day knew exactly what I was doing: graduating in style. People were congratulating me non-stop, and they did so with an authenticity that frankly, somewhat shocked me after four years in D.C.

It’s been five years since graduation now, and I still get goosebumps at the memory of my cap toss. I had vividly dreamt in my sleep during my final semester that I threw my cap off to “Yottabyte” by the Dutch DJ Martin Garrix. When I got to the set, my goal was simply just to throw my cap while on top of someone’s shoulders — forget about the song, which might not even be played.

The people I arrived at the festival with went to see another artist, so I was alone at the performance but made friends with strangers in the crowd, as one does at these things. About halfway through the show, I asked one of the guys, who was built like a college quarterback, if he’d hoist me on his shoulders for the next drop so I could toss my cap. His response was as if I didn’t even have to ask.

As fate would have it, “Yottabyte” began to play as soon as I topped his shoulders, and I flung my cap off, never expecting to see it again on the first bass drop. What I also wasn’t expecting was the crowd of 400 people around us who watched this all unfold and cheered when the cap flew. Someone handed it back a few minutes later after the hat made its way through the crowd. That college graduation was hands down one of the highlights of my life.

After the festival, I flew straight from Vegas to Costa Rica, where I slept in a bunk room shack and went surfing for a week to recover. I started working for The Federalist when I arrived back in D.C.

Everyone warned me about skipping commencement on the National Mall. Sometimes I wondered whether I would eventually regret doing so. But half a decade later, celebrating at a music festival instead of attending another pretentious D.C. ceremony remains one of my best moments.

So, here’s a tip for students such as those at the University of Southern California (USC) upset over missing out on commencement: don’t be. Go do something fun and make commencement your own.

Bullish Sentiment Index Reverses With Buybacks Resuming Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, Over the last two weeks, the bullish sentiment index has reversed from extreme greed to fear. The composite net bullish sentiment index, comprised of professional and retail investors, fell from 38.15 to 9.9 in two weeks. The previous drop between July and October last year was similar and marked the bottom of the correction. While the bullish sentiment index can indeed fall further, what is notable is the sharp reversal of market “exuberance” in such a short span. However, as discussed in “Just A Correction,” there was a significant gap between buyers and sellers. “However, at some point, for whatever reason, this dynamic will change. Buyers will become more scarce as they refuse to pay a higher price. When sellers realize the change, they will rush to sell to a diminishing pool of buyers. Eventually, sellers …

Three congressional Republicans want to know where the Centers for Disease Control stands on the “‘Wild West’ of assisted reproductive technology.”

Reps. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Matt Rosendale of Montana released a letter to CDC Director Mandy Cohen on Tuesday demanding answers about her agency’s knowledge and recommendations regarding the “destruction of precious life in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry.”

Citing the “government’s role in securing the natural right to life” noted in the Declaration of Independence, the Republicans worried that Big Fertility “has long operated under the radar of lawmakers in the United States.”

“While other Western countries prohibit clinics from practicing eugenics or carelessly destroying human life, the U.S. does not even require clinics to be transparent about their participation in these activities,” they wrote.

The CDC’s latest artificial reproductive technology (IVF) data suggests Americans undergo hundreds of thousands of IVF cycles each year. Since standard practice in American IVF requires harvesting and fertilizing multiple ova to increase chances of successful lab conception, hundreds of thousands of IVF cycles suggests millions of embryos are created and either destroyed or abandoned in freezers each year as well.

As the congressmen point out in their letter, fertility facilities are not required to share how many embryos they are responsible for manufacturing, freezing, or discarding each year. Nor is the domestic Big Fertility market under any obligation to disclose to anyone “statistics on their application of genetic screening, which more than 70% of fertility clinics utilize for sex-selection.”

“Advancing technology raises further concerns that clinics will use genetic screening to choose the ‘best’ embryos based on traits like eye or hair color, complexion, or potential height. In the U.S., this technology is already used to select or discard embryos based on eye color,” the representatives warned.

By May 29, the congressmen would like the CDC to provide specific answers about the number of embryos that are manufactured, cryogenically stored, and discarded each year and the average length of time embryos are frozen. They also want data on how many embryos undergo screening for physical traits and whether those results dictated the embryos’ fates.

Additionally, the Republicans asked the CDC to share its IVF recommendations including the number of embryos created, how non-implanted embryos are treated and destroyed, and genetic screening.

They concluded by questioning whether the CDC has “any moral or ethical concerns” about ART practices like the ones listed above. According to them, the rapidly expanding U.S. practice of legalized eugenics should not continue unchecked.

“Congress cannot allow clinics to continue concealing these activities, which carry significant moral and ethical implications, from the public,” the Republicans concluded.

This is not the first time members of Congress have raised eyebrows about the free pass U.S. lawmakers have given the fertility industry. Rosendale and Brecheen were part of a small coalition of House Republicans who publicly opposed the Department of Veterans Affairs’ plan to use taxpayer dollars to fund IVF for single and same-sex veterans. They attributed their “very strong objections” to the fertility industry’s longstanding immoral and unethical practices.

Even corporate media, which has eagerly sided against protecting life in its most vulnerable form, has begun to question whether Big Fertility could use less immunity and more oversight. “Most IVF errors go unreported in the lightly regulated fertility industry,” one Washington Post headline blared.

Another headline in Vox lamented that ART such as egg freezing, which is often pitched to young women as a way to preserve and prolong their fertility, is not the success it is made out to be by many in pop culture and media.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

This year’s class of graduating college students has some pretty bad luck. After missing out on their high school graduation four years ago due to unscientific Covid lockdowns, many of these same students are at risk of losing their college commencement because of the ongoing anti-Israel demonstrations that are plaguing campuses across the country.

In fact, it’s already happening at institutions such as the University of Southern California (USC), which announced plans late last week to cancel its main-stage commencement ceremony for graduating seniors. According to The New York Times, “The university said that it could not host the ceremony, which was scheduled for May 10, because of new safety measures that would have increased the amount of time needed on the day to process the 65,000 students and guests who usually attend.”

The school will, however, host a series of individual “school ceremonies,” where students “cross the stage, have their names announced, are photographed and receive their diplomas.”

Like many prominent American universities, USC has been a staging ground for left-wing anarchists demonstrating against Israel and its response to Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 terrorist attack, which left roughly 1,200 civilians dead. The formation of an unauthorized encampment on university grounds led to the arrests of 93 people last week, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Speaking about USC’s main-stage commencement cancellation, one purported student said in a recorded video that she is “in shock” the college would make such a decision, especially given how many of this year’s graduates were also denied a high school commencement due to Covid restrictions.

“We, as a whole senior class, have never had a real graduation,” she said. “We’ve all worked so hard to get here … and now they just canceled our freaking graduation.”

To be sure, college leaders having to grapple with antisemitic leftists and illegal encampments deserve no sympathy. These administrators have endorsed and pushed anti-Westernism and Marxist ideology in these universities for years. The pro-Hamas cultural revolutions now engulfing their college “safe spaces” are monsters of their own creation.

But not every student attending these universities endorses these ideologies or backs the demonstrations. By refusing to enforce the law and punish the unlawful conduct of these anarchists, universities are robbing graduates of the opportunity to have their hard work publicly acknowledged and celebrated.

Graduation — whether for high school or college — is a big moment for families. For students, it’s a recognition of the years of studying and research it took to get to that moment. It similarly acknowledges the role of parents in raising their children and providing them the skills necessary to acquire a degree.

Attending graduation may not be every student’s cup of tea. And that’s OK. But taking away students’ opportunity to participate in such a celebration because university leadership is unwilling to punish lawbreaking by unruly leftists is not.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Your Tax Dollars At Work: US To Buy Ukrainian-Made Weapons For Ukraine It’s not just US and Western defense contractors and arms makers that have been raking in the billions as a result of Washington’s mammoth defense aid handed over to Ukraine, but Ukrainian defense companies are also enjoying the largesse at US taxpayers’ expense. “A total of $1.6 billion of the recent US aid to Ukraine would go to the purchase of Ukraine-made weapons, said a senior Kyiv official,” Defense Post reports of the $61 billion in US aid just approved. Image via Reuters G7 countries have been planning broader assistance to Ukraine which would develop and prop up a Ukrainian domestic military-industrial complex for the long-term, in order to ensure the country’s independence from Russia well into the future. Ukraine parliamentarian and foreign policy committee member Arseniy Pushkarenko has said, “This is very important today, because …

New Biden Energy Rules Will Raise The Cost Of A New Home By $31,000 Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com, New HUD energy rules will raise the cost of home construction by imposing stricter building codes. Payback time is 90 years… Homes To Become Even More Unaffordable The Wall Street Journal comments on Biden’s New Plan for Unaffordable Housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is mandating costly new energy standards for new homes insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which will become de facto nationwide building codes. HUD last Thursday announced that it will require new homes financed or insured by its subsidy programs to follow the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code standard. Many governments have declined to adopt the 2021 standards because of their higher costs. The National Association of Home Builders says the energy rules can add as much as …

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou, it’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identarian twaddle concocted by modern man.

Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we have incentivized universities to create hordes of debt-ridden, credentialed nitwits.

I assure you no bank in the world would ever lend any young person tens of thousands of dollars — much less hundreds of thousands — to pursue studies in either indigenous, black, critical race, Islamic, gender, sexuality, abolition, or decolonization studies if those loans were not backed by the federal government. The state-guarantee policy has created a massive moral hazard that allows schools not only to ignore the real-world needs of their students but to charge astronomical tuition rates.

Many, if not most, students still pursue degrees in fields that have promise. They’ll get loans. But if Ivy League schools believe that those political science and journalism degrees are going to pay off in careers, then they should cosign on the loans instead of taxpayers. If Columbia wants an anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar on staff, it should be funded by school endowments (a $13 billion hedge fund that should taxed) or through charitable donations provided by the Soros Foundation to End Western Civilization, or whatnot.

It is true that universities are not meant to be wholly utilitarian institutions. We need well-rounded, intellectually engaged citizens. Does anyone believe that’s happening? There’s nothing wrong with studying art or culture or philosophy. There is nothing wrong with earning a liberal arts degree. The student-loan racket game, however, solidified silos of extremism and buffoonery, with decades of compounding radicalism and DEI racism smothering genuine intellectual diversity. Every discipline is infected.

Now Democrats want to go from backing this racket to decreeing that taxpayers should just pay off all these bad choices, creating even greater moral hazard. You can inject all the class-war emotions you like into this debate, but the rules of economics are clear. Bailouts disincentivize schools from acting responsibly and incentivize some students to keep chasing degrees that will do them very little good.

Speaking of credential nitwits, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who graduated cum laude from Boston University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in both international relations and economics, recently noted that one of the many things loan “forgiveness” would do is allow people to “go back to school.” The rate of first-time, full-time students at four-year institutions who graduate from the school they started at within six years stands at 64 percent. We need people out of school, finishing degrees that allow them to work and pay back their loans, not going back to school.

Of course, the United States is such a hellhole of capitalist imperialism that 13,838 students out of 36,649 at Columbia University are here on foreign visas. (I planned on arguing that this policy was unfair to high-achieving American students, until I realized that 13,838 Americans have been spared Columbia.) Schools love foreign students because they are wealthy and pay in cash. And that’s fine. Most of those kids are probably serious students in business and STEM programs.

Still, the U.S. government has zero constitutional duty to keep active visas for foreigners who agitate against the system, celebrate Hamas, or target American Jews (or anyone else) on campuses. We should be pulling visas for anyone suspended for ignoring university rules, breaking laws, invading buildings, or stopping other kids from attending class. Go to school in your excellent home country, instead.

Universities have always been hotbeds of radicalism. That’s fine. Those are the years to act like an imbecile. But extremism is longer on the margins. These days our once-respected institutions are increasingly producing little totalitarians, and clueless fellow travelers, who end up populating important real-world institutions. Society would be better served lighting up a giant cash bonfire than subsidizing this corrosive trend.

Walmart Targets Gen-Z With Cheap Private Label Food As Youngsters Struggle In Era Of Failed Bidenomics Walmart executives must be paying attention to Gen Z consumers bitching on TikTok and X about the failures of Bidenomics, as many of them have to work multiple jobs and still can’t afford to put food on the table, pay shelter costs, and buy gasoline at the pump. That’s why America’s largest retailer is launching a new line of cheap store-brand groceries for consumers, more importantly, targeting lost and hopeless youngsters.  Bettergoods is Walmart’s “largest private brand food launch in 20 years and the fastest food private brand Walmart has brought to market,” according to the retailer in a press release published Tuesday morning.  The new brand targets young consumers and will offer them 300 items, including frozen, dairy, snacks, beverages, pasta, soups, coffee, chocolate, and more. Prices of the goods range from under $2 to under $15, with most products available for …

China Hosts Hamas & Palestinian Authority For Rare Talks Via The Cradle Representatives of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Fatah party met recently in Beijing and held talks on reconciliation, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Tuesday. “Representatives of the Palestine National Liberation Movement and the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] recently came to Beijing,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said.  “The two sides fully expressed their political will to achieve reconciliation through dialogue and consultation, discussed many specific issues, and made positive progress,” he added. The spokesman did not clarify exactly what day the meeting took place.  Prior intra-Palestinian talks in Moscow, via Reuters China, Hamas, and Fatah confirmed beginning last Friday that intra-Palestinian talks would be held in the Chinese capital.  “They agreed to continue the course of talks to achieve the realization of Palestinian solidarity and unity at an early date,” Jian went on to say, …

“On The Verge Of Panic” – Dallas Fed Services Survey Suffers Longest Slump Since ‘Lehman’ It has been a terrible day for ‘soft’ survey data… Source: Bloomberg And it was just capped off by a big drop in Dallas Fed’s Services survey (which compliments yesterday’s Dallas Fed Manufacturing meltdown). The headline print dropped from -5.5 to -10.6. That is the 23rd straight month of contraction in the survey (one more month equals the span of contraction around Lehman’s collapse)… Looking ahead, the picture was an ugly stagflationary one with revenue expected to grow slower and prices expected to rise faster… With General Business Activity expected to decline (the first time since Nov 2023)… …

“Jack Smith Is Trying To Interfere With 2024 Election”: Stefanik Files Ethics Complaint Against Special Counsel Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) filed an ethics complaint against special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday, in which she accuses the prosecutor overseeing federal investigations into Donald Trump of trying to “interfere with the 2024 election and stop the American people from electing” the former president. “At every turn, he has sought to accelerate his illegal prosecution of President Trump for the clear (if unstated) purpose of trying him before the November election,” Stefanik wrote in a Tuesday morning tweet. “Smith’s conduct has brought disrepute to the Department of Justice and the entire federal government, and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility should impose the discipline that such conduct warrants.” 🚨🚨🚨 I just filed an official ethics complaint against Jack Smith with the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional …

New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik filed an ethics complaint Tuesday alleging Special Counsel Jack Smith’s rushed lawfare campaign against former President Donald Trump is tantamount to election interference. Smith, Stefanik said, has been “abusing the resources of the federal government to unlawfully interfere with the 2024 presidential election.”

The complaint, filed with the Office of Professional Responsibility within Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), argues Smith is attempting to rush the trial of Trump regarding his speech about the 2020 election ahead of this November’s rematch, in violation of the DOJ’s Justice Manual.

Section 9-85.500 of the manual stipulates “federal prosecutors … may never select the timing of any action … for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Stefanik argues Smith violated the statute in August of 2023 when “he petitioned the District Court for a January 2, 2024, trial date.” Stefanik cites the roughly 13 million pages of discovery Trump’s team had to review, alongside other evidence, to argue that Smith’s intended five-month turnaround was an obvious attempt to rush a complex case to get a judgment before Election Day.

“It’s obvious to any reasonable observer that Jack Smith is trying to interfere with the 2024 election and stop the American people from electing Donald Trump,” Stefanik said in a statement. “At every turn, he has sought to accelerate his illegal prosecution of President Trump for the clear (if unstated) purpose of trying him before the November election.”

Stefanik also alleges Smith violated the same statute when he unsuccessfully tried to expedite his case against Trump by begging the Supreme Court to grant certiorari before a lower court had rendered a judgment.

“That Jack Smith was solely motivated by the desire to interfere in the November election was effectively proven two months later” when he opposed Trump’s petition for certiorari on the issue of presidential immunity, Stefanik reasoned. Smith argued the nation had a “compelling interest in the prompt resolution of this case” in opposing Trump’s petition.

“The public, respondent, and the government are entitled to nothing less,” Smith argued, despite the fact that the Sixth Amendment grants the right to a speedy trial to defendants, not “the government” or “the public.”

“Aside from the upcoming election, what ‘compelling interest’ does the public have in the prompt resolution of this case?” Stefanik asked. “Why should this interest—based on an unstated reason—override the due process rights of a criminal defendant?”

The congresswoman also alleged Smith “repeatedly and deliberately violated” a district court’s stay of proceedings, including when he served an additional nearly 4,000 pages of discovery to Trump’s team. The district court had stayed “any further proceedings that would move this case towards trial or impose additional burdens of litigation on Defendant.”

In addition to the 4,000 pages of discovery, Stefanik pointed to Smith’s decision to file “a motion in limine in District Court” after Smith indicated to the Supreme Court that “the case is now on hold” at the district level. Smith’s “refusal to abide by the District Court’s stay” violated D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 3.4(c), and his admission to the Supreme Court that the case was “on hold” indicated he did so “knowingly,” Stefanik argued.

“Jack Smith emphatically said that ‘no one in this country … is above the law.’ If that is true, then he should be open to, and welcome, an ethics investigation into conduct that, on its face, implicates potential violations of DOJ policy and multiple rules of professional conduct,” Stefanik wrote. “Biden special counsel Jack Smith’s highly unusual and clearly improper attempts to expedite trial, and his blatant violation of District Court orders, evidence his partisan attempt to influence the results of the 2024 presidential election.”

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz filed a similar complaint in March requesting DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigate why Smith is apparently hellbent on trying Trump before November.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Judge Holds Trump Contempt With Fine, Jail Threat For Violating Gag Order In ‘Hush Money’ Trial Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan has held Donald Trump in contempt of court for ‘repeatedly violating’ a gag order in his so-called hush money trial in New York. According to Merchan, Trump violated the gag order nine times in online posts which targeted jurors or likely witnesses in the trial. The former president was fined the maximum of $1,000 per violation, or $9,000 – and was ordered to remove all of the offending posts by 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday. What’s more, Merchan threatened to toss Trump in jail if he willfully violates court orders again. “Defendant is hereby warned that the Court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders and that if necessary and appropriate under the circumstances, it will impose an incarceratory punishment,” …

‘Expectations’ Plunge To 11-Year-Lows As Conference Board Confidence Craters For the third straight month, The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell in April, tumbling to 97.0 from a downwardly revised 103.1 (dramatically below the 104.0 median expectation and in fact below the lowest of all 56 analysts’ estimates). Both current conditions and expectations plunged, with the latter at its weakest since Present situation confidence fell to 142.9 vs. 146.8 last month Consumer confidence expectations fell to 66.4 vs. 74.0 last month Expectations are back to Summer 2022 lows, which are equal to April 2013 lows… Source: Bloomberg Most notably, this is the sixth straight month of downward revisions… Source: Bloomberg That is 14.6pts of confidence erased in six months… to which we ask – in …

Don’t Buy Rate-Hike Hype, Next Fed Move Is A Cut Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist, The Federal Reserve’s next move this year is likely to be a rate cut – despite the re-emergence of inflation – leaving markets at risk of a dovish repricing. When it comes to the Fed, it’s easy to get hung up on what they should do, and neglect what they actually will do. From an inflation perspective, it’s becoming increasingly clear the central bank needs to raise rates further to quell resurgent price growth. But that’s unlikely. Instead, the risks to government funding costs and mounting pressure on liquidity are likely to tilt the Fed in favor of cutting rates, even as inflation is making an unwelcome return. This week again draws focus to the greater entanglement of monetary and fiscal policy. The Fed meets on Wednesday, but the Treasury’s …

Fastest Drop Since ‘Lehman’: Chicago PMI Puke Screams Stagflation After miraculously surging to two years highs in Nov 2023, Chicago PMI has plunged for five straight months, with the last four months seeing the MoM declines accelerating. Against expectations of a rise to 45.0 (from March’s 41.4), April’s PMI data printed 37.9 Source: Bloomberg That is the worst five-month collapse since Lehman… Source: Bloomberg More problematically – the underlying data screams stagflation: Prices paid rose at a faster pace; signaling expansion New orders fell at a faster pace; signaling contraction Employment fell at a faster pace; signaling contraction Inventories fell at a slower pace; signaling contraction Supplier deliveries fell at a faster pace; signaling contraction Production fell …

Rafah Invasion Will Happen With Or Without Hostage Deal: Netanyahu Despite immense pressure coming from the Biden administration for Israel to secure the hostage deal that’s on the table with Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged that an invasion of Rafah will go on with or without a deal. He issued the words Tuesday while speaking to an audience sympathetic to his hardline coalition. “The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all its aims is not an option,” Netanyahu said. “We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there — whether or not there is a deal — in order to achieve total victory.” In reference to the hawkish Gvura and Tikva forums a statement from by the Prime Minister’s Office indicated that “the groups urged Netanyahu and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi to continue the war and to resist international pressure.” …