HONEST POLITICS
WITHOUT READER SUPPORT
THIS COLUMN DISAPPEARS.
Brent Lambi
He Is Not Campaigning
For Them
He Is Campaigning For Himself – And They Know It.
A president with 33 percent approval has promised dozens of
candidates he will be with them “100% all the way to November.”
Forty-five of them have already found somewhere else to be.
THE IMMUNITY WAS NEVER HIS. IT BELONGS TO THE OFFICE.
HE IS RUNNING TO KEEP THE OFFICE FRIENDLY.
A CAMPAIGN THAT ENDS IN A COURTROOM IS NOT A PLATFORM.
IT IS A DEFENSE.
FORTY-FIVE OF THEM ARE STAYING HOME.
IN MY OPINION, THEY ARE WELL ADVISED.
SAVE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FROM THE MAGA LIES!
THE DINNER IN THE PAVED-OVER GARDEN.
Wednesday night, in the Rose Garden
he had stripped out and covered with stone,
the President told his party’s most endangered
members he would campaign in every contest
that decides control of Congress. “I will be with
you 100% all the way to November,” he said.
“It’s all about 35 races.” Two days earlier, Reuters/
Ipsos put his approval at 33 percent, the
lowest of his political life and the third straight
month there. A YouGov survey has him underwater
on net approval in forty-seven states.
A president this far down is normally asked to
stay home. This one booked the tour himself.
AND THE INVITATIONS NOBODY WANTS.
Then read the other half of the story. His party
built him a convention in Dallas next week
(the first midterm convention in American history),
and Politico found that at least forty-five
Republican members and candidates will not
be there. Of more than seventy surveyed, most
had no plans to attend; dozens would not say.
The regrets were polite. David Valadao of California
and Max Miller of Ohio confirmed they
are out; Miller is staying home to campaign
and see his family. Chris Smith of New Jersey
and Andrew Garbarino of New York have district
events. Tim Burchett of Tennessee is “not
sure” and mentioned the price. Tom Barrett of
Michigan, who sat at Wednesday’s dinner, put
it about as plainly as a member can: he cannot
control what the President will say in Dallas,
but he can control where he is standing.
TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS TO
STAND THERE. The door charge for a House
member is $25,000 with a guest, and the better
packages run near $100,000. The proceeds
go to a nonprofit that does not have to name
its donors. One Republican called the whole
thing a waste of time and the planning a mess.
Another was blunter about the fee: he did
not want to go anyway, and the price made it
easier. A third gave the actual diagnosis: you
should not still be rallying your base in September;
you should be persuading independents,
and independents are not watching this.
“Nobody says no to this president
out loud. They simply discover
they are needed at home.”
AND THE WEBSITES QUIETLY REWRITTEN.
In Texas, Carlos De La Cruz’s homepage
no longer reads “TRUMP CONSERVATIVE.”
It reads “PROVEN CONSERVATIVE,” and the
line about serving as the President’s wingman
in Congress is gone. Eric Flores replaced
“SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S AGENDA”
with “LOWER THE COST OF LIVING.” Mike
Lawler, who shared a stage with him in May,
now says only that the race will be decided by
his own record and his own vision. Not one
of them will say the word out loud. They just
find somewhere else to be. In my opinion, at
33 percent, they are well advised.
THE RÉSUMÉ HE IS RUNNING ON. Twice
impeached. Convicted in New York on thirty-
four felony counts of falsifying business
records, making him the first felon to take the
oath. Charged federally with conspiring to
obstruct the certification of an election, and
again with hoarding classified national-defense
documents and obstructing their return.
Neither case was ever tried. Neither ended in
acquittal. One was dropped because Justice
Department policy forbids prosecuting a sitting
president. The other was thrown out on a
technical question about how the prosecutor
was appointed; the appeal was quietly abandoned
once he held the pen.
Vote Like Jesus
Think Beyond Your Pocketbook
September 2, 2026
A ballot is a moral document. Eight questions on this year’s
ballot – and eight answers older than any party in America.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
A BIBLE IS NOT A CAMPAIGN PROP.
IT IS A JOB DESCRIPTION.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE.
VOTE LIKE JESUS – AND VOTE LIKE YOU MEAN IT!
Source note: Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
Confirmed he will not attend
Home to campaign and see family
Can control where he is standing
District events
“not sure” — cites the price
$25,000 minimum; packages near
$100,000
45 out; most of 70+ surveyed have no
plans
VALADAO (CA)
MILLER (OH)
BARRETT (MI)
SMITH (NJ),
GARBARINO (NY)
BURCHETT (TN)
THE DOOR
CHARGE
THE COUNT
THE POLITE REGRETS
THE SHIELD IS THE CHAIR, NOT THE
MAN. Judge Tanya Chutkan put it in writing.
She dismissed the January 6 case without
prejudice, noting that the immunity a sitting
president enjoys is temporary and expires
when he leaves office. The Supreme Court’s
ruling protects official acts of the presidency.
It does not protect Donald Trump. It protects
whoever occupies that chair. He is term-limited
out of it in January 2029. Two things stand
between him and a courtroom that year: a
Congress that will not impeach, and a Justice
Department that will not indict. Both are on
the ballot in nine weeks. In my opinion, that is
the entire campaign.
“He is not asking you to save the
country. He is asking you to keep a
friendly hand on the pardon pen.”
AND WHAT DID YOU GET FOR IT? Groceries,
gasoline, and premiums are not cheaper.
The war he swore he would end in twenty-four
hours ground on, and a new one in Iran has
wrecked the oil supply and your fuel bill. The
debt cleared $39 trillion. The Epstein files that
a unanimous Congress ordered released sit in
a drawer, three million pages deep.
WHAT DID GET BUILT. The East Wing: demolished.
A ballroom priced at $200 million,
then $300 million, then $400 million, now
trailing a $1 billion “security” request slipped
into an immigration package. $40 million in
taxpayer funds was appropriated for a triumphal
arch. Residence renovations of $377 million
this year against $39 million in 2025, an
increase of 866 percent. A garden paved for
umbrella tables that match Mar-a-Lago. Not
one family’s rent came down. His own members
now worry aloud that he will spend his
Dallas hour talking about the ballroom.
THE MEN HE PROMOTES. He elevates the
people who will not ask him a question and
pursues the ones who did. He pardons the loyal
and deports the roofer. He praises strongmen
and quotes them approvingly when they
call his prosecutions persecution. That is not
a conservative governing philosophy. In my
opinion, it is Vladimir Putin’s philosophy: rule
by loyalty, immunity by office, and a courtroom
reserved for critics.
WHAT AN HONEST CAMPAIGN WOULD
LOOK LIKE. Say what the groceries will cost.
Say whether the Iran war gets a vote. Say
whether the Epstein files get opened. Say who
pays for the ballroom. A member who can
answer those four questions does not need a
president in his district, and a member who
cannot will not be saved by one.
THE HONEST PART. He was acquitted in
both impeachments; that is the constitutional
result and it counts. The federal charges
were never proved to a jury, and a five-year
clock may already have run out on some of
them. The Republican National Committee
says enthusiasm for Dallas has been incredible,
and the Associated Press reports that
the overwhelming majority of Republicans
on the ballot are still embracing him; De La
Cruz’s campaign denies backing away at all,
and several of the members skipping Dallas
cite nothing worse than a calendar. Presidents
have always campaigned for their parties, and
all of them renovate the house. None of that
answers the question in front of us: why is a
man at 33 percent spending every remaining
day of this election on the ballot line instead of
the grocery line?
Sources: Reuters and AP, Sept. 2, 2026 (Rose Garden dinner);
Politico survey and The New York Times, Sept. 1-2,
2026 (Dallas convention); AP, Aug. 28, 2026 (campaign
websites); Reuters/Ipsos, Aug. 31, 2026; YouGov/The Economist;
United States v. Trump dismissal order (D.D.C., Nov.
2024); Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. (2024); Forbes, May
13, 2026; Axios, Aug. 13, 2026; Fortune, Apr. 6, 2026.
To every candidate for Congress this
November, of either party; if the President
asks to appear in your district, will you
accept – and will you answer that in October,
on the record, rather than in November,
after the votes are counted?
THE BALLOT QUESTION
BEYOND THE POCKETBOOK. Every campaign asks whether you are better off than you were
four years ago. Scripture asks the harder question, and it asks it of the voter, not the candidate:
what does your spending say about you? “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also.” (Matthew 6:21)
WALK, DO NOT TALK. Anyone can hold up a Bible for a camera. The test is not the prop; it is the
record. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but
to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8). Moses was given
the hiring standard, and it has not been repealed: “able men, such as fear God, men of truth,
hating covetousness.” (Exodus 18:21)
NO MORE FOREIGN WARS. We keep sending other people’s children to other people’s countries
for reasons that never survive the decade, lately without the vote the Constitution requires.
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9). And
“they shall beat their swords into plowshares.” (Isaiah 2:4)
THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR. Nearly every American family arrived here from somewhere
else, most of them poor and most of them unwelcome the week they landed. The law can be
enforced without cruelty. “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born
among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus
19:34)
PROVIDE FOR THE SICK. A country that can replace a missile in a year can train a doctor in
seven. We are not short of money; we are short of priority. “I was sick, and ye visited me.” (Matthew
25:36)
PROVIDE FOR THE POOR. The poor do not retain lobbyists, which is precisely why the duty
falls to everyone else. “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed
to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
(Proverbs 31:8-9)
A prop is held up. A job description is carried out.
THE EARTH IS NOT THEIRS TO SELL. The oil, the coal, the water, and the land were created
by no officeholder, yet they are leased, permitted, and given away by men who will be gone when
the bill arrives. “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1). “Woe unto them
that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.” (Isaiah 5:8)
PROTECT THE CHILDREN. This one admits no compromise, no sealed file, and no political

A WARNING FROM THE ROAD: IOWA AND NEBRASKA
Storm Clouds on the Horizon
And the Wind Is Already Up
A Carroll banker with sixty-six years behind a desk says he has read this sky before.
So have I. It looked like this in 1979, and the man in the White House was Jimmy Carter.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock, and Iowa State
University Extension operates the Iowa Concern Hotline for farm families.
Sources: U.S. Treasury; Learning Resources v. Trump (Feb. 20, 2026); USDA; American Farm Bureau Federation; Federal
Reserve Banks of Chicago and Kansas City; Congressional Research Service; NCBA; Iowa Farm Bureau; UPI and Iowa PBS
archives; Human Rights Watch; company filings.
CARTER, 1980 An embargo that cost us the market
THIS TIME $20 billion Treasury swap to Argentina
AUTHORIZED BY No vote in Congress required
TIMED FOR The longest U. S. shutdown, and Milei’s election
ARGENTINA Beef quota quadrupled in February
BRAZIL 40 tariff points off, record 2026 imports
WHAT CARTER NEVER DID
CARTER COST US THE MARKET.
TRUMP WIRED MONEY TO THE MEN WHO TOOK IT.
IN MY OPINION, THAT IS NOT A MISTAKE. IT IS A DIRECTION.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE
DEMAND REAL SOLUTIONS BEFORE THE SPRING NOTE!
THE MAN WHO READS THE SKY. In Carroll
I sat with a retired banker, a sixty-six-year veteran
of the business and a director of an Iowa
regional bank. He says another 1980s farm crisis
is coming and could be worse. His reasons:
a debt that crossed $40.05 trillion on August
18, trade policy that cost farmers their buyers,
and what happens when money gets expensive
again. At fifteen or eighteen percent, he said, it
will be twice as bad as 1981 because in 1981 we
had no trade war on top of it. He watched millionaire
farmers go broke in three years, men
he had banked for thirty.
WHAT THE LAST STORM TOOK. Researchers
counted 913 male farmer suicides across
five Upper Midwest states that decade. On December
9, 1985, Lone Tree farmer Dale Burr,
half a million in debt, killed his wife, Hills Bank
president John Hughes, and a neighbor, then
himself. Iowa banks hired guards.
IN MY OPINION, THIS IS CARTER’S PLAYBOOK.
Carter used food as a weapon. In January
1980 he embargoed grain to the Soviets,
trusting competitors not to take the sales. Argentina
refused, raising export earnings roughly
thirty percent selling to Moscow. Brazil, Canada
and Australia followed. The Soviets ate.
Iowa did not. America was branded an unreliable
supplier and never won that share back.
Then Carter bought the grain himself: $2.25
billion of it. Now watch it again. We taxed our
way out of the Chinese soybean market. Brazil
and Argentina took it. Our share of world soybean
trade is a record-low 23 percent. Then we
wrote a $12 billion check, drawn not on tariff
revenue but the Commodity Credit Corporation.
Borrowed money.
THE TARIFF THE COURT SAID HE NEVER
HAD. Read this twice. On February 20, the Supreme
Court ruled 6-3, with Roberts writing,
that the president has no power to impose
tariffs under the emergency-powers act. The
Court did not say they were unwise. It said they
were never lawful from day one. Roughly $175
billion may be owed back to importers. Iowa
farmers spent a year eating Chinese retaliation
for a policy the Court says was never authorized.
A day later the Trump administration
announced it would reimpose a fifteen percent
tariff globally under another statute. The share
is gone. The retaliation was real. Only the authority
was imaginary.
CARTER LOST US THE MARKET. THIS
ONE PAID THE MAN WHO TOOK IT. Here
is where my opinion hardens, and it is the
heart of this editorial. Carter was wrong, and
Iowa paid for it. But Carter never wrote Argentina
a check for taking our business. On October
9, 2025, during the longest government
shutdown in American history, the Treasury
Secretary announced a $20 billion swap line
with Argentina’s central bank and directly
purchased Argentine pesos. The money came
from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which
needs no vote in Congress. No economic conditions
were attached. The timing served President
Milei’s October elections. And at that very
hour, Argentine farmers were selling China
the soybeans Iowa could not. Senator Grassley
said it plainly at the time: our farmers were
upset about Argentina selling soybeans to China
right after the bailout, with zero U.S. sales.
Then in February we quadrupled Argentina’s
beef quota. On August 21 we floated 300,000
metric tons more. Cattle broke that morning.
Carter shut a door and our competitors walked
through it. Trump opened the Treasury and
wired them the fare.
AND THE GATE FOR BRAZIL. In July 2025
the Trump administration put a 50 percent
tariff on Brazilian beef. By November it had removed
40 of those percentage points. Brazilian
packers shipped $795 million of beef into this
country in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Total
U.S. beef imports hit a record $13.75 billion in
2025 while our own beef exports fell about 11
percent to $9.3 billion. Imports are on pace for
nearly 6 billion pounds this year, which would
be a record. And on August 21 the Trump administration
announced a 90-day cut to beef
tariffs, in the middle of that record. The cattlemen’s
association called it flooding the market
with “government-subsidized, below-market
beef.” Not my words. Theirs.
AND NOW THE PACKINGHOUSES. I
watched plants go dark in Storm Lake, Fort
Dodge and Cedar Falls. Rath closed in Waterloo
in 1985. But those jobs went to American
firms cutting American wages: IBP’s boxed
beef, rural low-wage plants, packing pay below
the average U.S. manufacturing wage by
1983. Ugly, and ours. Now the ledger. Tyson
shut its Lexington, Nebraska, plant in January,
eliminating 2,000 jobs. On August 13, Tyson
announced the immediate closure of its Joslin,
Illinois, plant, affecting 2,500 workers, plus its
Eagle Mountain, Utah, facility. Perry, Iowa is
gone. Over 10,000 Tyson jobs since 2023. JBS
is closing a Pennsylvania plant, eliminating
2,000 more jobs. JBS is Brazilian, controlled by
the Batista family of São Paulo. The plants that
closed this month processed American cattle.
What is replacing them does not.
ONE THING REAGAN WOULD NEVER DO.
Reagan ended Carter’s embargo in ninety-four
days. He tore a barrier down. Whatever else he
was, and I have written plainly about what he
was, he never bought a competitor’s currency
with public money, and he never cut his own
ranchers’ tariff protection during a record import
year. That, in my opinion, is the whole distance
between a president who mishandled a
crisis and one who is financing the other side of
it. Carter was wrong. He was not misdirected.
This is misdirected.
WHY THIS ONE COULD BE WORSE. The
banker’s real warning was not about prices. It
was about where the debt is sitting. Farm debt
hits a record $624.7 billion this year, carrying a
record $33 billion in interest. The Kansas City
Fed reports farmers taking larger operating
loans and longer to repay. The Chicago Fed’s
May survey of 104 Midwest ag lenders found
falling cash rents, rising rollovers, tightening
credit and near-breakeven cash flow. An Iowa
bankruptcy attorney describes what I remember
from 1980: farmers moving operating debt
onto the land because the land is the only thing
still holding value. That is the trap. Land is up
three percent while cash flow is negative. The
ground is carrying the losses. It carried them in
1979 too, right until it did not. Then it fell sixty
percent with the notes still attached.
The ground is carrying the losses.
It carried them in 1979 too,
right until it did not.
THE WIND IS ALREADY UP. Corn breaks
even near $5.00; USDA forecasts $4.20. Soybeans,
$12.27 against $10.30. Iowa net farm income
is projected down 53 percent. Nineteen
percent of the state’s midsize and large farms
are financially vulnerable, double 2022. Chapter
12 filings rose 220 percent here.
THE HONEST PART. Tyson and JBS blame
the cattle herd: 86.2 million head, a 75-year low
from drought and disease, not imports. That is
the stated cause, and I will not pretend otherwise.
The Argentine swap was a credit line,
not a grant, and Treasury says the draw was repaid.
In terms of wreckage, 1980 through 1985
was still worse: land off sixty percent, Farm
Credit down $2.7 billion. My argument is not
that the checks have already destroyed us. It is
about direction and about what is being loaded
onto the ground right now.
GET THE MACHINERY IN. Remove the tariffs
and trade barriers. Rebuild the herd before
importing the beef. Stop financing the competition.
E20 now, E30 by 2029. Do it before the
spring note comes due. The note is where this
ends. It always was.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
THE BOOK IS NOT A PROP
They Held Up the Book
They Simply Never Opened It.
The acts first, in plain language. Then the verse each one breaks.
The deeds are public record. Scripture is theirs too.
THE PHOTOGRAPH. On June 1, 2020, federal
officers cleared demonstrators from Lafayette
Square. Minutes later the president walked
across it and held a Bible up in front of St.
John’s Church for the cameras. He did not go
in. He did not read from it. He did not pray.
◆ “They love to pray standing in the synagogues
and in the corners of the streets, that
they may be seen of men… They have their
reward” (Matthew 6:5). The reward was the
photograph. That was the transaction.
THE $59.99 BIBLE. In 2024 he put his name
on the “God Bless the USA Bible”: scripture
bound with the Constitution and a song lyric,
sold at $59.99, with a licensing cut to him.
◆ Christ drove the sellers out of the temple:
“make not my Father’s house an house of
merchandise” (John 2:16). Merchandising
the book is not witness. It is inventory.
A Bible held up for a photograph is
not a testimony. It is a costume.
THE MONUMENT. A $600 million ballroom
rises on the people’s ground, about half of it
charged to taxpayers. A federal judge ruled
that only Congress may rename the Kennedy
Center; in August the board voted around him
and renamed the grounds the President Donald
J. Trump Plaza.
◆ “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built…
for the honour of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30).
Nebuchadnezzar lost his reason in the middle
of that sentence. “Whosoever shall exalt
himself shall be abased” (Matthew 23:12).
THE GIFT AND THE SETTLEMENT. A $400
million jet was accepted from Qatar. A $10 billion
claim against the IRS, filed in his personal
capacity, was settled in May by the attorney
who defended him in his own criminal case
and now runs the Justice Department; the
claim was traded for audit protection on every
earlier return.
◆ “Thy princes are rebellious, and companions
of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth
after rewards” (Isaiah 1:23). And the
ledger verse: “A false balance is abomination
to the LORD” (Proverbs 11:1).
THE PARDONS. Juan Orlando Hernández,
sentenced to 45 years for moving hundreds of
tons of cocaine, was pardoned and released.
Roughly a hundred drug clemencies followed.
Meanwhile, 70.6 percent of those held in ICE
detention had no conviction.
◆ “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that
condemneth the just, even they both are
abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15).
Both halves, in one line. Mercy for the trafficker.
A cell for the roofer.
THE SICK AND THE CHILDREN. Premium
credits lapsed on December 31, 2025, and
premiums rose about 26 percent. Measles returned
to its worst year since 1991 as kindergarten
vaccination rates fell to 92.5 percent.
A law passed 427–1 ordered the Epstein files
released; the survivors are still waiting.
◆ “I was sick, and ye visited me not” (Matthew
25:43). Of the children: “it were better for him
that a millstone were hanged about his neck”

Your Tax Dollars,
Their Harvest
The Tariff Is Ours. The Bailout Is Theirs.
The American farmer never asked for protection. He asked
for a market, and Washington sold it to his competitor.
A FARMER DOES NOT WANT A CHECK. HE WANTS A BUYER.
STOP FINANCING THE COMPETITION.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE
SELL IT — DON’T SUBSIDIZE IT!
Sources: U.S. Treasury; White House Proclamation of Feb. 6, 2026; U.S. Customs and Border Protection quota bulletins;
USDA; American Soybean Association; Congressional Research Service; Reuters; CNN; NBC News; Associated Press.
SWAP LINE $20 billion to Argentina’s central bank, Oct. 2025
CHINA’S CUT More than half of U.S. soybean exports; $12.6B in 2024
BEEF QUOTA 20,000 to as much as 100,000 metric tons in 2026
FARM INPUTS ~$33 billion imported yearly – taxed at the gate
THE “HELP” $12 billion in bridge payments, Dec. 2025
THE LEDGER, BY THE BUSHEL
WHAT “POLITICAL” NOW MEANS. Juan
Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras,
was convicted of conspiring to move
at least 400 tons of cocaine into this country
and sentenced to 45 years by Judge Kevin
Castel, an appointee of George W. Bush. On
December 1, 2025, he walked out of a federal
penitentiary with a full pardon. The explanation
offered was that he had been “persecuted
very unfairly” and was the victim of what the
President called a Biden administration setup.
No evidence was produced. Not one juror answered.
Just the word “political,” thrown over a
verdict like a tarp.
WHO ACTUALLY DID THE WORK. In 2025,
the Coast Guard seized more than 511,000
pounds of cocaine, over three times the service’s
annual average. Operation Pacific Viper
alone has taken more than 215,000 pounds and
apprehended 160 suspected traffickers. Eighty
percent of interdictions of U.S.-bound drugs
happen at sea: small boats, black water, boarding
ladders. DEA agents and county deputies
do the same work on land: years of wiretaps,
controlled buys and grand jury testimony, given
under their own names, in the same counties
where the people they charge live. Nobody
hands them a signature at the end of it.
NOW DO THE ARITHMETIC. Four hundred
tons is 800,000 pounds. One signature
undid more than the Coast Guard’s best
year on record.
They boarded the boat. He signed the paper.
Only one of them was risking anything.
THE COMPANY HE KEEPS. Hernández was
not alone. On day one, it was Ross Ulbricht,
founder of the largest online drug market of its
time, serving two life sentences. In May 2025, it
was Larry Hoover. The Washington Post counts
clemency for roughly 100 people accused of
drug-related crimes.
AND THE PRESS THAT MOVED ON. It was
reported once. The Washington Post ran the
clemency tally. The wires carried the release.
Two House members filed a resolution condemning
it. Then the cameras went back to
THE PARDON LEDGER
Four Hundred Tons Is
Not a Political Opinion
And a Cutter Crew Is Not a Talking Point.
A federal jury convicted him. A judge appointed by a Republican president
sentenced him. The White House calls it persecution.
Sources: U.S. Coast Guard and DHS interdiction releases (2025–2026); The Washington Post clemency analysis; AP, NPR and
CBS reporting on the December 1, 2025 release; U.S. v. Hernández, S.D.N.Y.
Every package of imported, foreign-processed
meat on an American shelf is a shift that
does not get run here. Tyson shut its Lexington,
Nebraska, plant in January, eliminating
3,200 jobs. This month, it announced the closure
of its Joslin, Illinois, complex, eliminating
roughly 2,500 more jobs, plus the closure of its
Eagle Mountain, Utah, plant. It is also seeking
a buyer for its Pasco, Washington, facility. Imports
have hit a record 17 percent of American
beef supply, and Washington suspended the
tariff-rate quotas in May. Consolidation pencils
out for shareholders. The bill lands on the
farmer. Every packer that disappears is one
less bidder at the gate, and kill capacity, once
gone, does not come back.
None of this was a market accident. Washington
suspended the quotas, waved the imports
through, and called it competition. Our
farmers lose the buyer. Our towns lose the
payroll. Our floors go quiet while the trimmings
come off a boat. That is not policy. That
is gross incompetence, and the farmer pays
for it last and longest.
One Less Bidder at the Gate
The Packing Jobs Go First. The Farmer’s Price Goes Next.
Every pound processed overseas means one less shift run
here and one less buyer for the farmer.
LEXINGTON, NEB. Closed Jan. 20, 2026 – about 3,200 jobs
JOSLIN, ILL. Closed Aug. 14, 2026 – about 2,500 jobs
EAGLE MOUNTAIN, UTAH Case-ready plant closing – 723 jobs
THE IMPORT SIDE 17.3% of U.S. beef supply, an all-time high;
tariff rate quotas suspended May 11, 2026
THE RECORD, PLANT BY PLANT
Source: Tyson Foods statements, Nov. 21, 2025 and Aug. 13, 2026; UNL Center for Agricultural Profitability;
WARN notice, Joslin complex; USDA WASDE import share.
A FARMER OUR FARMERS LOSE THE BUYER. OUR INDUSTRIES
LOSE THE FLOOR. OUR NEIGHBORS LOSE THE JOB.
GROSS INCOMPETENCE IN WASHINGTON WROTE THIS.
AMERICAN CATTLE. AMERICAN PLANTS. AMERICAN JOBS.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE. DEMAND BETTER FROM BOTH!
THE MAN WHO NEVER ASKED FOR A
SUBSIDY. The American farmer was the original
small businessman. He bought his inputs
at market, sold his crop at market, absorbed
his own losses without a lawyer, and asked
Washington for one thing: an open door and
an honest price. He was the freest trader this
country ever produced. He is now the only
man in America being taxed on both ends of
his own barn.
WHAT TWENTY BILLION BOUGHT. In October
2025 the Treasury opened a $20 billion
swap line to Argentina’s central bank and began
buying pesos outright, the largest direct
U.S. rescue of a foreign government since Mexico
in 1995, with talk of doubling it to $40 billion
through private funding. Days later Buenos Aires
suspended its grain export taxes, and China
bought Argentine soybeans at a price we could
not match. China had already halted American
purchases in May; a market worth $12.6 billion
in 2024 went to zero. Republican Sen. Chuck
Grassley asked the obvious question in public.
He never got an answer.
AND THEN THEY SENT THE BEEF. On February
6 the President quadrupled Argentina’s
tariff-rate quota: 80,000 additional metric tons
of lean trimmings on top of the existing 20,000.
Senator Deb Fischer objected. The trimmings
came anyway.
“We taxed his fertilizer, closed his market, then financed the man who took it.”
THE BILL HE CANNOT PASS ALONG.
Meanwhile the tariff lands on the one man in
the chain who cannot hand it to anyone else.
Roughly $33 billion in imported inputs a year,
including fertilizer, chemicals and machinery
parts, is taxed at the gate. Three straight years
of losses. Chapter 12 filings up 46 percent.
Then $12 billion in bridge payments: Washington
handing you your own money back
and calling it generosity.
THE HONEST PART. A swap is not a grant,
and Treasury insists no taxpayer loss is anticipated.
The beef quota answers a cattle herd at
a record low and ground beef at $6.69 a pound.
The Argentine agreement opens more than
two hundred categories to American goods.
Fine. Now explain all of it to a man in Idaho
paying a tariffed price for a combine part while
his buyer loads Argentine soybeans.
the boat strikes, and the pardon shrank into a
footnote inside coverage of the very campaign it
contradicts. The question worth putting to this
administration on camera, and putting again
the next day, is a simple one: how does that
ledger get explained to the crews still being sent
out? A government that kills suspected smugglers
without trial while pardoning a convicted
kingpin is not a news cycle. It is a standing contradiction,
and it deserves a standing question
at every briefing.
THE HONEST PART. The pardon power is
absolute, and both parties have used it on drug
cases. Hernández and his lawyers maintain the
case rested on the word of convicted traffickers.
Clemency is not the offense here. Calling a jury’s
verdict political is. The Movement Ate Its Own
It Called That Loyalty
Three women asked one question about the Epstein files. Two are gone.
And the file they asked about now sits with the president’s own lawyer.
AND WHO HOLDS THE FILE NOW. On August
10, Todd Blanche, Trump’s own criminal
defense attorney, was sworn in as Attorney
General by Emil Bove, another of his former
lawyers. Only two Republicans voted no. Epstein
survivors testified against him. New Mexico
is suing his department for stonewalling a
state investigation. He has declined to promise
that the president will have no voice in individual
prosecutions.
THE HONEST PART. Greene, Mace, and
Massie crossed Trump on more than Epstein,
and primary voters removing a member is democracy,
not conspiracy. Bondi’s and Noem’s
failures were their own. But no conspiracy is required
here. Only a rule: ask, and you are gone.
THE THREE WHO ASKED. In November 2025, four House Republicans signed the discharge
petition forcing a vote on the Epstein files. Three were women: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren
Boebert, and Nancy Mace, who called her signature deeply personal as a survivor of sexual
and domestic violence. Trump phoned Boebert before dawn and summoned her to the White
House. He played phone tag with Mace. Neither folded.
AND WHAT IT COST THEM. Trump branded Greene a traitor. She resigned on January 5, 2026.
Mace lost her primary for governor of South Carolina in June. Thomas Massie, the fourth signer,
lost his primary as well. Boebert survived chiefly because the president moved to punish her
after the filing deadline had passed.
THE WOMEN WHO WERE USED. Pam Bondi handed Epstein binders to influencers, issued the
memo declaring the case closed, and absorbed a year of fury that belonged upstairs. She was fired
on April 2, 2026. Kristi Noem testified that Trump personally approved the $220 million campaign
promoting her own leadership. She, too, was fired. They were not partners. They were padding.
GREENE Called a traitor; resigned
Jan. 5, 2026
MACE Lost the S.C. governor’s
primary, June 2026
MASSIE Lost his primary as well
BOEBERT Survived – the challenge
came too late to file
THE FILES Law passed 421 – 1; still in
court in 2026
THE FOUR WHO SIGNED
“Loyalty was not a bond.
It was a warranty period.”
THEY DID NOT LOSE THEIR LEADERS.
THEY WERE SHOWN THE DOOR FOR ASKING A QUESTION.
THE FILE BELONGS TO THE PUBLIC — NOT TO HIS ATTORNEY.
THEY ASKED ONE QUESTION
VOTE INDEPENDENT IN NOVEMBER!
Sources: AP, Reuters, NBC News, CNN, Axios, The Hill, NPR, PBS NewsHour, 19th News, Ms. Magazine (Nov. 2025 to Aug. 2026). When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my opinion
that discovery in this matter is being shaped
by people whose names do not appear in the
case caption. I cannot prove that today, and I
will not tell readers otherwise. I can only tell
you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone
else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed

REPORTING LLC | WWW.HONEST-POLITICS.COM
Veritas Pro Populo
HONEST POLITICS
I WANTED TO BELIEVE IT. In 1980 I cast my
ballot for John Anderson, an independent, because
a government too large to audit is a government
too large to trust. So when a movement
arrived promising to shrink it, end the
wars, balance the books and enforce the law,
I gave it a hearing. Eleven years on, I will say
plainly what I have concluded: it is the biggest
lie I have ever witnessed.
LAW AND ORDER, EXCEPT AT THE TOP. In
2024, Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley
wrote to the FBI accusing it of quietly revising
crime figures and calling the numbers unreliable.
Today the same party quotes the same
system as proof of its own success. I will concede
the decline is real: homicides fell 18 percent
in the first half of this year, and independent
analysts say so, not just the government.
But a party that trusts the measuring stick only
when it flatters its case has not adopted a standard.
It has adopted a scoreboard.
AND THEN THE PARDONS. Juan Orlando
Hernández moved more than four hundred
tons of cocaine and drew forty-five years.
He served roughly eighteen months and
walked out on a signature. Ross Ulbricht.
Larry Hoover. Some 100 drug-related clemencies.
Roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants,
including men convicted of assaulting police
officers. Ninety-six percent of second-term
grants were issued outside Justice Department
review. That is not law and order. That
is a favor window.
The kingpin got a signature.
The trafficker got a transfer.
The girls got a sealed file.
NO FOREIGN WARS. We fought a war with
Iran that Congress never voted on. The Abraham
Lincoln’s crew has been at sea more than
260 days with no date home. Iran sells its oil
at a better price today than before we started.
A BALANCED BUDGET. $39.8 trillion. About
$286,000 per household. Interest now costs
more than defense. Every point of it lands on
your mortgage, your car note and your child’s
tuition, all parts of the finances you were
promised you would control.
AND THE CHILDREN. The Epstein Files
Transparency Act passed the House 427–1
and was signed in November 2025. Nine
months later the file is still shut. But Ghislaine
Maxwell, days after a private meeting
with the Deputy Attorney General, was
moved to a minimum-security camp that
Bureau of Prisons policy says a sex offender
cannot be assigned to at all. No survivor ever
got that consideration.
I DID NOT LEAVE A MOVEMENT.
THE MOVEMENT LEFT THE OATH.
Source note: Clemency, crime and appropriation figures
are drawn from public records and cited reporting.
The Biggest Lie I Have
Ever Witnessed
I voted for John Anderson in 1980 because I believed
big government was dangerous. I still believe it.
That is exactly why I cannot vote for this one.
WITHOUT READER SUPPORT
THIS COLUMN DISAPPEARS.
Brent Lambi
THE COMMANDER AND THE CREW
Let Them Flush
Porcelain Toilets
Thirty-three gold bathrooms in Palm Beach.
On the Abraham Lincoln, the toilets do not work.
THIRTY-THREE. That is the number of bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago finished with gold-plated
fixtures and marble. The Trump Tower triplex was remodeled in gold from floor to ceiling.
The Oval Office got gold molding from his own gilder. The Lincoln Bedroom bathroom, photographed
and posted while the government was shut down, is now finished in polished statuary
marble with gold fixtures.
AND ON THE LINCOLN, THEY DO NOT WORK. The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego in November
and was due home in May. It has been at sea for more than 260 days, with no port call in
more than 200 days, a record. Families have given CNN photographs of overflowing toilets in sewage-
saturated washrooms. Sailors report moldy showers, rationed meals, no milk for three months,
and running out of soap. A sailor’s video tour of the heads circulated around the country last week.
Senator Blumenthal’s letter to the Pentagon cites plumbing failures and water contamination. Central
Command’s own tally for that crew: 10,000 flights and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance.
THE PORCELAIN LEDGER
AND HE SAYS THEY SHOULD STAY LONGER. Asked whether the Lincoln had been out too
long, the president said “not nearly long enough.” Asked whether families were worried, he said
they were not. Congressman Mike Levin responded that the least this country owes these sailors
is hot water, a working toilet, and a real meal. The defense secretary called the families’ warnings
fake news. Senator Mark Kelly, who flew 39 combat missions, wants an investigation.
HE NEVER SERVED A DAY. Five deferments kept him out of Vietnam: four for school, followed
by a 1968 diagnosis of bone spurs at age 22. The podiatrist’s daughters told The New York Times
that the diagnosis was a favor to Fred Trump, their father’s landlord. Trump later said he could
not recall the doctor’s name. A biographer asked to see the spurs and saw nothing. He has never
once had to use a military head.
Sources: TIME, CNN, NPR, Navy Times, GAO, The New York Times.
MAR-A-LAGO 33 gold-plated bathrooms
TRUMP TOWER Triplex remodeled in gold
LINCOLN BEDROOM Marble and gold fixtures
BEDMINSTER Rented restrooms, up to $333,801
USS A. LINCOLN Overflowing; 260+ days at sea
When You Own Both
Sides, You Never Lose
Two Examples Anybody Can Follow. Then Washington.
A prosecutor who works for you. An insurance company you own. Now count the odds.
EXAMPLE ONE: You are accused of business fraud. Your own attorney is also the prosecutor
who decides whether to charge you. What are the odds you get charged? Zero. Not low. Zero.
The evidence is irrelevant. The only man who can act on it works for you.
EXAMPLE TWO: You file an injury claim. Your attorney is an ambulance chaser, and you also
own the insurance company he is billing. Odds of a big payout? Certain. The facts are irrelevant
again. Your claim is reviewed by your own side.
Hold both pictures at once. They are two wings of one building: one wing charges people, the
other pays them.
THE MAN IN BOTH WINGS: Todd Blanche was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney.
He is now Attorney General of the United States. On Sunday, when asked whether he would
act independently of the White House, he said he would not promise that. He also said that the
President should have a say in who gets prosecuted.
WING ONE: THE FILE: Congress ordered the Epstein files released. The House voted 427 to
1. The Senate agreed without a single objection. It was signed into law in November 2025 with
a thirty-day deadline. Nine months later, millions of pages are still withheld. Blanche ran that
release. He published personal details of some victims and redacted heavily elsewhere, and he
withheld material about the President.
Understand the sequence. In May 2025, Blanche and Bondi told Trump his name appears in
the Epstein files. That summer, FBI personnel were instructed to flag any mention of him in the
case records. This month, a federal judge had to rule that an act of Congress outranks Ghislaine
Maxwell’s claim to privacy. The law was never the obstacle. The department was.
AND THE ONE PERSON WHO GOT SERVICE: Blanche interviewed Maxwell himself in July
2025. Days later she was moved out of a low-security prison to a minimum-security camp with
no fence. The victims got redactions. The convicted trafficker got a transfer. In my opinion, that
is not law enforcement. That is coverage.
WING TWO: THE CLAIM: In January Trump sued the IRS for ten billion dollars over his leaked
returns. Ten billion. Not for money taken from him, but for embarrassment. Reputational harm.
The injury nobody can x-ray, the sore back of civil litigation. He filed as a private citizen, joined
by two of his sons and the family company.
Now ask the obvious question: what proof of ten billion dollars in damage was ever put on the record?
None. The figures that leaked were his own true numbers. No court ever weighed a dollar
of it, because the case never got that far.
AND WHO WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE? This is the part to sit with. In a real lawsuit, opposing
counsel makes you prove every dollar you claim. Who is the IRS’s lawyer? The Justice Department.
And who ran the Justice Department? The President’s own former defense attorney, who
negotiated the deal personally. The man demanding ten billion and the office defending against
it answered to the same desk. There was no adversary. There was only a signature.
WHAT CHANGED HANDS: Trump dropped the claim. In exchange, the government agreed
never to audit him, his two eldest sons, or the Trump Organization on any return filed before
May 19. Tax attorneys say the IRS has never granted anyone such protection. By the Times’ reading
of his returns, one earlier audit alone could have cost him more than a hundred million dollars.
That money was never his. It was yours.
JUL ‘25
NOV ‘25
JAN 29
APR 2
MAY 19
AUG 8
AUG 16
Blanche interviews Maxwell; days later she is moved to a minimumsecurity
camp
Epstein Files Transparency Act signed after a 427–1 House vote; 30
days to comply
Trump, two sons and the Trump Organization sue the IRS and
Treasury for $10 billion
Bondi removed; Blanche, the President’s former defense lawyer, takes
over as acting attorney general
Settlement: claim dropped, audits closed on every return filed before
that date
Blanche confirmed 50–49; the $1.8 billion allies’ fund killed, the audit
deal untouched
Declines on television to pledge independence from the White House
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.

WANTED TO BELIEVE IT. In 1980 I cast my
ballot for John Anderson, an independent, because
a government too large to audit is a government
too large to trust. So when a movement
arrived promising to shrink it, end the
wars, balance the books and enforce the law,
I gave it a hearing. Eleven years on, I will say
plainly what I have concluded: it is the biggest
lie I have ever witnessed.
LAW AND ORDER, EXCEPT AT THE TOP. In
2024, Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley
wrote to the FBI accusing it of quietly revising
crime figures and calling the numbers unreliable.
Today the same party quotes the same
system as proof of its own success. I will concede
the decline is real: homicides fell 18 percent
in the first half of this year, and independent
analysts say so, not just the government.
But a party that trusts the measuring stick only
when it flatters its case has not adopted a standard.
It has adopted a scoreboard.
AND THEN THE PARDONS. Juan Orlando
Hernández moved more than four hundred
tons of cocaine and drew forty-five years.
He served roughly eighteen months and
walked out on a signature. Ross Ulbricht.
Larry Hoover. Some 100 drug-related clemencies.
Roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants,
including men convicted of assaulting police
officers. Ninety-six percent of second-term
grants were issued outside Justice Department
review. That is not law and order. That
is a favor window.
The kingpin got a signature.
The trafficker got a transfer.
The girls got a sealed file.
The Biggest Lie I Have
Ever Witnessed
I voted for John Anderson in 1980 because I believed
big government was dangerous. I still believe it.
That is exactly why I cannot vote for this one.
NO FOREIGN WARS. We fought a war with
Iran that Congress never voted on. The Abraham
Lincoln’s crew has been at sea more than
260 days with no date home. Iran sells its oil
at a better price today than before we started.
A BALANCED BUDGET. $39.8 trillion. About
$286,000 per household. Interest now costs
more than defense. Every point of it lands on
your mortgage, your car note and your child’s
tuition, all parts of the finances you were
promised you would control.
AND THE CHILDREN. The Epstein Files
Transparency Act passed the House 427–1
and was signed in November 2025. Nine
months later the file is still shut. But Ghislaine
Maxwell, days after a private meeting
with the Deputy Attorney General, was
moved to a minimum-security camp that
Bureau of Prisons policy says a sex offender
cannot be assigned to at all. No survivor ever
got that consideration.
I DID NOT LEAVE A MOVEMENT.
THE MOVEMENT LEFT THE OATH.
Source note: Clemency, crime and appropriation figuresThe Right Move for
the Wrong Reason
Scaling back the Korea drills is the first real
de-escalation of this term. Now do it three more times.
ONE GOOD ORDER. On Sunday the president instructed Secretary Hegseth to “substantially
reduce” the joint exercises with South Korea, calling them costly and a signal that is “totally inappropriate
and hostile” toward a North Korea he says has not been threatening. Set the messenger
aside. Lowering the temperature on the most heavily armed border on earth is the correct call,
and the first of its kind this term.
NOW DO IT AGAIN. The same week, he told Fox News that if Oman gets in the way, we will
bomb it. That is not a policy. That is a mood. Iran remains under an American air campaign
Congress never voted on. Maduro was taken by force in January. Greenland belongs to a NATO
ally, and this White House will not rule out taking it. No foreign wars was the promise. It has been
broken in three theaters.
“Withdrawal is not weakness. Keeping a promise never is.”
AND USE THE RELATIONSHIP. If the friendship with Kim Jong Un is real, spend it. Pyongyang
has shipped Russia some 33,000 containers of arms and buried thousands of its own men in
Kursk. Ask him to stop. That is what a good relationship is for.
THE HONEST PART. The stated reason was not peace. It was irritation that Seoul would not join
the Iran war. And the order came Sunday, while the drills began Monday, reduced but not canceled.
A right move made for a wrong reason is still a right move. It is also still a shaky foundation.
FOUR THEATERS, ONE PROMISE
KOREA Ulchi Freedom Shield cut on the president’s order, Aug. 16.
IRAN American air campaign continues. Congress has never voted.
VENEZUELA Maduro seized by U.S. forces, Jan. 3, 2026.
GREENLAND A NATO ally’s territory. Force not ruled out.
PYONGYANG ~33,000 containers of arms to Russia; troops in Kursk.
THE PROMISE “No foreign wars.” Kept in one place out of four.
Source: Truth Social post of Aug. 16, 2026; AP/PBS, NPR, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy and CNN reporting
of Aug. 16–17, 2026; Defense News and Washington Times reporting on DPRK support to Russia.
DE-ESCALATION IS NOT SURRENDER.
IT IS THE PROMISE YOU RAN ON.
NOW KEEP IT IN TEHRAN, IN CARACAS, AND IN NUUK.
NO MORE FOREIGN WARS
KEEP THE PROMISE.
Sources: Truman diary (May 1945); Executive Order 11154 (1964); Church Committee reports (1975–76);
Senate and Justice Department records, August 2026; Washington Post, PBS/AP, NBC News, Time, The Hill.
If J. Edgar Hoover
Became President
J. Edgar Hoover held one desk for forty-eight years and made
eight presidents afraid of him. In my opinion, we are now
watching the same instinct with every desk in its hands.
THE MAN WITH THE FILES. J. Edgar Hoover ran the Bureau from 1924 to 1972, through eight
presidents, and none of them fired him. His authority was never statutory. It sat in the locked
“Official and Confidential” files in his own office: derogatory material on congressmen, senators
and presidents. Truman wrote in 1945 that the FBI was drifting toward a Gestapo and dabbling
in sex-life scandals and blackmail. Johnson exempted him from mandatory retirement. Even
Robert Kennedy, with a brother in the White House, could not control him. Within days of his
death, his secretary destroyed the files.
AND WHAT HE DID TO CRITICS. In 1964 the Bureau mailed Dr. King an anonymous letter and
a tape urging him to end his own life. Agents planted a false story about the actress Jean Seberg
with a gossip columnist. Melvin Purvis, the agent who got the credit for Dillinger, was pushed
out and frozen out afterward. The Church Committee documented the pattern. Cross J. Edgar
Hoover, and you were not argued with. You were ruined.
AND THE PART HE HID. He ran a “Sex Deviates” program that collected files on suspected homosexuals
and got them fired from government work by the thousands, while spending his life
beside Clyde Tolson, his deputy, constant companion, and heir. His own private life was never
established, and the lurid stories remain unproven. What is documented is the arrangement:
one standard enforced on strangers, another kept for himself.
J. Edgar Hoover never had to win an argument.
He only had to have a file.
THE SAME INSTINCT, ALL THE DESKS. The Attorney General is the President’s former defense
lawyer, confirmed 50–49, three weeks after a federal judge set aside his settlement with
that same client, finding it had been filed in bad faith. The FBI Director has polygraphed his
own detail hunting leakers, turned the Bureau toward reporters who wrote about him, and sued
a magazine for describing him. Homeland Security is run by a senator introduced as a MAGA
warrior. The Homeland Security Secretary kept her job after federal agents killed two American
citizens in Minneapolis; she lost it over a $220 million advertising campaign featuring her on
horseback. J. Edgar Hoover would have recognized every part of that.
AND STILL NOTHING WAS DELIVERED. Retribution rules, and the public was played the
fool. Nine months after a transparency law passed 427–1, the Epstein file still takes a judge to
pry loose. Gasoline is up 26.7 percent, compared with 3.2 percent wage growth. Premiums rose
about 26 percent, with no replacement plan. The debt is $39.8 trillion.
THE HONEST PART. Presidents appoint allies; that is the job, and the Senate signs off. J. Edgar
Hoover was never elected and could not be removed. These men can be. But appointees leave
and judges do not.
J. EDGAR HOOVER NEEDED FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AND A FILE CABINET.
THIS ONE NEEDED NINETEEN MONTHS AND A SIGNATURE.
RETRIBUTION RULES. THE PUBLIC WAS PLAYED THE FOOL.
REPAIR TAKES LONGER THAN RUIN When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
are drawn from public records and cited reporting

HONEST POLITICS
Brent Lambi
When I filed this case, I expected a
straightforward process involving discovery
and documents. If the record supported
it, I also expected the true wrongdoer to
be named as a third party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not
appear in the case caption. I cannot prove
that today, and I will not tell readers otherwise.
I can only tell you what I believe and
why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and
its agents may themselves have been used
by someone else who gave them a version
of events and left them to act on it.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
THE LONGEST CON
In 1974, Republicans of substance walked into the Oval Office and said STOP.
Today, saying stop is what gets you destroyed.
SEVEN COUNTS AGAINST THE ENABLING PARTY
ON AUGUST 7, 1974, three Republicans walked into the Oval Office and told a Republican
president he did not have the votes and was not going to get them. Barry Goldwater.
Hugh Scott. John Rhodes. Two weeks earlier, six Republicans on the House Judiciary
Committee had crossed the aisle to vote articles of impeachment. Elliot Richardson
and William Ruckelshaus had resigned rather than fire a prosecutor. Howard Baker
had asked the question that ended a presidency.
Nobody called them traitors. They were called Republicans.
They did not act alone. Katharine Graham kept the Washington Post printing while
that same White House went after the broadcast licenses of her television stations. The
New York Times printed the Pentagon Papers and won 6 to 3 at the Supreme Court. A
free press did its job. A party with a spine did its job. The Republic survived the collision.
Fifty-two years later, that party is gone. What replaced it is, in this writer’s opinion,
the longest running confidence game ever worked on the American public.
THE ENABLER’S DICTIONARY
Every con needs confederates. Ours hold committee gavels, and they have built
themselves a vocabulary. “I’d rather work within the party. I did what I
thought was best under the circumstances. I don’t comment on social
media posts. I’d have to see the whole quote.”
Translated back into English: I saw it. I know exactly what it was. And I
want the endorsement more than I want the oath. That is not prudence.
That is a lookout at the door while the safe is emptied.
AND WHEN THEY REFUSE
Ask Mike Pence, whose reward for following the Constitution on one Wednesday in
January was a mob chanting for his hanging while a President suggested the mob had
a point.
Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, the most devoted MAGA voice in the House until she
demanded the Epstein files be opened. She was rebranded “Marjorie Traitor Greene,”
promised a primary challenge, and resigned her seat on January 5. Ask Thomas Massie,
Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, who signed that same petition.
Ask John McCain, told he was no war hero and insulted after his death. Ask Liz
Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Justin Amash. Ask
Chris Krebs, fired for saying the election was secure. Ask Brad Raffensperger and Rusty
Bowers, who simply counted. Of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach,
eight were gone within two years.
Every one a Republican. Not one accused of stealing a dollar. They were destroyed
for candor, and the survivors watched, learned, and shut up.
That silence is the party’s only real platform. Here is what it buys.
ONE: THE FILES THEY WILL NOT OPEN
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act;
the President signed it. It forbids withholding any record
for embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity.
Justice blew the deadline, dumped three million
pages a month late, and still sits on millions more. In
June a federal judge found the administration had likely
violated the Act. Not one Republican leader will say the
word all.
TWO: THE PARDON FOR THE
NARCO-PRESIDENT
Juan Orlando Hernández, president of Honduras,
convicted in a New York courtroom of conspiring to push
cocaine into this country, which prosecutors counted
in the hundreds of tons, and sentenced to 45 years. He
served about eighteen months. Pardoned December 1,
2025; out the same day. This administration blows up
boats in the name of the drug war and freed the biggest
trafficker it ever convicted.
THREE: THE AFFORDABILITY
THAT WENT SOMEWHERE ELSE
Through June, consumer prices were up 3.5% on the
year, gasoline up 26.7%, electricity up 4.0%, against wage
growth of 3.2%. The one ledger that soared belongs to
the family in the White House: a 927-page disclosure
reporting nearly $1.2 billion in crypto income for 2025,
with roughly $1.55 billion pulled out of World Liberty
Financial while outside token holders lost an estimated
$674 million.
FOUR: THE HEALTH CARE THEY LET EXPIRE
Congress let the enhanced premium tax credits lapse
on December 31, 2025. Marketplace premiums rose
roughly 26% for 2026, and KFF estimates the amount
subsidized enrollees pay themselves more than doubled,
from about $888 a year to $1,904. Analysts put the
added uninsured in the millions. There was no replacement
plan. There has never been a replacement plan.
FIVE: THE FARM ECONOMY THEY CALL A WIN
USDA forecasts 2026 net farm income at $153.4 billion,
a fourth straight year of pressure, while farm sector
debt hits a record $624.7 billion and interest expense a
record $33 billion, about $90 million a day. Chapter 12
farm bankruptcies rose 46% in 2025. Against a 25 million
tonne soybean pledge, Chinese buyers had booked
roughly 200,000 tonnes. Our farmers are being paid in
bridge payments instead of markets.
SIX: THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
He promised to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four
hours. Nineteen months into this term, the truces last thirty-
two hours at a time and men are still dying in the mud.
SEVEN: THE BILL YOUR CHILDREN INHERIT
$39.8 trillion in federal debt, about $286,000 per
household. Interest on that debt now costs more than
the entire defense budget. The party of fiscal responsibility
ran it up, then named a ballroom after itself.
Image created with AI.
IF YOU WANT YOUR FAMILY SAFE FROM DRUGS………………………………….DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT THE FILES OPENED AND THE PREDATORS NAMED………DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT REAL SOLUTIONS IN HEALTH CARE……………………………….DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT HIGHER FARM INCOME…………………………………………………..DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT MONEY LEFT OVER FOR A HOME OF YOUR OWN…………..DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT AN END TO FOREIGN WARS…………………………………………….DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
IF YOU WANT THE DEBT BROUGHT DOWN…………………………………………..DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
State house. County board. School board. Congress. There is no local exception to a national loyalty oath.
AND BEFORE YOU DECIDE IT DOESN’T MATTER, ASK YOURSELF ONE MORE QUESTION:
CAN YOU STILL AFFORD THE GAS TO DRIVE TO THE POLLS?
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
THEN DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author
of this defamation but a vehicle for it. To
the extent that my filings suggested otherwise,
my apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or
its agents will come forward or tell others
what I suspect they may already know: the
origin of this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute
with the federal government is ongoing
and that the government’s objective is to
silence and discredit me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In
this political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.

HONEST POLITICS
Brent Lambi
The Strait is Not The Border
Forty thousand people looked at the world as it is and
decided to swim. The rest of us should ask what they were
swimming away from and who built it.
Last week, tens of thousands of young Moroccans walked into the sea. French reporting
put the figure near 40,000; Ceuta’s own leader estimated 60,000, with Madrid counting roughly
8,000 children among them. They swam around a breakwater toward a beach in Africa that
happens to belong to Spain. Dozens drowned doing it.
Ask why, honestly. The answer is not recklessness. It is arithmetic. From Fnideq, a young
man can see, five kilometers across open water, a life he cannot reach in forty years of labor
on his own side. He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim. Meanwhile, Ukrainians
die defending a border, Gazans die trapped inside one, and half the world lives beyond
the reach of a physician.
He priced the swim against the wait and took the swim.
We are told some nations simply do things right. Norway educates its children, insures its
sick, and pensions its elderly. But Norway also sits atop North Sea oil and had the rare discipline
to bank the proceeds for the unborn instead of spending them on itself. Afghanistan
has been an empire’s chessboard for a century and a half, with British, Soviet, and American
powers each arriving with a theory and departing with a body count. Institutions matter
enormously. So does whether the world ever permitted you to build any.
That distinction should trouble us, because it decides who gets to be born lucky.
So here are the questions we should ask aloud and answer on the record:
If prosperity is largely an accident of geology, geography, and who invaded whom, on what
moral ground do we call it earned?
Is a border a legitimate line of governance, or a fence around a lifeboat?
We spent $113 billion on 145 days of war in Iran. What would that sum have purchased in
clinics, wells, and classrooms, and which purchase would have produced fewer swimmers?
If a stranger’s child drowns within sight of your shore, does distance excuse you, or only
comfort you?
And the hardest one: do we hold these gifts in trust, or in fee simple?
A man born on the lucky side of the water will tell you
it was his swimming that got him there.
The Compliment You Didn’t Ask For
On being diagnosed by people who have never opened a chart
Congratulations. You have been diagnosed.
Not by a physician, not after an examination, and not on the basis of anything you actually
said. You were diagnosed the instant you produced a fact your opponent could not answer.
The condition is called Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the only known symptom is
winning.
Consider how the diagnosis is made. You cite a dollar figure. You cite a court ruling. You
ask a question with a documentary answer. Your opponent, finding no fact of his own, reaches
past the argument and reaches for you. He does not say the number is wrong. He says you
are unwell.
In debate, this maneuver has a name older than the republic. It is the ad hominem, and it
is not a rebuttal but a surrender delivered in the tone of an insult. A man with better evidence
produces the evidence. A man without it produces a label. When the label arrives, the scoring
is over; only the volume is still in dispute.
A man with better evidence produces the evidence.
A man without it produces a label.
Notice what the phrase concedes. To call criticism deranged is to admit that criticism exists
in quantity and that ordinary people, given the record, keep arriving at the same unflattering
conclusion. That is not a syndrome. That is a consensus.
Honesty requires a word for the other side. Some criticism is unhinged. There are people
who read a grocery receipt as a coup and who would be no better company under any other
president. Say so when you see it. But the cure for a bad argument is a better one, not a nickname,
and the man who cannot tell the difference has told you which he lacks.
So accept the honor. When someone informs you that you are deranged, he has told you
three things: he heard you, he could not answer you, and he would rather discuss your mind
than his candidate’s record.
Take the trophy. It was awarded under protest, which is the only kind worth having.
The Sickness No Medical
School Can Cure
A billion dollars to build healers, while others use
their offices to tear them down
CHANGE MY MIND
In February 2024, a woman in her nineties stood before a room of medical students in the
Bronx and told them their tuition was gone. Ruth Gottesman had taught at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine since 1968, specializing in learning disabilities, and chaired its board of
trustees. The billion dollars came from her late husband, David, an early investor in Berkshire
Hathaway, who left it to her to spend as she saw fit. She saw fit to make Einstein tuition
free in perpetuity, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.
Understand what she actually bought. Tuition ran nearly $59,000 a year, and roughly half
of Einstein’s graduates left owing more than $200,000. Debt of that size does not merely burden
a young doctor; it selects her specialty for her. It steers her away from pediatrics, from
primary care, from the clinic in the neighborhood that needs her most and pays her least.
Gottesman did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible and freed them to study,
to research, and to serve.
“She did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible.”
Set that beside the spectacle we now call oversight. Anthony Fauci spent five decades on
HIV, Ebola, and COVID and helped build a program credited with saving millions of lives
abroad. His reward in 2026 was a subpoena and a hearing room designed to produce a referral
rather than an answer.
One American spent a fortune expanding the nation’s capacity to heal. Others use their
offices, their subpoena power, and our money to attack the people who already did.
That is the contrast worth amplifying. A gift like Gottesman’s is not charity; it is infrastructure.
It will outlive every politician currently auditioning outrage for a fundraising list.
Medical school can teach anatomy. It cannot teach gratitude. It can teach pharmacology,
but there is no course in humility, and no prescription for a public official who mistakes
destruction for duty. That sickness is moral, not clinical, and the only known treatment is
administered at the ballot box.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897),
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
What the Pool Reflects
Sixteen million dollars, a friend with a contract awarded without
bidding, and a mirror the President refuses to look into.
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar (1894)
A reflecting pool has exactly one job. It shows you what is standing in front of it.
For roughly $16 million of the public’s money, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
has performed that job with a fidelity no one in this administration intended. It reflected a
rushed vanity project. It reflected a contract handed to a friend. It reflected a government
that, confronted with its own failure, went looking for a citizen to punish.
THE MONEY
A $14.7 million contract awarded without competitive bidding went to Atlantic Industrial
Coatings of Virginia to spread blue waterproofing across the pool’s concrete floor, justified
by urgent need. The Park Service bypassed competitive bidding by invoking an urgency exemption
tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary. A second contract, worth $1.7 million, went
to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio firm whose owner keeps a home in Palm Beach less than a
mile from the President’s Palm Beach residence. Its controlling figure, John J. Cafaro, has two
felony convictions: a 2001 guilty plea for conspiring to bribe a congressman and a 2010 plea
for a campaign finance violation. A deadline became a license. The license became a favor.
The work failed within days. The coating peeled. The water turned green. And the President
of the United States went on social media to announce, without evidence, that saboteurs had
cut a gash measuring 250 feet into the facade and poured corrosive chemicals into the water.
THE BLAME
Then came the arrests. A person who was 17 years old was cited over a piece of paint. And
David “Davey” Hearn, who competed in the Olympics three times, was indicted on a felony
charge carrying a sentence of up to ten years, accused of pulling up roughly two square feet
of liner. The U.S. Attorney announced “tremendous evidence.”
On July 31, that case collapsed. Prosecutors told the court the damage resulted from
flawed installation by the contractor, not vandalism. More damningly, they said that if the
Interior Department had been forthcoming with information already in its possession, no
indictment would ever have been sought.
A man who cannot look at a mirror without
demanding it show him someone else.
Credit where it is owed: Jeanine Pirro corrected the record against her own interest. Days
earlier, the Interior secretary had told the country the contractor did a fantastic job and would
be rehired for the repairs. And the President? On Saturday he answered the confession of his
own Justice Department by insisting the major damage was still the work of vandals.
WHAT HISTORY RECORDS
Here is the part worth remembering. History reflects well on the public servant who owns
a mistake. It always has. Voters forgive error; they do not forgive the official who insists the
mirror is lying. Pirro will be remembered for the harder filing, not the easier one. An honest
correction is not weakness; it is the whole reason an office is worth holding.
An Olympian’s name was put on a federal felony indictment to cover a contractor’s failure.
That is not a paint problem. That is the machinery of federal prosecution turned into a
drop cloth.
THE RIPPLE
“We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going,
and then go with the drove.” Twain wrote that of the American
habit of borrowing an opinion rather than forming one.
But a reflecting pool does more than mirror. It ripples. Whatever is thrown into it travels
outward to the edges, which is to say, to us. A political party is an implied association. When
a voter stands inside a party line and says nothing about a contract awarded without bidding
and steered to a neighbor, or an innocent citizen charged to protect an official story, that
silence becomes part of the reflection. It is not only the President in that water. It is everyone
standing behind him who declined to speak.
Congress has the bidding under review. Voters hold something stronger: a ballot and the
standing to demand honesty before they spend it. Demand it out loud and demand it of your
own side first. History reflects favorably on those who did and keeps a clear record of those
who did not.

Your Ballot Is Not Local
A ballot cast at the county line is spent in Washington and in every capital watching how we answer.
There is no longer any such thing as a purely local vote.
A county commissioner, legislator, or school board member running on the MAGA line is not an isolated figure. That candidate is a precinct in a national machine. The candidate’s margin is reported as a mandate. Party leadership reads the win as permission. What the candidate ratifies at home is executed in Washington and exported to the rest of the world.
To shrug at either is to choose the predator over the prey.
So put two questions to that candidate and write down the answers.
Will you demand the complete, unredacted release of the Epstein files? Congress already answered: the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed overwhelmingly and set a December 19 deadline. Seven months later, a federal judge was still ordering the Department to unredact records or explain itself. Among those records was a draft indictment with the names of potential accomplices blacked out. Redaction shields victims. Nothing in that statute authorized the Department to shield names.
Will you condemn the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández? A federal jury convicted him; a judge sentenced him to 45 years for a scheme that moved more than 400 tons of cocaine into this country, the equivalent of some 4.5 billion doses, while he boasted he would stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses. The President erased the punishment in a social media post. This month he returned home to cheers in Tegucigalpa.
I state this as my opinion, and I mean it plainly. A candidate who will not answer those two questions stands on the same moral ground as someone who knows what was done to a child and keeps it secret. The files are records of children sold to powerful men. The pardon freed a trafficker who poisoned somebody’s sons and daughters by the ton. To shrug at either is to choose the predator over the prey. I would not leave a child in such a person’s care. I do not intend to leave a county, a state, or a country there either.
Your ballot does not stop at the county line. Cast locally, it is spent nationally and globally: in a Justice Department that treats a deadline as a suggestion, in a pardon power operated as a favor bank for the convicted and connected, and in every capital now reading American law as negotiable.
Ask them at the forum. Ask them on the doorstep. Then vote as though the answer will be enforced in your name, because it will be.
Name Calling Is Not a Denial
The President answers questions about Epstein with a label.
A label is not an answer.
Ask the President why the Epstein files remain sealed and redacted, and you will not get an answer. You will get a diagnosis.
In Michigan on July 27, a man in the crowd accused him of protecting pedophiles. Mr. Trump did not rebut the charge. He waited for security, pointed into the audience, and pronounced the man a communist. He then pivoted to a riff about seized houses and tax rates of 80 percent. The accusation went unanswered. The crowd got a villain instead.
This is the whole method. Demand transparency from the left and you are a communist. Demand it from the right, as Marjorie Taylor Greene did, and you are branded a traitor. Demand it in print and the entire matter becomes a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. The label performs the work the evidence cannot.
“The faithful execution of the laws is not a left-wing hobby.”
Consider what is being called communism here: the belief that the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law the President himself signed, ought to be obeyed. That is not Marx. That is Article II. The faithful execution of the laws is not reserved for the political left, and insisting upon it is not a symptom requiring treatment.
Note, too, who gets pathologized. Not the trafficker. Not the men in the flight logs. The citizen asking the question.
A man with nothing to hide answers questions. A man with something to hide changes the subject and then insults whoever noticed. We have now watched both.
Release the files. Unredacted. Then call us whatever you like.
A SATIRE ON THE STEWARDSHIP OF PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS
The Crazed Librarian
A public collection is a trust, not a private shelf, and the clerk at the desk is not the author.
Imagine a librarian who wakes one morning having forgotten that he does not own the library.
The books were bought with the public’s money. The building was raised by the public’s hand. His only job is to keep the doors open, the shelves stocked, and the card catalog honest, so that every citizen who walks in may find what is there and judge it for himself. Instead, our librarian arrives with a red pen, a stepladder, and a nameplate.
First, the pen. The Smithsonian, that great national reading room, has been directed to hand over its wall placards, its exhibition catalogs, its internal guidelines, and its plans through 2029, so that “divisive” language may be replaced with something more “unifying,” as though the American past were a customer complaint to be managed. At the Kennedy Center, the board was cleared and restocked with loyalists. Programming vanished. Artists walked. This is not curation. This is a librarian rewriting the endings he dislikes and shelving the rest in the basement.
“One tradition endows. The other edits.”
Second, the ladder. Andrew Carnegie funded some 2,500 libraries, put his name on the masonry, and then handed the collections to the towns that used them. Set that beside the Moscow model of librarianship, where the catalog is revised to match the man behind the desk and yesterday’s authors are quietly erased. One tradition endows. The other edits.
Third, the nameplate. Dulles. Penn Station, its name reportedly dangled in exchange for sixteen billion dollars in frozen tunnel money. The Institute of Peace, rebranded. The Kennedy Center itself was renamed in December, but a federal judge barred the change in May, and workmen scraped off the letters in June. A national park pass bearing the President’s face beside Washington’s. A House committee voting 33 to 25 to name the Opera House for the First Lady. Somewhere, a bill waits to make an international airport a monogram.
Fourth, the tote bag. A rule so obvious that it was never written down: what the library buys or produces while the librarian is employed does not follow him home when he retires. It is not his to box up and shelve beside a bathtub for late reading. The collection stays. The clerk leaves.
A librarian who stamps his name across every spine has confused stewardship with ownership. The remedy is old and unglamorous: he is not the author, not the publisher, not the owner. He is the temporary clerk on duty.
The books belong to us. Every one of them. Including the ones he would rather we did not read.
A PERSONAL NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ME FROM A WINDOW – BUT THEY ARE TRYING
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of falling from hospital windows. Businessmen who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient ends on staircases and balconies across Moscow.
I am writing this from Omaha, Nebraska. I have not been thrown from a window.
THE IRS AS A WEAPON OF SILENCE
But I am being thrown out of something just as vital: my life savings. What I am experiencing is what I believe to be a targeted, methodical IRS assault. Not random, not routine, not coincidental. It follows my speaking out. It follows my refusal to be silenced. In Russia, they silence critics with gravity. In America, I think they are learning to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial ruin. Stripping away everything a person has built until the cost of their voice becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi v. United States of America, et al Case # 8:2026cv00101U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska
SLANDER THROUGH TRUSTED INSTITUTIONS: THE BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY CAMPAIGN
And the IRS is not the only instrument being wielded against me. I believe I have also been the victim of deliberate, government-sourced slander and lies spread to professional contacts who had no reason to doubt what they were told. I believe that honest, hardworking realtors employed by Berkshire Hathaway, one of the most respected real estate companies in America built on a foundation of integrity, were fed false information about me by government actors. These were decent professionals simply doing their jobs, used as unwitting vectors of what I think is a smear campaign designed to isolate me professionally, damage my reputation, and ensure that doors would close before I could even knock on them. This is not the free market. This is not the rule of law. This is the deliberate destruction of a private citizen’s livelihood by government machinery set in motion to punish dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is as much of a victim in this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, Pro Se V. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, et al Case
# DO1CI260001752Nebraska District Court, Douglas County
I AM STILL STANDING
This is the American version of defenestration. No broken glass. No headlines. Just a man with his savings under assault, his name poisoned in his own community meant to serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching. The message is clear: speak up, and we will take everything. Your money. Your reputation. Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.
Both Hands On The Scale
They came for the lawyers. Then they came for the newsroom that reported it.
Two things protect an ordinary person from a government determined to have its way: a lawyer willing to take an unpopular case and a reporter willing to publish an unwelcome fact. Both were squeezed quietly through paperwork.
Start with the lawyers. The White House signed orders against Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey, stripping security clearances, canceling government contracts, and barring their attorneys from federal buildings. In plain terms, you cannot get in the door, and your clients are punished for hiring you. A judge found that the firms were chosen for the causes they champion and the clients they represent. Four federal judges ruled the orders unconstitutional; the government dropped its appeals. Nine other firms never fought. Instead, they pledged hundreds of millions in free legal work to avoid being named. Protection money.
The courts said no. So the pressure moved to the institution that still tells the public what happened.
60 Minutes reported that campaign against the law firms. Scott Pelley won a Cronkite Award for that very coverage. Meanwhile, the President was suing CBS for $20 billion over an interview edit, while CBS’s parent needed federal approval for an $8 billion merger. Picture the person suing you while also holding the permit you need to stay open. Paramount paid $16 million. The merger cleared.
Now follow the chain. The new owner installed Bari Weiss atop CBS News. Weiss fired the show’s executive producer, three senior producers, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, and then installed Nick Bilton, a technology journalist with no traditional broadcast news experience. On June 2, Pelley was fired too, a day after reportedly telling staff that Weiss was “murdering the show.” A finished segment on an El Salvador prison had already been pulled. Three correspondents remain.
No law was passed. No vote was taken. Clearances, contracts, a merger review, and a personnel file did the work.
Silence the lawyer and the case is never filed. Buy the network and the silencing is never reported.
That is not a policy dispute. That is the removal of both witnesses.
So put these questions to every Republican or MAGA candidate on your ballot, on the record:
ONE. Four federal judges ruled these orders against law firms unconstitutional. Do you agree with those rulings: yes or no?
TWO. Should a federal license, contract, or merger approval ever depend on how a network covers the President: yes or no?
And if a candidate will not answer either question, ask plainly: why are you against the rule of law and the First Amendment?
Silence is an answer. In my opinion, it is the wrong one, and it belongs on the ballot beside the candidate’s name.

ON THE POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS HONOR
We the People, Not We
the Vindictive
The nation’s highest civic tributes have become
spoils of a partisan war that ought to end at the grave.
It is time to bind them in statute.
When Lindsey Graham lies in state beneath the Capitol dome on July 28, the Rotunda
will do what it too often does. It will confer the republic’s highest civic honor
by the oldest and least honorable of standards: who had the votes.
There is no statute that governs this. None. Lying in state requires only a concurrent
resolution of Congress, and the criteria are whatever the majority happens to
feel that week. That is precisely why the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a man who marched
from Selma, ran twice for president, and carried the moral weight of a movement,
was denied the Capitol Rotunda his supporters requested and sent home to a state
capitol instead.
Honor flows to friends․ Insult flows to rivals․
The dead deserve better than a scorecard․
It is why John McCain, a genuine war hero, was saluted with the flag grudgingly
lowered to half staff. A sitting president raised it and lowered it again only after veterans’
groups shamed him into decency.
The pattern is unmistakable. The dead are ranked not by service to the country
but by their standing with whoever holds the gavel and the flagpole. And so the
machinery of national mourning, including the Rotunda, the flag at half staff, and
commemorative coins and stamps, becomes one more prize in a feud that should
have no place beside a casket.
This is a disgrace, and it is fixable. Congress should establish clear, neutral criteria
in federal law for who receives these honors, considering the length and character
of national service and measuring it by law rather than by grudge. It should take
the decision out of the hands of small men who treat a funeral as a ballot.
The Rotunda belongs to the nation, not to a faction. The flag at half staff should
salute the citizen, not flatter the powerful. Let these honors be dispensed by We the
People, not We the Vindictive.

The Wanted Poster
and the Parade
Picture your own town. Then look at what we’ve become.
Picture the sheriff’s office in your own town. On the wall hangs a poster: WANTED.
The charge is stealing children by carrying them off from a neighboring county
in the middle of a fight. Everyone who walks in sees that face. Everyone knows what
he is accused of. Now picture the Fourth of July. The mayor doesn’t just let that man
into town. He gives him the lead float. He seats him up front where the children can
wave. He rides beside him down Main Street, smiling for the cameras, while the
band plays and the flags snap in the wind. Nobody mentions the poster. It is still on
the wall, three blocks away, gathering dust.
“The poster is still on the wall․ We just handed him the float․”
That parade was real. It happened on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. The
man on the float was Vladimir Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court
since March 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The lead float
was a red carpet and a shared limousine. The mayor was the President of the United
States. And the poster, the warrant, is still on the wall, gathering dust.
There is a second float in this parade. Israel’s prime minister rides it while under
his own ICC warrant for the conduct of the war in Gaza. He is welcomed to the
reviewing stand more often than any other guest in town. When someone asks the
mayor why, the answer is always the same: these are good men to do business with.
As if a warrant were a credit rating. As if the poster on the wall were a suggestion.
And here is the part that should turn a decent stomach. There is one poster that
can never be printed in this town: the mayor’s own. We built the sheriff’s office so
that no outside court could ever hang our leaders on that wall. A rule that binds
only the strangers you dislike, and never the friends you profit from, is not the law.
It is a parade permit.
You can tell what a town honors by whom it puts on the lead float. Right now, we
are saving that seat for wanted men while asking the children to wave.

The Chickenhawk’s Ledger
They declare the wars. Someone else’s children pay for them.
They send the young to die, then call it honor.
Consider the arithmetic no one in power wants totaled. The average American
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was about 26 years old. He earned a junior enlisted
wage, often $25,000 to $40,000 a year, and his net worth, after a truck payment and
some debt, hovered near zero. He left behind a spouse who will raise his children
on the memory of a folded flag.
Now consider those who signed his orders. The President draws $400,000 a year.
A member of Congress draws $174,000, and the median lawmaker is worth roughly
$1 million. In the House, the average member is worth some $8 million. They vote
for war from marble chambers, confident that their own sons will never have to
trade civilian life for a Humvee.
“The powerful discover their courage precisely when
the bleeding will be done by someone else․”
The pattern is bipartisan and shameless. Donald Trump, who as commander
in chief ordered strikes and deployments, sat out Vietnam through a string of deferments,
capped by a convenient diagnosis of heel spurs. Bill Clinton, who fired
cruise missiles from the Oval Office, maneuvered clear of that same war through
his own tangle of deferments. Two men, two parties, one privilege: the wars are
always for other people’s children.
This is the oldest swindle in the republic. The powerful discover their courage
precisely when the bleeding will be done by someone poorer, younger, and more
decent than themselves. The soldier believes he is defending a democracy. Too often
he is defending the fortunes and reputations of men who arranged, when it was
their turn, to be somewhere safe.
We are told to honor the fallen. Fine. But honor is cheap when it costs a wreath
and a speech. Real honor would mean this: no one who dodged a war should vote
to start one, and no lecture on sacrifice from a millionaire who never risked a dime
or a son.
The ultimate price is paid by the few: the young, the broke, and the loyal, all
on behalf of the many who profit and preen. Until that ledger is read aloud, the
speeches are only noise over fresh graves.

Selling Tickets to Insider Information
on a Platform Called “Truth Social”?
Consider the branding. A company named for truth, running a platform named
for truth, now proposes to sell truth itself by the millisecond to the highest bidder.
Beginning August 1, Trump Media & Technology Group’s “Truth API” will pipe the
president’s posts that move markets to banks and trading firms milliseconds before
the public sees them, for a reported monthly fee in the six figures. The name promises
information for the people; the product delivers it to the auction winner.
Recall Joseph Kennedy’s shoeshine boy, trading on the same tip as the tycoon.
At least he shared the tycoon’s information. Today, the White House teleprompter
operator reads the words that move markets before they are even spoken and is
better informed than Kennedy’s bootblack ever was, while the public learns them
last. Proximity to the podium is now an asset for rent.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Strip the euphemism and it is plain: tickets to insider information, sold at the
door. Speed, when the merchandise is government policy, is no convenience. It is
a head start on the Treasury, marketed by a company largely owned by the president’s
own trust. The SEC exists to forbid exactly this asymmetry. That presidents
were exempted from conflict of interest statutes decades ago does not bless the arrangement;
it exposes the loophole. Every prior occupant treated policy as public
property and released it to everyone at the same time. This one meters the tap and
pockets the meter.
Retire the pretense: “Truth Social” is a turnstile, and truth is the commodity behind
it, sold first to the few and delayed for the many. Veritas pro populo? Not at
these prices. “Markets already move on our posts,” the company boasts. Precisely.
That is the confession, not the defense.

The Wrong Kind of Strength
When the Pentagon starts measuring its people by their
hormones instead of their heads, the Republic should worry.
The Secretary of Defense has apparently concluded that the gravest threat to
American arms is not incompetence, not poor judgment, not the slow erosion of
merit, but low testosterone. Last week, Pete Hegseth ordered mandatory annual
hormone screening for every service member over thirty, wrapping the order in
swaggering rhetoric about high testosterone and a “Department of War.” Physicians
reacted with something close to disbelief; one kinesiologist dismissed the idea
of blanket screening of everyone over thirty as a ridiculous notion. They are right.
Consider what actually won the Second World War. It was not the biggest biceps
in the barracks. It was radar, the codebreakers, the Manhattan Project, penicillin,
and an industrial machine no adversary on earth could match. America triumphed
because it out-thought its enemies, not because it looked more menacing. The decisive
weapon was the disciplined human mind, marshaled by leaders who understood
that victory is counted in objectives achieved, not in blood spilled.
Our finest commanders earned their laurels the same way. Washington’s patient
retreats and Eisenhower’s meticulous planning avoided needless slaughter rather
than chasing it. Strategic restraint is not weakness. It is the highest form of strength,
and it requires a clear head, not a chemically inflated one.
That is precisely why this fixation alarms. We are telling the men and women
who guard the most fearsome arsenal ever assembled, an arsenal capable of ending
civilizations, that aggression is a virtue to be maximized. Roid rage and the nuclear
codes are not a pairing any sane republic should court.
And beneath the hormone charts lies the real rot: a merit system built on competence,
character, and candor is being quietly swapped for a loyalty system built on
flattery. Advancement now flows to those who echo the boss, not to those who tell
him hard truths. Ability is out; adoration is in.
Has all sanity left Washington? The nation’s defense demands both the best
minds we can find and the spine to promote them.
When the Bank Robber
Lectures You on Vault Security
A convicted felon’s crusade against “election fraud”
collapses the moment you read the record.
When Donald Trump warns America about “election fraud,” listen closely. It is
the bank robber lecturing the tellers on vault security. No public figure alive has a
thinner claim to the language of law and honesty, and the case against him is not
opinion or partisan spin. It consists of docket entries, signed memos, and pardon
paperwork. Together, they form a record any citizen can read.
Trump is a convicted felon, found guilty by a Manhattan jury in 2024 on thirty
four counts of falsifying business records. It was the first such verdict against a
former president in our history. Not an accusation. A verdict. He lectures us on
“rigged” systems from the far side of a conviction he could not talk his way out of.
Then recall 2020. He swore the election was stolen and marched into court
roughly sixty times to prove it, appearing before judges he appointed. Even his own
attorney general found no fraud that could have changed the result. He lost nearly
every case because he had no evidence. A man who cannot win a single fraud case
has no standing to cry fraud forever.
Consider whom he has freed. On his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted
some 1,500 January 6 defendants, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
convicted of seditious conspiracy and rioters who beat the officers defending the
Capitol. The party of “back the blue” now cheers the very men who bloodied them.
Then, in December 2025, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former
Honduran president whom a U.S. jury convicted of moving over 400 tons of cocaine
toward American streets in one of the largest and most violent trafficking
conspiracies in the world. He bombs fishing boats in the name of a drug war while
unlocking a convicted kingpin’s cell.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Consider whom he shields. He signed a law to release the Epstein files, then let
his own Justice Department blow past the deadline and keep the record buried.
His deputy attorney general, his former personal lawyer, interviewed Ghislaine
Maxwell, a convicted trafficker of underage girls. She was quietly moved to a softer
prison. The victims wait. Maxwell gets comfort.
And consider whom he exempts. In 2026, a Justice Department memo declared
the IRS “forever barred” from auditing Trump, his family, his trusts, and his businesses.
A possible $100 million penalty simply evaporated. One set of rules for you.
No rules for him.
This is not conservatism. It is not law and order. It is a man rewriting history in
real time, betting you won’t check the record. In November, check it. And if you can
cheer every line above, you have earned the red face to match the red hat.
A Personal Note From the Author
They haven’t thrown me from a window but they are trying.
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient ends on staircases and
balconies across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha, Nebraska. I have not been
thrown from a window.
The IRS as a weapon of silence.
But I am being thrown out of something just as vital: my life savings. What I am
experiencing is what I believe to be a targeted, methodical IRS assault. It is not random,
routine, or coincidental. It follows my speaking out. It follows my refusal to
be silenced. In Russia, they silence critics with gravity. In America, I think they are
learning to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial ruin, stripping away everything
a person has built until the cost of speaking becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi v. United States of America, et al., Case No. 8:2026cv00101,
U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska.
Slander Through Trusted Institutions: The Berkshire Hathaway Campaign
And the IRS is not the only instrument being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-sourced slander and lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason to doubt what they were told. I believe
that honest, hardworking real estate agents employed by Berkshire Hathaway were
fed false information about me by government actors. Berkshire Hathaway is one
of the most respected real estate companies in America and was built on a foundation
of integrity. These were decent professionals simply doing their jobs, used
as unwitting vectors of what I think is a smear campaign designed to isolate me
professionally, damage my reputation, and ensure that doors would close before
I could even knock on them. This is not the free market. This is not the rule of law.
This is the deliberate destruction of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is as
much a victim of this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, pro se v. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, et al.,
Case No. D01CI260001752, Nebraska District Court, Douglas County.
I am still standing.
This is the American version of defenestration. No broken glass. No headlines.
Just a man with his savings under assault and his name poisoned in his own community,
all of it meant to serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching. The message
is clear: speak up, and we will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.Sell Alaska. Take the money. Run.
Two broke empires once sold us a continent.
It is time we returned the favor.
America has a long and honorable tradition of buying continents from broke
warmongers. It is time we returned the favor.
Consider the pattern. In 1803, Napoleon needed cash after bleeding out in Haiti
and preparing to bleed out across Europe. He sold us 828,000 square miles for
$15 million, roughly three cents an acre, because empires with expensive hobbies
eventually need a garage sale. In 1867, Tsar Alexander II, still nursing the hangover
of the Crimean War, sold us Alaska for $7.2 million. Two cents an acre. Seward’s
Folly, the papers sneered. The folly, of course, belonged to the man who had spent
his treasury on artillery instead of infrastructure. We are now that man.
“Every nation that ever sold a continent said the same
things right up until the invoices arrived.”
Our national debt has sailed past $37 trillion, propelled by a foreign policy that
treats the Pentagon budget like a bar tab we will settle in the next life. Venezuela.
Iraq, twice, in case the first one did not take. And now serious people in serious
rooms are discussing the acquisition of Greenland, apparently on the theory that
what this country really needs is more frozen real estate we cannot afford to heat.
So sell the frozen real estate we already have.
Alaska is, geographically speaking, Canadian. It sits atop British Columbia and
the Yukon like a hat. It is separated from the contiguous United States by an entire
foreign country, a fact we handle by pretending the map is not doing what the map
is obviously doing. Alaskans drive to the rest of America by driving through Canada.
Let us stop the charade.
The price? Alaska’s proven oil and gas reserves, mineral deposits, fisheries, timber,
and 365 million acres of land plausibly run into the low trillions. Call it $3 trillion,
at a friendly neighbor rate, with financing available. That is eight percent of the
debt erased in a single afternoon, plus we stop paying for statehood’s upkeep and
gain a permanent excuse to blame Ottawa for the price of salmon.
The objections write themselves. National security. Sovereignty. Sentiment.
Fine. But note that every nation that ever sold a continent said the same things,
right up until the invoices arrived.
History’s lesson is not that great powers fall. It is that they get billed. Russia and
France learned it. We are about to.
Two cents an acre bought it. Let us see what we can get.
This satire is offered in the spirit of Swift and in earnest about the arithmetic

Fill America’s gas tanks with corn, bring the troops home,
and the one weapon Iran holds over us simply disappears.
The U.S.–Iran ceasefire fell apart this month. American forces struck dozens of targets,
Iran hit back at bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, and the Strait of Hormuz, the sea
lane that carries much of the world’s oil, came under attack again.
The plain truth most headlines skip: Iran’s greatest weapon against ordinary Americans
isn’t a missile; it’s the price of gas. Threaten that shipping lane and pump prices
jump, hurting families that have nothing to do with the fight. Remove that lever, and
Iran loses most of its power over us. This can be done without an invasion and without
putting American lives at risk.
1. More Home-Grown Fuel in Every Gallon
Today’s gas is mostly oil with a splash of ethanol, a clean fuel made from American
corn. The plan raises that to “E27”: 27 percent ethanol in every gallon. More corn in
the tank means less oil burned, so a distant crisis does far less damage to your wallet.
Farmers win, drivers win, Tehran loses leverage.
2. Make New Cars ‘Flex-Fuel’ Ready
A flex-fuel car runs on high ethanol blends as easily as it runs on gasoline, and the
equipment that allows it to do so costs about a hundred dollars per car. Require it in
all new vehicles, and the country can shift to home-grown fuel as fast as farmers can
supply it.
3. One Clear Red Line — and Only One
America steps back from policing the region and stops offensive action against Iran
with one exception. If Iran moves to build an actual nuclear weapon, the facility involved
can be struck precisely from the air, with no ground troops. One firm rule replaces
a hundred smaller provocations that keep the war spiraling.
4. Let the Peacemakers Work
Qatar and Pakistan are already carrying messages between Washington and
Tehran. Back that channel: ease sanctions that punish everyday Iranians in exchange
for letting inspectors back into Iran’s nuclear sites. Talking costs nothing
and risks no one.
5. Move Troops Out of Harm’s Way
The bases Iran keeps firing at are tripwires. Pull those exposed forces back,
and there are fewer targets, fewer excuses for the next round, and less pressure
to strike again.
The bottom line is simple: Make American gasoline immune
to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s ability to
squeeze us would quietly end, with no war required.

A Rigged Game: When the
Plaintiff Owns the Courthouse
How “Plaintiff Donald Trump” became the accuser,
enforcer, and appointer of his own judges, all at once.
Imagine a baseball game where one team’s owner also hires the umpire, picks
the official scorer, and installs his personal batting coach as commissioner of the
league. Would you call that a fair game? Of course not. You’d call it a fraud. Yet that
is precisely the arrangement now being built around a single litigant in America:
Plaintiff Donald Trump.
Here is what should alarm every citizen, whether left, right, or independent:
When Donald Trump is a party to a legal fight, he does not merely argue his case.
He controls the machinery meant to judge it. He directs the prosecutors who decide
whom to charge. He nominates the federal judges who preside over the disputes.
And he has now placed Todd Blanche, the lawyer who personally defended him
in his criminal cases, atop the entire Justice Department as acting attorney general.
Read that again. The man whose job was to keep Trump out of prison is being
handed the keys to the nation’s prosecutorial power. That is not a coincidence. It
is by design.
The oldest rule in Anglo-American law, older than the Constitution itself, is this:
no man may be a judge in his own case. It is the beating heart of due process. The
Fifth Amendment promises that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property
without a fair and neutral hearing. There is nothing neutral about a courthouse
where the plaintiff picks the umpire, signs the judge’s commission, and lunches
with the commissioner.
Call it what it is: a kangaroo court, a proceeding in which the verdict is settled before
the gavel falls and the process is dressed up in the costume of legitimacy. When
one man is at once the accuser, the enforcer, and the appointer of his own judges,
the trial is theater and the Constitution is a prop. The Founders fought a revolution
to escape exactly this. We did not trade a king for a courtroom.