They sold America, the greatest nation on Earth, for next to nothing because that’s what they believe it’s worth.
The Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Mr. Hunter Biden up to a million dollars a year! Wow! It seems like a lot of money.
But what were the Bidens selling? Not Hunter’s expertise in, say, energy, economics, international law, Ukrainian culture, or actually anything that he could do on his own. They were paying him because of his proximity to his father, President Joseph Robinette Biden.
The Bidens were selling the greatest country on Earth.
And this is, to me, perhaps the most troubling part of the story. The Biden crime family so undervalued my country that they sold it for chump change—not merely disloyal, but deeply dismissive and disrespectful.
What should it cost to sell America? I’d start at 50 trillion dollars—that’s 5 followed by 13 zeros. Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be around 200 billion dollars—that’s two followed by 11 zeros. In other words, I’d demand 250 times the net worth of the planet’s richest man. And then I’d walk away.
But not the Bidens.
Let’s assume for a moment that every accusation is true. My guess is that at least 90 percent of them are true because many major concerns about the Bidens have been confirmed from Hunter’s laptop. Moreover, we have finally been permitted to know that the laptop was really his—and not some Russian hoax, as President Biden and his leftist operatives in the foreign policy establishment and the legacy media had falsely alleged.
Here’s the total so far from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, a majority of whose members are Republicans, so this number might be an overestimate, at least for now: “the Bidens and their associates have received over $20 million in payments from foreign entities.”
Really? That’s it? Despite Joe’s and Hunter’s attitudes that they are tough negotiators? It doesn’t place the Biden crime family anywhere close to the Fortune 500.
And that’s another way to get at this question: what is their net worth? Forbes estimated Joe Biden’s to be $10 million. Estimates for Hunter Biden’s net worth vary widely, from $1 million to $20 million to $230 million. But all of these figures are embarrassingly tiny for what they were hawking.
The Clintons also undersold our county through their eponymous Clinton Foundation, which was eventually exposed as an influence-peddling scam. In 2015, just before Hillary Clinton’s run for president, its total take was $2 billion. “[O]ne-third of the foundation’s donors who contributed $1 million or more were foreign governments or entities,” according to official reports.
It’s part of a larger pattern: the academic left has sold our universities, hence the education—and eyeballs—of our youth, to foreign interests for a song. During the past two years, Harvard University has taken over $10 milliion from Qatari and Saudi entities. In the same period, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) accepted over $2.5 million in Saudi money.
America’s great rival, the Communist dictatorship of China, has also seized the opportunity to influence Ivy-League schools, their students and faculty, and hence our current and future governmental leaders—while also funneling more money to the Biden family and associates. In 2017, Penn established the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement—and shortly thereafter received more than $30 million from mainland Chinese donors.
In the process, Penn made Joe Biden an honorary professor. Mr. Biden held the position for about four years, during which they paid him close to $1 million, yet he taught no regular classes. Nearly a dozen high-ranking appointees in the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, worked at—and were presumably paid by—the Penn Biden Center.
Only this past April (2023) did we learn that Mr. Anthony Blinken, then a Biden campaign operative, had quickly organized the public statement from 51 former intelligence officials that temporarily, but successfully, cast crucial doubt on The New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. These former intelligence officials’ devious, misleading public statement came on October 19, 2020, just in time for the upcoming presidential debate and then the election of November 2020.
So mainland China gave money to the Bidens; China gave money to Penn; Penn gave more money to Joe Biden, as well as to Anthony Blinken and others; and Anthony Blinken engaged in a grotesque propaganda campaign that may have flipped the close election of 2020—to get Joe Biden, head of the Biden crime family, into America’s presidency. That’s real influence.
“The Penn Biden Center is a dark-money, revolving-door nightmare where foreign competitors like China donated millions of dollars to the university so that they could have access to future high-ranking officials,” according to Mr. Tom Anderson, director of the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center.
Not to be outdone, Harvard raked in $75 million of mainland Chinese money from 2014 to 2019, and Yale’s take during the same period was $43.5 million, according to public records. The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s own student newspaper, reported that the university’s total haul from foreign organizations from 2013 to mid-2019 was $258 million, including donations from mainland China, Qatar (a sponsor of Hamas, a US-designated foreign terrorist organization), Saudi Arabia, the medieval dictatorship of Iran (major sponsor of Hamas and of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another designated foreign terrorist organization), and Russia—some of the worst oppressive illiberal regimes on Earth.
It’s peanuts. Harvard has an endowment of $50.9 B-billion dollars. Yale’s is $41 B-billion, and Penn’s is $20 B-billion. Under no circumstances do these institutions need an extra $10 million or even $258 million. And yet they took it.
Why? Because they do not value this country or its future.
In A Man for All Seasons, a play later made into a movie, Sir Thomas More confronted his former protégé, Sir Richard Rich, just after Rich had committed perjury against him—apparently in exchange for a high office in Wales.
“Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
The Bidens, the Clintons, Harvard University, Penn, and the rest of the academic left are the Richard Riches of today.
Photo by Chatham House — Wikimedia Commons
Brilliantly written.
It seems that selling your soul for an appointment to Wales, or for whatever Biden tallied, presupposes there is a soul to sell. I am reminded of a quote from John “Serpico” Salerno about a newly elected Congressman from Jersey City. “Sure, Congress is okay, but if you really want to get rich, you have to be mayor.”
The very point of this article is what I thought when I first heard the rumors about the Biden shenanigans. You mean, that’s all they managed to be paid for major national secrets and other details that we don’t even know about yet? They risked everything for small figures in the mere millions of dollars? Incredible and bizarre.
But the deeper point made by this author is that those small-potato figures represent what the Bidens think of the value of the USA. That’s the pity of the whole terrible saga that we are just now beginning to uncover. There is no suitable punishment for their actions. Impeachment, schimpeachment, it doesn’t begin to cut it.
Thank you, Jane Johnson, you are correct, sadly.
Thanks also to
–Andrew B for reminding us of the low price to purchase the Clintons,
–Paul Dasher for the crucial point that our adversaries know how cheaply these people can be bought, and
–James Croak for memories of low-rent Spiro Agnew.
An old joke from Jay Leno about good/bad names comes to mind:
50 cent – good name for a rap star, bad name for a prostitute.
To Dr. Ed:
Thanks for your comments.
At the time the Communist dictatorship of China gave the money to Ivy League universities, what I wrote was true – but I hope you are right about a collapse in the status and influence of those schools in the nearest future.
As I’m sure you know, our adversaries have been thinking along similar lines, e.g., they’ve been spreading their money to schools outside the Ivy League as well.
There were over 100 Confucius Institutes, funded by the CCP, at universities in the USA until
“In 2018. Congress restricted federal funding to schools with institutes; nearly all of the institutes have since closed.” Only about five remain:
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105981 .
The NAS has also reported on this problem.
And there’s this from Texas A&M:
https://www.thefp.com/p/texas-a-and-m-qatar-deal-iran-u-s-secrets
and this from Montana:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-republicans-fume-over-university-defying-calls-shutter-ccp-linked .
“the price of liberty is eternal vigilance” (a quote of disputed origins)
To Penrod: I’d be more optimistic, but I agree that it won’t be easy.
Best regards to all,
Kevin Jon Williams
The Clintons really got the ball rolling, selling missile guidance technology to China for, what was it, $300K? Treason just ain’t what it used to be.
An ex-KGB officer once said that Americans sold out cheaply.
When the federal AG office discovered Spiro Agnew had taken a $10,000 bribe while governor of Maryland, reporter Mike Wallace (Sn) exclaimed that Agnew “had made it possible for the little guy to participate in national politics.”
“America’s great rival, the Communist dictatorship of China, has also seized the opportunity to influence Ivy-League schools, their students and faculty, and hence our current and future governmental leaders…”
I’m not so certain that our future governmental leaders will be coming from Ivy-League schools. This country has seen dramatic shifts in power over the past few centuries and the only common thread is that the gilded elite never knew what what was going to hit them until after it had.
When the Federalists got the Constitution ratified in 1789, they never dreamed that they would be thrown out of power in the landslide election of 1800. And while there was a lot of angst and furor over the “corrupt bargain” of 1824, I doubt anyone anticipated that Andrew Jackson would “clean house” to the extent he did when he took office in 1829.
Or that Franklyn Roosevelt would transform both the government and the Democratic party as much as he did when he took office in 1933. I once came across an interesting study of voter registration in the (then) small towns of Midcoast Maine — where everyone in the towns had been a registered Democrat in 1932, they were all registered Republicans in 1934.
The railroads ran Maine (and much of the country) in the first half of the 20th Century. The two biggest were the NY Central and the Pennsylvania — and when they merged to form the PennCentral, who would have imagined that the whole thing would wind up bankrupt and needing a Congressional bailout (i.e. Amtrak & Conrail)?
Likewise, “solid as GM” used to be more than a marketing slogan, lots of people based their retirement in part on GM stock, never expecting it to suddenly become worthless. There was Sears & Roebucks, Montgomery Ward, and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, aka A&P (grocers) — all of which are now gone, along with the claim that “nuclear power will be too cheap to meter.”
One of the problems in urban forestry is convincing the community that a majestic multi-ton tree needs to be cut down before it blows down in a storm — often bringing power lines with it and causing untold damage to whatever (or whomever) it lands on. Often I’ve seen such trees blow down and wondered why it hadn’t happened earlier, with all the rot inside the trunk and the little amount of roots the tree actually had, what was holding it up?
Such is the condition of the Ivy League right now — it’s core is rotten, it has dry rot in its roots, and it is being held up by little more than its past reputation of quality. And it’s only held it’s international reputation for the past 60-70 years — prior to that, they were all regional schools, and 70 years is about what a national organization has before it implodes.
Someone in January of 1924 could well have concluded that the good times would continue forever — we had won the war to end all wars and now we would enjoy endless prosperity. They had no idea that the Depression, WWII and then the Cold War were coming — no more than we have any idea what is coming at us.
We don’t know what’s coming at us, but I doubt that our leaders will continue to come from the Ivy League…
“We don’t know what’s coming at us…”
Yet a surprising number of smart, well educated people are sure that X can’t happen here, the reason often stated as ‘because THIS is America!’ without any understanding that Americans by and large no longer espouse the values which used to…mostly…prevent X from happening. Or at least punish…frequently enough to have some effect…those who perpetrated X anyway.
Perhaps enough people woke up from their complacent naps after seeing the pro-Hamas responses to October 7th. Perhaps. I won’t count on it, though.
Viewed as a group, Americans no longer value freedom from political mandates and prohibitions. Oh, ask them if they do and they will frequently claim to, but ask them about a specific issue? They will get huffy and tell you why freedom should of course be prohibited.
We may still value the slogan, but no longer the reality.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
— Ronald Reagan
I didn’t mention it above, but I think we are overdue for a fourth Great Awakening. It’s happened three times before in the past 300 years, and some people argue that the first one is what led to the American Revolution.
Dear Dr. Ed,
Thanks for your comments.
An old joke from Jay Leno about good/bad names comes to mind:
50 cent – good name for a rap star, bad name for a prostitute.
At the time the Communist dictatorship of China gave the money to Ivy League universities, what I wrote was true – but I hope you are right about a collapse in the status and influence of those schools in the nearest future.
As I’m sure you know, our adversaries have been thinking along similar lines, e.g., they’ve been spreading their money to schools outside the Ivy League as well.
There were over 100 Confucius Institutes, funded by the CCP, at universities in the USA until
“In 2018. Congress restricted federal funding to schools with institutes; nearly all of the institutes have since closed.” Only about five remain:
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105981 .
The NAS has also reported on this problem.
And there’s this from Texas A&M:
https://www.thefp.com/p/texas-a-and-m-qatar-deal-iran-u-s-secrets
and this from Montana:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-republicans-fume-over-university-defying-calls-shutter-ccp-linked .
“the price of liberty is eternal vigilance” (a quote of disputed origins)
Best regards,
Kevin Jon Williams
China has some *serious* problems of its own — mainly economic and corruption.
The Evergrande (real estate development) bankruptcy is far bigger than it appears because they aren’t the only developer in trouble. Lots of off-the-books loans from municipalities, etc as well.
They built a LOT of housing in places where no one lives and no one would want to live. Much of it is also unfinished, hence not producing revenue. And while they hide this stuff as best they can, it doesn’t make it disappear.
As to the corruption, it is SO extensive that it interferes with people getting things done and there is a great deal of resentment over that. The one child policy has become a disaster, both in the shortage of young women (as parents killed girl babies so as to have a boy) and young people in general.
The CCP’s deal was “you have no freedom, but you can get rich.” (Rich by Chinese standards, middle class by ours.) They’re not producing on the latter and that’s a problem.
I’ve wondered if some of the Covid lockdowns were more to suppress anti-CCP protests than Covid itself…