In the early chaos of the pandemic in March of 2020, travel was effectively shut down in every state nationwide, and in other countries around the world. No one was driving, except for those whose jobs required it. As a result, fuel prices crashed.

On March 19, 2020, then President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Energy to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its maximum capacity, by purchasing 77 million barrels of American-made crude oil due to the cratering price of oil.

It goes without saying, a great deal has happened since then.

The end of June and the July 4th holiday weekend were clouded by nation-shaking Supreme Court rulings and unthinkable tragedies, crystalizing a zeitgeist of anxiety and discontent. Elsewhere in the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin made statements before Russian parliament on July 8 saying, “Everyone should know, that largely speaking, we haven’t yet started anything serious in Ukraine.”

With every passing day that this conflict goes on, one can’t help but be a little anxious that the collapse we were told would be coming for Russia due to their government’s actions is instead being wrought upon us; which brings us back to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

On July 6, Reuters released a report detailing analysis of export data, discovering that 5 million barrels of oil released from the Strategic Oil Reserve had been shipped to Europe and Asia in the last month. While President Biden took the action to combat price hikes that he blamed on Russia’s invasion, the truth is Americans have taken it at the pump from the moment he took office, well before Putin started massing troops and tanks at the Ukranian border.

In the early days of his presidency, Biden made good on promises to “shut down” the fossil fuel industry that he made during his campaign by pulling the plug on federal oil and gas leases and every domestic pipeline project that would have established infrastructure to transport American and Canadian crude to refinery facilities. What followed was a steady climb in fuel prices nationwide, feeding historic inflation and price hikes.

When Biden first announced the historic draw down of the SPR in late March 2022, the assumption most Americans had was that it would address the explosions in price domestically. The price has been declining over the last few weeks, but that is due more to the collapse in demand for fuel due to spiking prices. Experts still expect the national average to exceed $6 a gallon nationally by the beginning of August, despite the best efforts of our president to find fault in as many other players as possible.

What has been discovered, however, is that 950,000 barrels of SPR were sold to a company called Unipec, a Chinese company that is part of the Chinese state oil conglomerate Sinopec. Unipec had made pledges to honor sanctions against Russia’s energy industry but continues to purchase oil from the pariah state. It is worth mentioning that Unipec has also received investment of $1.7 billion from BHR Partners, a fund that is controlled by Bank of China Limited and some guy named Hunter Biden.

The junior Biden had announced his intention to resign from the BHR board in the lead up to his father’s presidential run in 2019, but Chinese records unearthed by the Washington Examiner do not indicate he has left.

President Biden has publicly denied any knowledge of his son’s business dealings anywhere, whether it be Ukraine, Russia, China or otherwise. One maybe could ignore or explain away some of the associations in Biden’s web, but for some reason his father’s administration time and again makes choices that benefit these companies and countries working with his son.

We impeached the last one because he made a phone call, asking for Ukrainian authorities to look into whether there was corruption involved with the firing of a prosecutor looking into the business dealings of Hunter Biden when his father was vice president overseeing the administration of the country after the Euro-Maiden Revolution in 2014. This is a fact as ironic as it is infuriating.

On July 10, users of the message board 4Chan began circulating what they alleged to be the contents of Hunter Biden’s cell phone, revealing yet more videos and images of the embattled man’s debauchery. More pertinently, this leak contained additional emails and communications regarding business matters between him and his father.

Included in the trove was a voicemail from Joe Biden to Hunter regarding an article that was set to be published about the younger Biden’s business activities. Joe assured his son that based on his understanding of the article’s content, Hunter was “in the clear.”

When White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked to comment on what the president said on the voicemail, she shut down the line of inquiry, saying the White House would not be commenting on anything deriving from the laptop. She directed Fox News’ Peter Doocy to contact Hunter’s lawyers, but at least conceded that the laptop exists.

The general policy to memory hole negative narratives around the Biden family continues to beclown national media outlets. Worse, it obscures an untenable truth, that the Bidens are as corrupt and captured by foreign influence as the media assured us the Trumps were. The president’s children and family brazenly partaking in every obvious grift our dynastic political families can sink to. Even with all that influence, it cannot buy popularity.

Biden’s job approval rating is tanking into the low 30s, and in a recent poll by the New York Times and Siena College, only 13% of American voters said that the nation is on the right track. Even worse, only 26% of Democrats want him to run in 2024.

Our national media cannot ignore this any longer, and neither can the party leadership. Though surely, they will embrace cynicism, simply calling him old and unpopular and primarying him in 2024 if he can’t be convinced to walk away.

What should happen is a special prosecutor and an impeachment, but as George Orwell foretold, time marches on, paving history over on a day-to-day basis, even in the so called “Age of Information.” This is the Endless Present, where Year Zero is every day, and “the Party is always right.”