For some strange reason it takes a conservative news outlet to ferret out the truth during a Democrat presidential administration.

Funny how that works.

The latest example is the Washington Free Beacon uncovering a bald-faced lie from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

We should expect nothing but lies from the Biden Administration, and nothing but coverups from the MSM when they do so. It is par for the course these days. Which is why trust in the MSM is at an all-time low, and still plunging. (John wrote about a debate on trust in the MSM and the results will confirm exactly what you know: nobody trusts them when they get to choose).

Yet somehow even the most cynical of us underestimate just how low both the administration and the MSM will go to convince us of ridiculous things.

Granholm’s latest whopper was about a grant to a battery facility, made under the auspices of the so-called Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The DOE announced in October that it would give the $200 million award to Microvast Holdings to build a battery separator facility in Tennessee, using funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. At the time, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the grant would “supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is American-made.”

While the DOE described Microvast as a “majority U.S.-owned company, traded on NASDAQ” and “headquartered in Stafford, Texas,” financial records show the company operates primarily out of China. Microvast itself says the Chinese government “exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities and may intervene, at any time and with no notice.” The company was also recently added to a Securities and Exchange Commission watchlist of Chinese companies that are on track to be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to comply with U.S. auditing requirements.

The whole selling point for the award was to help America develop its own green energy infrastructure that would be independent of China’s influence. Instead the administration is simply giving a Chinese company with shady business practices big bucks. And they are doing so pretty much for a quick media hit. $200 million given away so they can put out a press release.

It wasn’t a secret that Microvast Holdings is simply a shell company used by the Chinese to operate in America. It was in their SEC filings. The DOE knew exactly what it was doing, but did it anyway. Maybe Microvast’s owners were Hunter Biden clients at some point? Who knows? Maybe if the media had done their work on the Biden laptop we would know. But that is “old news.”

In its 2021 annual SEC report, Microvast describes itself as a “holding company” that conducts its business “principally through our subsidiary in China.”

“A substantial portion of our operations and manufacturing and most of our current customers are in the [People’s Republic of China],” said Microvast, adding that it has received subsidies from the Chinese government and that most of its customers are associated with “state-owned companies in the PRC.”

In May, the SEC added Microvast to a list of Chinese companies that aren’t in compliance with U.S. auditing requirements under the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. The law, which went into effect last spring, is designed to prevent Chinese companies listed on the U.S. stock exchanges from using non-approved China-based auditors to obscure their finances.

Remember Granholm’s boast about the award: that it would “supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is American-made.” That was a lie, and she knew it. This was nothing more than a transfer of wealth from the US taxpayer to the Chinese Communist Party under the guise of supporting American manufacturing.

Bills that engage in industrial policy–the government directing investment to get preferred policy outcomes–are rife with fraud, abuse, and bad outcomes. Solyndra was one example we all remember–friends of the Obama Administration getting $530 million to do precisely nothing.

Solyndra, though, is a piker compared to another Obama energy failure, the Tonopah concentrated solar project. The Obama Administration poured $737 million in taxpayer loan guarantees in 2011 into the project. It was a disaster, and closed in 2020 (during the height of the pandemic, so nobody noticed) because it didn’t produce much energy and couldn’t do so reliably. It literally kept falling apart.

Even when it was proposed everybody knew that the energy produced would cost multiples of that coming from other sources. It was a scam from beginning to end. It would have been fraud, but then again is it fraud if all people involved are in on it?

These government investments are always a scam, and the MSM always provides breathless propaganda masquerading as “news” coverage to keep the gravy train going. Here’s the kind of propaganda I am talking about:

Nobody should be surprised that politicians are psychopathic liars, but like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football we still get taken in by the MSM’s willingness to promote propaganda.

Even the most cynical of us are occasionally fooled, assuming that there are some depths to which even the MSM will dare not go.

This is a mistake I make, and most of us do. No matter how many times we have been lied to, somehow we fall for it again every once in a while. In this case, for instance, I would have assumed that the Microvast Holdings award was a scam, but never in my wildest dreams would I have assumed it was just a way to funnel money to China’s communists. After all, the whole point of the program is to sever our dependence upon Chinese “green energy,” right?

Silly me. Even cynical me needed the Washington Free Beacon to remind me that both our leaders and our MSM are trash.