RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

The classroom subject of “civics” evokes antiquated images of Cold War-era conformity, but Andrew Hart describes a recent teacher workshop on civics with a schoolboy’s exuberance: “It was really refreshing. I was, like, wow.” The weeklong seminar at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia delved into the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and civil rights titans W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.  “We spent the first full day just talking about...

HOLLY RIDGE, La. – More than three millennia ago, indigenous people built a massive ceremonial mound a few miles from here, an engineering marvel called Poverty Point and one of the oldest known building projects in North America. Today, this is ground zero for what may prove a defining feature of the 21st century’s landscape. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is constructing a gargantuan, $10 billion data center that tech executives, lawmakers, and business leaders say will bring much-needed prosperity to this rural area in northeast Louisiana. Set to be operational...

This is the second of a two-part series on the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read the first installment here. The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20th century. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and...

This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities, particularly those with vibrant downtown cores such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of other iconic American cities. Most visions of the future still view urban cores as the uncontested centers of production, consumption, and culture, with rural areas, small cities, and suburbs relegated to the backwaters...

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment. Liz Simons is using some of the money made by her hedge fund math whiz father, Jim Simmons, to push math informed by social justice.  @CommunityChange YouTube channel What Liz...

Domestic violence is often framed as a crime perpetrated by men against women. There’s a federal Office of Violence Against Women dedicated to domestic and sexual violence, but no male equivalent. News media articles overwhelmingly cover male perpetrators of domestic violence, and, when females are the aggressors, they often portray them as acting in self-defense. Hollywood portrayals of domestic violence generally tell a similar narrative.  A recent study, however, challenged the assumption that gender violence is a one-way street. Canadian...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – On Friday, August 26, 2005, Hurricane Katrina was just another nuisance storm lurking in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly headed our way. I was more concerned about Ohio State’s first-ever game against Texas in two weeks. As people from Houston to Tallahassee have done for decades when hurricanes come calling, we planned to stock up on bottled water and batten down the hatches, then rake up piles of debris after Katrina passed. Then Katrina became a monster overnight. While I slept, the Category 3 storm intensified into a Cat 5 as its whirlpool clouds filled the...

I was heartened to see my former employer, Duke University Health System, quietly reverse its commitment to woke racism this year. I had joined the internal resistance to its diversity, equity, and inclusion crusade and was fired because of it. Here’s my story.  Without public notice, the 38,000-employee organization scrubbed its website of the commitment to DEI it had trumpeted in 2021, when it proclaimed racism a “public health crisis,” and “equity” as its cure. Now, all such fealty to DEI has been discarded with its new 2025...

Molecular biologist Mike Rossner, who has committed his life to following the science, now finds himself playing an unexpected if urgent role – exposing the fraud of his fellow scientists.  Rossner is part of a network of experts that sniff out researchers who intentionally or recklessly fabricate, falsify, or plagiarize evidence. Rossner, a consultant specializing in identifying manipulated and duplicated images in journal papers – a telltale sign of deceit – has been dismayed by his findings at U.S. research centers. Scientists often have deleted the data...

The Obama intelligence community’s claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized dirty tricks to try and help Donald Trump win the 2016 election was based on "one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard [intelligence] reports," according to a just-declassified report that had been locked away in a CIA vault. Nevertheless, former CIA Director John Brennan ordered agency analysts to use the claim in the Intelligence Community Assessment issued during the Obama administration’s final days – even though the ICA itself noted...

A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them. According to the report, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been "related to activities" of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax, who were accused of...

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Colin Williams, coordinator of the USGS Mineral Resources Program, who responded to RCI’s request for comment after publication. On July 11, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Wyoming’s top elected officials were in the Cowboy state celebrating something that last happened when Dwight Eisenhower was president and the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series: The United States opened a rare earth mine. Ramaco’s Brook Mine in Ranchester, Wyoming, is the first such domestic mine in 70 years. The...

On June 27, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump what he hailed as a “GIANT WIN,” finding that lower courts had “likely” overstepped in ordering universal injunctions blocking many of the president’s policies. While the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Trump v. CASA appeared to disarm Trump’s opponents of perhaps their most potent legal weapon, his adversaries had other ideas. In the weeks since, Trump’s challengers have seized on the ruling’s openings – especially the use of class-action suits in which...

Following a years-long surge in illegal immigration, the Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census. President Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Biden overturned his predecessor’s policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined “to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy...

Nowadays, it seems we can be addicted to anything – not just alcohol and drugs, but pornography, random Internet browsing, video games, and smartphones. Academic research papers have investigated a wide range of other behaviors including gambling, but also “dance addiction,” “fishing addiction,” “milk tea addiction,” and “cat addiction.” One cheeky paper used the standard medical criteria to show young people are “addicted” to their real-life friends. While this trend involves many factors, perhaps the single...

Although Robert Mueller failed to find an election conspiracy between Donald Trump and Moscow, the former Special Counsel threw a lifeline to the Russiagate narrative by alleging that the Kremlin had engaged in a “sweeping and systematic” effort to get Trump elected and “sow discord” among Americans.  Six years later, that questionable but enduring claim continues to unravel. According to newly declassified documents, U.S. intelligence leaders concealed high-level doubts about one of Russiagate’s foundational allegations: that Russia stole and leaked...

The floodgates holding back long-buried classified documents exposing government efforts to claim Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election might finally be opening.  Trump administration officials held an urgent meeting Sunday to discuss “new information on Russiagate,” which they might use to build a criminal conspiracy case against Obama and Biden administration political appointees who allegedly weaponized the government against Trump, two Trump administration officials told RealClearInvestigations. The documents are said...

With donuts now over $20 a dozen and a cup of coffee topping $3, working a shift for the Los Angeles Police Department isn’t what it once was. But with overtime pay at 1.5 times the regular hourly rate,  LAPD officers aren’t having trouble footing the bill at Randy’s or Starbucks. Indeed, overtime pay has now grown so much that some detectives earn more money than the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.  Thanks to overtime, many Los Angeles police officers earn more than Mayor Karen Bass.   Invision In 2023, the last year for which...

Explosive new evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016. A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier – a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump’s first term. The eight-page review conducted by career CIA...