RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

Gov. Gavin Newsom has made reducing the homelessness crisis in California a top priority, saying the scale of the state’s efforts is “unprecedented” and calling for the continued expansion of his signature effort – Project Homekey – that has already cost $3.75 billion.  But in a state with more than 181,000 homeless individuals, or about one-third of the U.S. total, Homekey has been marred by failures and scandals, including a lack of government oversight and accountability as well as a federal investigation into allegations of fraud in Los...

On the campaign trail, Vice President JD Vance repeatedly chastised the Biden administration for allegedly losing track of some 320,000 minors who had crossed the border unaccompanied. “Our government, under the policies of Kamala Harris, has lost thousands of innocent children to sex trafficking, to drug trafficking, to human trafficking,” Vance said. One year later, the fate of most of those children remains unknown. While the Trump administration has all but stopped the crush of migrants that occurred during Biden’s term, neither the government nor the nonprofits...

Joseph Cohen had worked for an organization in Britain devoted to encouraging Jewish-Muslim dialogue and combating antisemitism. But following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians and then the bombing and destruction of Gaza, the rising tide of sometimes violent antisemitism made him feel he no longer belonged in his native land. “I would rather be living in the nation where the police and the military are set up to do everything they can to prevent that,” he recently told the Jerusalem Post. The deadly October attack at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester...

When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency – and his chances of reelection in 2020.  RCI’s review of recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveals for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either...

This is the third part of a series on academic publishing. Read part one here and part two here. For many years, the prestigious journal Philosophy & Public Affairs published about 14 peer-reviewed articles annually. So its small volunteer staff of renowned scholars was shocked to learn that its publisher, Wiley, was demanding a significant increase in production, at one point requiring 35 new articles within 60 days.  Instead of compromising its peer-review process and rushing low-quality papers into print, then-Editor-in-Chief Anna Stilz at the University of...

In a recent focus group we held with 11 U.S. and foreign-born Latinos in Riverside, California, most of the participants expressed grave concerns about the breakup of hard-working and law-abiding families in what one participant called ICE’s “war” against Latinos. And yet, when asked if they were optimistic about the future, all 11 enthusiastically said “yes.”  Their responses reflected the broader patterns of progress and severe challenges we uncovered in an analysis of national data and on-the-ground reporting for our new report, “The Rise Of...

When Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren recently traveled to the Big Apple to endorse New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, she was asked if overt socialism is really the best model for Democrats to adopt. “You bet,” she replied in her signature folksy style. The Boston lawmaker wasn’t just jumping on the sudden trendiness of socialism three-and-a-half decades after its near-extinction. With fellow Senate traveler Bernie Sanders, Warren has been a catalyst for moving her party to the left since her first campaign in 2012.  She and Sanders are, in many ways, the...

In 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a bombshell report, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” that painted a bleak picture of citizens feeling “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” Most provocatively, it stated that perhaps half of Americans face a personal crisis of aloneness that poses health risks “similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” The report received wide attention as it resonated with myriad data points – including declining marriage and birth rates and the rise of remote work –...

After taking the helm at New York’s financially troubled Nassau University Medical Center late last year, Megan C. Ryan stumbled upon something baffling in the books: a two-decade-long series of transactions engineered by New York State that may have shortchanged the hospital by a staggering $1 billion in matching funds. As a hospital primarily serving patients on Medicare, Medicaid, or who are uninsured, the medical center qualified for federal matching grants tied to state contributions. Ryan’s discovery indicated that the state was having the medical center itself post its...

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.    It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive...

For more than 30 years, the author and public intellectual Peter Brimelow has argued for and published the writings of like-minded “immigration patriots” who support strong restrictions on immigration. Standing at the right edge of the policy debate, he has drawn the ire of pro-immigration advocates who ascribe racism to his positions. Left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League label him a “white nationalist.” They put him and VDARE, the nonprofit he established in 1999, on their well-publicized...

“Portland is burning to the ground,” President Trump told a press pool in early October. This followed earlier assertions that the city was a “war zone,” “like WW II,” and “under siege from attack by Antifa” mobs. Having lived in Portland for 15 years and covered 2020’s violent protests extensively, I found the president’s claims simultaneously plausible and overwrought. Footage from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility south of downtown featured federal officers in what looked like hand-to-hand combat with...

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...

Three years ago, RealClearInvestigations reported that the FBI was undercounting the number of armed civilians who had thwarted active shooters by a factor of three. Even though the FBI acknowledged the issue at the time, it never corrected the error involving the politically fraught issue. In the years since, the problem has only gotten worse. Since RCI’s 2022 article, the FBI has acknowledged just three additional incidents of armed good Samaritans stopping active shooters from 2022 to 2024, and none in the last two years. In contrast, the Crime Prevention Research...

The fertile Middle Belt region in north-central Nigeria became a killing field in June, when more than 200 Christian men, women, and children were slaughtered in an apparent series of coordinated attacks. The massacre was the latest in a string of killings that have taken the lives of an estimated 7,000 Nigerian Christians so far this year. Since 2009, Islamists – including Boko Haram and outside terrorist groups such as ISIS – have killed at least 52,500 Christians and displaced another 5 million of them, while destroying some 18,000 churches and setting 2,200 schools ablaze,...

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...

Halloween could come early this year. The Democrats have named their price to avoid a government shutdown come October – an additional $350 billion for healthcare over the next decade. Critics say a big chunk of that money may go to ghosts. At issue are the generous subsidies the Biden administration created for Affordable Care Act policies, sweeteners that are slated to expire in December. Making healthcare essentially free for millions of Americans, those policies have skyrocketed enrollment in Obamacare plans. But a recent study found they have also sparked a curious...

As it emerges from bankruptcy, Bed, Bath & Beyond has announced plans to open 300 new stores in the next two years – though not a single one will be in California, the state that used to be a center of its operations. The home goods retailer, which once operated 90 stores in California – the highest number in any state – is seeking a fresh start in business-friendly Southern states. Its first location opened in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 2024 under the new name “Bed Bath & Beyond Home.” “California has created one of the most...

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...