RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By James Varney & Abigail Degnan, RealClearInvestigationsApril 18, 2024 When Dexter Reed died in a shootout with Chicago police on March 21, the incident was quickly grafted onto a narrative that began in 2014 after a policeman killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. – namely, that the U.S. faces an epidemic of violence by unbridled cops who do not believe black lives matter. “Killing of Dexter Reed raises questions about Chicago police reform. ‘The message is, go in guns blazing,’” blared a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times. Reed’s death joins a long...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsApril 17, 2024 The ‘whistleblower’ who sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment was deeply involved in the political maneuverings behind Biden-family business schemes in Ukraine that Trump wanted probed, newly obtained emails from former Vice President Joe Biden’s office reveal. Eric Ciaramella: Privately expressed shock -- "Yikes" -- at linking U.S. aid to firing a prosecutor probing the firm paying Biden's son. But he kept mum publicly, so was he really shocked? Harvard University/Davis Center In 2019, then-National...

By Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.comApril 11, 2024 Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield – to win hearts and minds. Tucker Carlson: No Kremlin stooge, but portrayed as one in Ukraine media. AP A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsApril 10, 2024 Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found. Mike Howell: “There is not a ‘shadow’ campaign. There is an overt assault on President Trump and those who wish to vote for him." Heritage Foundation The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsApril 3, 2024 The residents of Fort Pierce, Florida, are not accustomed to seeing dark SUVs and flashing motorcycles speed down the town’s main thoroughfare bordering the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Part beach getaway, part working class community, the city is located about 60 miles north of the luxurious Palm Beach estate of the most famous – and frequent –criminal defendant in recent history: Donald J. Trump. To many, Donald Trump's classified documents mishandling is similar ... AP ... to Joe Biden's, a point that hasn't gone...

Update, April 2024: Sexual Assault of Migrants in Panama Rises to Level Rarely Seen Outside War NY Times By James Varney & Abigail Degnan, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 26, 2024 When President Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Reilly as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics. Laken Riley: High-profile victim. Wikipedia The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive...

By Amanda Kieffer, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 25, 2024 After years of drug abuse and crime, Rudolph H. Carey III began to get his life back on track in 2007 when he checked himself into rehab and eventually drew on his experience to become a substance abuse counselor in Virginia. Rudolph H. Carey III: To this former inmate, the link between work and not returning to crime is no mystery. “You gotta have income to survive,” he says. Institute for Justice Then it was all taken away from him. After his company was taken over, his new employer fired him in 2018 due to...

By Toby Dershowitz and Max Friedman, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 18, 2024 Shortly before South Africa accused Israel in the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in its post-Oct. 7 counteroffensive against Hamas, the South African ruling party, the African National Congress, suddenly resolved its longstanding and crippling debt issues. Naledi Pandor: South Africa’s foreign minister is scheduled to visit Washington in the coming days. AP The court action in December – committing tens of millions of dollars to accuse a nation thousands of miles from South...

The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network. Roosevelt Montás: Signaling classical education’s effort to diversify.  Columbia U. Princeton University Press The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir "Rescuing Socrates," are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted...

While books like “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” are roiling public school districts, another heated debate is unfolding in the small niche of classical education – focusing on whether writers such as medieval French nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Ralph Ellison are worthy enough to belong in the Western canon. Jessica Hooten Wilson, Pepperdine U.: For classical education to thrive, it must add more women and writers of color to the canon. Andrea Barnett While the content of the works at issue may be very different, both controversies center...

The newly disclosed video shows a dark SUV pulling up to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., at 9:44 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021. It sits for several minutes until a uniformed man with a bomb-sniffing dog enters from the right and steps up to the vehicle. The driver complies with his command, the dog sniffs inside and outside the car which is soon allowed to enter the parking garage. The man and his dog exit back to the right. This scene is unremarkable except for one detail: The uniformed man and his trained canine came within a few feet of where a...

When the Biden administration announced in 2022 that it would remove some 4 million acres of federal land in Western states from oil and gas exploration, environmental groups hailed the decision as a milestone in their fight against global warming. Scott Pruitt: “The era of regulation through litigation is over,” said Trump's EPA administrator. AP Michael Regan: No, it isn't, says Biden’s EPA chief, who rescinded Pruitt's policies. AP “With the oil and gas industry bent on despoiling American’s public lands and fueling the climate crisis, this is...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 15, 2024 While Special Counsel Robert Kyoung Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017. Biden at his presser: shifting blame. AP At a press conference hastily assembled after the report’s release, Biden said he assumed his...

By John Murawski, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 13, 2024   In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 7, 2024 After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, one of the terrorist organization’s chief financial sponsors, hosts of its leaders, and backers of its propaganda found itself singled out by America’s leaders – not for condemnation, but praise. Timmy Davis, Biden envoy: "Qatar could not have done more than it did in 2023 to play an indispensable role on the world stage.”  Department of State/Wikimwedia “The U.S.-Qatar partnership could not be stronger, and Qatar could not have done more than it did in...

By Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.comFebruary 5, 2024 As the 2020 Election Day count dragged on into the next morning in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, the New York Times campaign reporter Reid Epstein reported a hiccup at 4:52 a.m.: “Green Bay’s absentee ballot results are being delayed because one of the vote-counting machines ran out of ink and an elections official had to return to City Hall to get more.” Eight minutes later Epstein sent a follow-up tweet giving the all-clear: “Clerk has returned with printer ink!” This tiny drama from...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 30, 2024 Washington glitterati assembled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in October to celebrate federal employees making a difference in government. Hosted by CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, the black-tie affair featured in-person appearances by top Biden White House officials including Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack. Judge Florence Pan, who now has key Trump issues such as presidential immunity before her in court ... U.S. District Court for the...

By Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations & LeeFang.comJanuary 25, 2024 Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored "Ministry of Truth." Brian Murphy, Logically.AI executive and ex-U.S....

Update, Jan. 29, 2024: 5 Years for Leaking Trump's and Others' Taxes  Another apparent "sweetheart deal" negotiated by President Biden’s Justice Department in a politically charged case is drawing scrutiny. "Chaz" Littlejohn, top right, is to be sentenced by this Biden-appointed judge next week. WDRB News/YouTube Former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, who stole and helped publicize the confidential tax records of Donald Trump and an estimated 7,500 other wealthy Americans, could face little or no jail time from his sentence this month, because the DOJ allowed him...