RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 17, 2024 Next month, the Huntsville School District in Arkansas will join the wave of public schools switching to a four-day week.  The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.   Jonathan Warren, Superintendent: “We recognize the potential risk,...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 10, 2024 Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history. Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far...

Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction. It's your money. But, hey,...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsJune 26, 2024 Just before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in their second presidential debate, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper met in the White House with a small group of advisers to President Obama to hatch a plan to put out a first-of-its-kind intelligence report warning the voting public that "the Russian government" was interfering in the election by allegedly breaching the Clinton campaign’s email system. Trump and Biden, who debate again on Thursday with the impartiality of CNN moderators again in...

SAN FRANCISCO—Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice. “When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.” In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsJune 19, 2024 Echoing the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Professor Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley lecturer, told his fellow Muslims: “The Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews.” At the Santa Clara conference sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, Bazian exhorted the crowd: “They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsJune 13, 2024 Top officials at the Department of Justice are downplaying recently disclosed documents showing FBI agents were authorized to use deadly force during their 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. Responding to Trump’s claim that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was following “standard operating procedure” as it executed a search warrant on Aug. 8, 2022, regarding classified material...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsJune 10, 2024 COLUMBUS, Ohio—On a bright morning in May at the Columbus Collegiate Academy Main, orderliness is on display. Students in khakis and blue tops carrying bulging backpacks walk briskly in line through the front doors of the single-story brick building – looking like young people who really want to be there.  In class after class, the predominantly black and Latino student body appears seriously engaged, with pencils in hand or fingers on keyboards. Teachers move rapidly through lessons. Hands shoot up to answer questions....

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJune 7, 2024 Like-minded members of Congress have created hundreds of caucuses to help them work on specific issues – including the Arthritis Caucus, the Freedom Caucus, the U.S.-Japan Caucus, the Special Operations Forces, and the Bipartisan Candy Caucus. But two of them – the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus – stand out for the unparalleled fundraising they do through independent but closely aligned nonprofit arms. Filled with current members of Congress and representatives from some of...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsMay 31, 2024 This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and...

By Nancy Rommelmann, RealClearInvestigationsMay 23, 2024 1. The Scoop On November 7, 2023, I was forwarded an email that began, “I know the world is on fire but have you guys read anything about Bubba Copeland, the Alabama Mayor/Pastor who committed suicide after being outed by 1819 ‘news’?”  "Brittini Blaire Summerlin": A death described as being  “used as propaganda for trans activists’ benefit.”  Reddit The woman who wrote the email was a longtime friend of Fred “Bubba” Copeland, whose suicide at age 49 and what was...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsMay 14, 2024 Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order.  In recent weeks the Biden administration and many news outlets, including USA Today and The Hill, have touted declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place.  “Right now, with 2023 figures and early 2024, the trends are all pointing down, in a positive direction,” Jeff Asher, whose New Orleans-based AH Datalytics is developing his own “Real-Time Crime Index,” told...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsMay 2, 2024 Jack Smith, special counsel: Opposed releasing files on the handling of Trump's documents case. AP Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida. More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt...

By Aaron Maté, RealClearInvestigationsApril 30, 2024 In successfully lobbying Congress for an additional $61 billion in Ukraine war funding, an effort that ended this month with celebratory Democrats waving Ukrainian flags in the House chamber, President Biden has cast his administration’s standoff with Russia as an existential test for democracy. Flag-waving Democrats in the House chamber. That is, Ukrainian flag-waving Democrats. Free Press Journal/YouTube “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and...

Joe Feldman has faced many tough crowds in the course of successfully selling his “Grading for Equity” program to school districts across the nation. During the consultant’s presentations, teachers concerned that his approach lowers standards have rolled their eyes, questioned his understanding of students, and worse. Joe Feldman, equity-grading booster: Teachers and parents can be a tough crowd, but dozens of districts nationwide are giving the consultant’s ambitious project a shot. Crescendo Education Group “A guy in the front row got his stuff...

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...