RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By John Murawski, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 29, 2023 A group of intellectual mavericks made splashy headlines in 2021 when they announced plans to launch a new university in Texas called the University of Austin.    Backed by a gallery of celebrity intellectuals – its trustees and directors include former Harvard president Larry Summers, Brown University economist Glenn Loury, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, civil rights leader and former congressman Andrew Young, and the journalists Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan – the startup would be dedicated to the...

The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters – DEI – which goes a long way to explaining the fissures now tearing higher education apart.   For progressives committed to social justice advocacy, academic freedom must shield the prevailing academic consensus on race and gender from outside political pressure. Nowhere is that academic consensus better represented in the modern university than in the campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which exists to advocate for students and faculty who identify...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 23, 2023 LAPLACE, La.―Along Interstate 10 where the Mississippi River threads from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, ever-expanding petrochemical and other industrial projects have long been fought by environmental activists, who have saddled the stretch with the disputed moniker “Cancer Alley.”     Now the Biden administration is opening a new front in the war -- against a proposed expansion of the sector in St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes known to Louisianians as the River Parishes. Under its stated aims of...

In 1981, the Small Business Administration guaranteed two loans totaling almost $1 million – about $3.2 million in 2023 dollars – to a waterpark to build a giant water slide and start on other construction projects. Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, awarded the SBA his Golden Fleece Award for this ridiculous loan guarantee at taxpayers’ expense. According to Proxmire, the SBA approved two loan guarantees for Waterworld USA in the Sacramento, California area. Two local private banks loaned them $560,000 each, and the SBA agreed to guarantee 89 percent of...

New Jersey is enlisting public-school teachers and librarians to show children how to combat what it calls the grave threat of disinformation.  “Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in signing the nation’s first law mandating “information literacy” instruction for all K-12 students. The law, which aims to provide students with the “critical thinking” skills necessary to differentiate between “facts, points of view, and opinions” will, Murphy proclaimed,...

Combating disinformation has been elevated to a national security imperative under the Biden administration, as codified in its first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, published in June 2021.   That document calls for confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism. In connection therewith, it cites as a key priority “addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”  Main...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 15, 2023 At the same time that Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, DOJ documents and federal court records reveal.   In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 15, 2023 The Justice Department is not disclosing to the public or Congress links between President Biden’s son Hunter and brother James and a corrupt Chinese government agent who doled out millions of dollars in bribes. It has scrubbed the connections from court documents and is suggesting it doesn’t have evidence clearly in its possession.  In addition, the department appears to be trying to silence another disreputable partner from coming forward to tell what he knows about the Bidens' Chinese...

The State Department recently gave $330,000 to two organizations that funded The Global Disinformation Index, a British nonprofit that blacklists what it claims are “disinformation outlets,” including American political news outlets, in an effort to cut their ad funding, according to the Washington Examiner. The Global Disinformation Index creates a “dynamic exclusion list” of news outlets it accuses of spreading disinformation, and then distributes them to advertising companies, including major players like Microsoft-owned advertising company Xandr. These companies...

Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts, begun in 2020, to use private money to influence and run public elections.   Supported by groups with more than $1 billion at their disposal, according to public records, these partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government or political parties.   Registering and turning out voters - once handled primarily by political parties – and design of election office websites and mail-in ballots are being handed...

There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.     “It's like we have gone back to the days of the one-room schoolhouse,”...

Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.   Durham’s team, the Times declared in a widely circulated Jan. 26 article, has gone “unsuccessfully down one path after another” and ultimately “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.”  The three bylined reporters, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner, base their conclusion on...

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.  They are now. The "diversity industrial complex" has arisen suddenly, with no fanfare on the order of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 warning of a "military industrial complex" in...

If America’s greatest secrets are so crucial to national security, why do classified documents keep showing up where they shouldn’t?  The National Archives. AP Since last August, when federal agents raided former President Trump’s Palm Beach home seeking classified documents he had removed from the White House, national secrets have also been discovered at various properties connected to President Biden, including his Delaware home, and at former vice president Mike Pence’s Indiana home.  Although each of these cases were slightly different,...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 7, 2023 Amalgamated Bank, with just five branches across three cities, and a market value lower than the net worth of many an individual hedge fund honcho, would seem an unlikely mover and shaker in the world of Wall Street, let alone Washington, D.C.  “It’s a bank for an ideological movement.” amalgamatedbank.com Yet last fall, it successfully pressured colossal credit card companies Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to use the financial system to track and report gun purchases. Amalgamated is...

Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.    Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy. California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.   Where does it end? Reparations could be a bottomless...

Echoing the private financing of public elections that critics saw as heavily favoring Democrats in 2020, some of America’s richest foundations are pouring money into a similar effort again, in the face of more organized conservative resistance.   The Audacious Project, part of the TED Foundation, funds many groups with "left-of-center policy goals," says the conservative Influence Watch. The Audacious Project A nonprofit group called the Audacious Project, whose supporters include the Gates and MacArthur foundations and the Bridgespan Group, a consultant whose...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 25, 2023 Last June a firebomb ripped through the CompassCare crisis pregnancy center in Buffalo, causing extensive damage but no deaths. Amid the rubble and soot, the words “Jane was here” were written on the wall, suggesting that the militant abortion rights group Jane’s Revenge was responsible. Almost immediately, authorities all the way up to the FBI assured the pro-life enterprise they would bring the perpetrators to justice.  Damage at the suburban Buffalo CompassCare pregnancy center, above and below. Authorities...

By Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 19, 2023 It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City's Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head.  Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot...