RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Dec. 9 to Dec. 15
Featured Investigation
Richard Bernstein’s latest article for RealClearInvestigations uses four recent incidents to reveal an alarming trend in American society: How nuclear outrage is routinely provoked by rather tame opinions, especially those touching on the hot-button topics of race and sexuality. He shows how the effort at universities and other institutions to curb ugly hate speech and reduce sexual harassment has led to what Bernstein describes as “a defining down of outrage.”
The trend even extends to years-old comments, as with the recent ouster of comedian Kevin Hart as host of Hollywood’s Oscars.
Bernstein’s article focuses on these incidents:
- At the University of California-Berkeley, a member of the Student Senate faced mass, indignant demands for her resignation, after she abstained on a vote on transgender rights.
- At the Public Broadcasting Service newsroom in New York, a veteran editor was fired after saying “Not bad” to a colleague as they viewed photographs of the actress who would marry Prince Harry, Meghan Markle.
- A tenured Caucasian professor of history at Rutgers University was threatened with punishment after he made a clearly satirical comment on Facebook that he hated the white race and wanted to resign from it.
- And at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY, the office of a self-described “conservative-leaning professor” was vandalized hours after he published an opinion article in the New York Times, lamenting what he called the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses.
Bernstein puts these episodes in a wider context. First amendment scholars, he reports, have long noted that strong limits on the government’s ability to suppress speech (“Congress shall make no law,” etc.) have led to a range of informal mechanisms and customs restraining speech – most notably, the social sanction against use of the “N-word.”
In the age of Twitter, Trump and political correctness, these informal strictures are extended to utterances that fall well short of hate speech or harassment to the point of being shouted down and even punished.
“Students act as de facto arbiters of free expression on campus,” says John Villasenor, an engineering professor at UCLA. “If a big percentage of students believe that views they find offensive should be silenced, those views will in fact be silenced.”
The Trump Investigations
'Appointment in Prague' Was Dossier Bunk, Mueller Files Indicate
One of the most inflammatory charges made in the Clinton-financed opposition research known as the Steele dossier – that Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen met with “Kremlin officials” in Prague in 2016 to arrange payments to operatives hacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign – appears to have been debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. As Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations, the 25 pages of court papers Mueller has filed on Cohen over the past two weeks offer no evidence he contacted Kremlin officials in Prague, as described in the dossier. And Cohen’s guilty plea regarding lying to Congress does not include his sworn statement that he has never been Prague. Sperry also reports that Mueller apparently withheld exculpatory evidence in the statement of charges he filed last week against Cohen.
More on the Trump Investigations
Tab Mogul Admits Playmate Pay Was to Help Trump Win, Politico
Trump Indictment Likely in NY Over Campaign Hush Cash, Fox News
Sudden Shift in Get-Trump Talk: Campaign Money, Not Russia, Washington Examiner
Inaugural Donations From Mideast Scrutinized, New York Times
New Doubts About FBI Handling of Flynn Interview, The Federalist
DOJ Recovers 19,000 Page-Strzok Texts, but Many Others Lost, Washington Times
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Ballot Fraud, American-Style ... and Its Bitter Harvests
RealClearInvestigations
North Carolina is moving ever closer to a new election in its 9th Congressional district following allegations that Republicans used a controversial practice known as “ballot-harvesting” – illegal in the Tar Heel State. As Eric Eggers reports for RealClearInvestigations, this practice – in which absentee ballots are collected by intermediaries who deliver them to polling officials – is an invitation to mischief. It was legalized in California in 2016 and may have contributed to the Democrats’ wide gains in that state during the recent midterms. In the state’s once deep-red Orange County, an estimated 250,000 harvested ballots were reportedly dropped off on Election Day alone. The county Republican Chairman claimed legalization of harvesting "directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.” Eggers reports that ballot-harvesting has plagued elections in various states, including Florida, Missouri and Texas.
400+ Sex Abuse Charges Against U.S. Baptist Churches
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
For decades, women and children have faced rampant sexual abuse while worshiping at independent fundamental Baptist churches around the country. The network of churches and schools has often covered up the crimes and helped relocate the offenders, an eight-month Star-Telegram investigation has found. This four-part series draws on interviews with more than 200 people — current or former church members, across generations — who shared their stories of rape, assault, humiliation, and fear in churches where male leadership cannot be questioned.
Jamaican Resorts Covered Up Rapes of Tourists
Detroit Free Press
This article follows an earlier Free Press investigation that found sexual assaults of tourists are a long-standing and unchecked problem in Jamaica, where an estimated one American is raped per month, according to State Department statistics. Over the last several years, Jamaican resorts have silenced multiple sexual assault victims, discouraging them from calling the police or pressing charges, downplaying their fears and offering free hotel stays or cash refunds in exchange for a promise not to sue or tell anyone what happened, the Free Press found. After that story ran, multiple victims contacted the newspaper to tell their stories about cover-ups, confidentiality agreements and payoffs by resorts looking to protect their reputations and revenue. Those stories are featured here.
How the IRS Was Gutted
ProPublica/Atlantic
Nobody likes the IRS – especially Congress. Sharp cuts in funding have reduced the number of auditors by a third since 2010, dropping it to the lowest number of auditors since 1953, when the U.S. economy was one-seventh the size. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will. The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. It has drastically pulled back from pursuing people who don’t bother filing their tax returns. New investigations of “nonfilers,” as they’re called, dropped from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 last year.
Americans, More Than Ever, Are Aging Alone
Wall Street Journal
Baby boomers are aging alone more than any generation in U.S. history, and the resulting loneliness is a looming public health threat. About one in 11 Americans age 50 and older lacks a spouse, partner or living child, census figures and other research show. That amounts to about eight million people in the U.S. without close kin, the main source of companionship in old age -- and their share of the population is projected to grow. Researchers have found that loneliness takes a physical toll, and is as closely linked to early mortality as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day or consuming more than six alcoholic drinks a day. Loneliness is even worse for longevity than being obese or physically inactive.
Your Apps Share Where You Were Last Night
New York Times
At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day. These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year.
Google Sought to Block Breitbart From Ads, Emails Show
Daily Caller
Google employees sought to block Breitbart from Google AdSense less than one month after President Donald Trump took office, leaked emails from the company reveal. Emails published by Breitbart show that Google employees sought to use alleged “hate speech” as a pretense for banning the conservative news site from taking part in the advertising program.
Scam Hits His Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie
New York Post
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Pizza Reporting goes to … John Crudele of the New York Post. Like so many great stories, this one owes a lot of chance – Crudele asked his local pizzeria to give him the pie in the window. At first they wouldn’t sell it to him – because it’s larger than their typical large pizza! Crudele then found out this deception is a common practice at New York pizzerias. The pizza they show is bigger than the pie they sell. Digging deeper, Crudele turned this observation into news you can use. Turns out the pie in the window is used to sell slices – and that by the slice pies have a wider diameter (20 inches) than large whole pies (16 inches). Next, Crudele calculated that the 20-inch pie delivers roughly a third more pizza than the 16-inch job – 314 square inches of pizza compared with 210 square inches. Finally, noting the 16-inch pie sells for $15 and that eight slices at $2.50 a pop comes to $20, he calculated that “you are paying 7 cents per square inch for the smaller pie and only 6 cents per square inch for the larger one. ... So, to my surprise and maybe yours, it’s typically a better bargain to go into the pizzeria and order eight single slices of pizza rather than a full pie.”
