RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 7 to March 13, 2021

Featured Investigation:
How California Is Embracing Mandatory
Racial-Injustice Instruction for Everyone in High School

It’s a watershed moment in the "woking" of American education. John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations that California next week is expected to approve an "ethnic studies" curriculum emphasizing whites’ subjugation of non-whites -- with the aim of making the course mandatory for all of the state’s 1.7 million high school students.

Murawski reports:

• The “ethnic studies” material is not a conventional textbook subject but an ideology with an activist political agenda.
• “In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion,” a critic says. “This kind of proselytizing has no place in public schools.”
• But activists are furious that their efforts are being diluted. They attribute the state’s political compromises to a common enemy: “whiteness.”
• The state’s guidelines grant teachers wide flexibility -- leeway that the activists deride as a “Foods, Heroes & Holidays” and “all lives matter” pabulum.
• President Biden’s Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is considered a champion of the ethnic studies cause.
• Some warn that the curriculum violates state anti-discrimination policy, and at times borders on child abuse.
• Through “unity chants,” pep rallies prepare high schoolers to do battle against colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and other manifestations of white supremacy. (Sidebar.)
• Given California’s outsize influence in the textbook industry and educational trends, its standards could serve as a national model for years to come.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Texts: FBI's Coziness With Reporters Often Backfired Just the News
Lincoln Project’s Secrets, Side Deals and Scandals New York Times

Other Noteworthy Articles

La.: Where Cops Unleash Dogs on Black Teens
Marshall Project
Between 2017 and 2019, Baton Rouge police dogs bit at least 146 people. Of those, this article reports, 53 were 17 years old or younger; the youngest were just 13. Almost all of the people bitten were black, and most were unarmed and suspected by police of nonviolent crimes like driving a stolen vehicle or burglary. The Baton Rouge Police Department’s dogs bite people at a more than twice the rate than those at any of the departments in the country’s 20 largest cities. The department described its use of police dogs as the use of “less lethal force” to take possible criminals into custody. It’s “actually safer for the suspect,” said a  spokesman.

Big Problems Flagged at Drug Maker Lilly
Reuters
A whistleblower alleges that the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly falsified or destroyed records in the wake of manufacturing mistakes, this article reports. In one case, according to 2018 emails among executives, company-mandated quality assurance documents were missing for Trulicity, a blockbuster diabetes medication, which security filings show garnered more than $4 billion in sales in 2019. As associate director of human resources tasked with investigating workplace issues, including manufacturing complaints, the whistleblower repeatedly pressed her superiors to address serious problems, including staffing shortages, poor training, record destruction and falsifications. Her inquiries were reportedly downplayed, ignored and sometimes blocked. FDA inspectors have cited some of the same lapses she flagged.

India Targets Climate Activists With Help of Big Tech
The Intercept
Even as social media is empowering citizens to communicate and organize around the world, many governments are using those same tools to censor and punish dissent. This article focuses on India, where the government transformed several forms of communication – including “WhatsApp groups, a collectively edited Google Doc, a private Zoom meeting, and several high-profile tweets” – into key pieces of evidence in “a state-sponsored and media-amplified” effort alleging the existence of an international conspiracy among climate activists. The government’s case was so thin and its overreach so clear that a judge issued a scathing ruling against it. But, this article also reports:

In a nation where online hatred has tipped with chilling frequency into real-world pogroms targeting women and minorities, human rights advocates are warning that India is on the knife edge of terrible violence, perhaps even the kind of genocidal bloodshed that social media aided and abetted against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

License-Plate Scans Aid Crime-Solving at Expense of Privacy
Wall Street Journal
This article reports that license-plate readers are feeding immense databases with details on Americans’ driving habits. The vast network of automated license-plate scanners, which has been growing for decades, makes it nearly impossible to drive anywhere in the U.S. without being observed. The scanner data, which require no warrant, has become a key tool for law enforcement from local police to the Justice Department. Plate scans were crucial, for example, in the arrests of a number of suspected rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Much of this data is in private hands. Marketing materials from Vigilant Solutions, a division of Motorola Solutions Inc. and one of the largest private vendors of data and scanners, boasts that its database contains more than nine billion scans of American citizens’ license plates.

Wisconsin: 72 Hours in Kenosha
GQ
This long article about the deadly shooting during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August draws on a wide variety of sources – including interviews with some with participants speaking for the first time – to reconstruct “how American order imploded for three nights in Kenosha” with “citizens warring in the streets, and what that breakdown might tell us about the United States’ deepening divisions.” In a separate article, ProPublica reports that leaders of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board discouraged staff from confronting the NYPD about a lack of cooperation as it investigated more than 700 complaints filed in connection with the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

He Got $300K in Credit-Card Rewards. IRS: It's Taxable.
Wall Street Journal
File this one under why didn’t I think of that first. Experimental physicist Konstantin Anikeev made a bundle by exploiting a wrinkle in the credit card cosmos. He used his American Express card – which offered 5% back on grocery store and pharmacy purchases - to buy prepaid Visa gift cards. He used the gift cards to buy money orders, then used the money orders to make deposits in his bank account, then used that money to pay his credit-card bill. In a $500 transaction, the 5% rewards would yield $25 – more than enough to cover gift-card fees of about $5 and the $1 fee on the money order. He did so many of those transactions – $6.4 million worth, netting him at least $310,000 – that he tripped the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which investigates money laundering. The IRS sued for back taxes but the court mostly ruled in favor of Anikeev.

More Noteworthy Articles

Coronavirus Investigations

The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers ProPublica
J&J Used Aborted Fetal Cells Creating Covid Vaccine KHOU
Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracker Wall Street Journal
Who's Making Billions From Covid-19 Vaccines? Guardian
U.S. Envoys Flagged Wuhan Peril 2 Years Before Outbreak Politico
Small Business Owners Haven’t Had PPP Loans Forgiven Intercept