RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 15 to May 21, 2022

Featured Investigation:
It's Conservative David vs.
the Woke Corporate Green Giant

There’s a nascent but growing backlash against a corporate America seen by many as going off the “woke” deep end, Ben Weingarten reports for RealClearInvestigations. Moving beyond the gender education furor pitting Florida vs. Disney, Weingarten pulls together a one-stop overview of “woke capitalism” and the gathering forces against it – in the private sector and at the state and federal level -- most developments not widely reported:

• The pushback, and the uphill climb facing those doing the pushing, can be seen in the record number of conservative shareholder proposals during this year’s annual corporate meeting season – nearly 50 – but also the record number of progressive proposals dwarfing that figure. 
• Republicans from West Virginia to Texas to Idaho have launched inquiries into or introduced bills opposing the progressive embrace of three initials profoundly transforming capitalism: ESG, short for Environmental, Social, and Governance. 
• The conservative Heartland Institute says it has identified, proposed, or helped to pass anti-ESG bills in 24 states.
• The free-market American Legislative Exchange Council has proposed a State Government Employee Retirement Protection Act to shield pensioners “from politically driven investment strategies” by the likes of financial giant BlackRock.
• There are anti-woke stirrings in Washington, with Congress likely going Republican after fall elections. 
• Among anti-woke campaigners are entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; journalists Rupert Darwall and Andrew Stuttaford; and scholar Richard Morrison of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
• Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute is another critic, often exposing corporate secrets regarding “anti-racism” and gender identity – including, lately, at Disney.

Featured Investigation:
Genius Move? NYC's Black Mayor
Bucks Progressives
on the Racial Chessboard
of 'Gifted' Education

Diving headfirst into a nationwide controversy over selective public schools, New York’s new black mayor is rejecting the idea that accelerated learning is racist, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations. Instead of dismantling gifted programs, he reports, Mayor Eric Adams is expanding them. It’s a longshot strategy that, if successful, could influence public education across the country, Bielski reports:

• Under Adams and his new schools chancellor, David Banks, New York City is adding 1,100 seats to the gifted and talented program for elementary students this fall.
• To make sure more black and Hispanic kids get in, Banks is dropping the citywide written test – exploited by white and Asian families – in favor of admitting the top second-graders in each elementary school. That’s supposed to reduce any edge from growing up in a wealthier school district.
• But such racial rebalancing has set off backlashes elsewhere.
• And already the Adams plan has encountered stiff opposition among the famously liberal city’s progressives. They’re ideologically opposed to competitive programs as racist and elitist.
• Their preferred scenario: Put advanced students in the same classes with those who are academically behind – and everyone wins.
• Behind the mayor’s buildout of gifted education is an urgency to reverse the flight of wealthier families from the school system
• The move could be “a huge plus for the country and a big win for excellence in education,” says a “gifted” teaching expert. 

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Inside the Buffalo Massacre
Washington Post

Eighteen-year-old Peyton Gendron had spent month casing the Tops supermarket in Buffalo and used a diary to meticulously plan the mass shooting that left 10 dead:

The teen from a rural town 200 miles away kept the diary to document his preparations to drive to the Tops in a neighborhood he had selected for its dense population of Black people, “enter with Bushmaster XM-15 and shoot all blacks,” making sure to “livestream it on Twitch.” … In January, he bought an armored vest. In February, he settled on Tops, having searched online and found that the 14208 Zip code had a striking concentration of Black residents – 72.5 percent, according to the 2020 census. “Damn that is looking good,” he wrote on Feb. 17. … On March 8, after noting that “suicide seems very tempting right now,” Gendron wrote that he drove to Buffalo, “went inside Top’s,” drew a map of the store, and “I noted there were 45 blacks inside, 8 white inside, and 10 blacks on the outside of the store.”

As it describes Gendron’s plans and frame of mind, this article also recreates the terror he unleashed inside the store and describes the lives of the innocent strangers he murdered and their devastated family members:

Katherine “Kat” Massey, 72, a longtime civil rights activist, planned to be picked up by her brother when she finished shopping at Tops, according to her sister, Barbara Massey. As the afternoon wore on, Barbara stood in the parking lot, dialing and redialing anyone who might know where her sister could be. No one would have a good answer.

Pearl Young, 77, had gone out to breakfast Saturday, then over to Tops to shop. Her son Damon, 48, planned to fetch her, and the two had been communicating back and forth. Then she stopped responding. Suddenly, Damon’s phone began buzzing with news alerts about the chaos at Tops.

“She wasn’t answering, wasn’t calling back,” he said. “They said it was some people wounded as well, so I was kind of hoping for that.”

California: FBI Probes Cabal That Runs Anaheim
Los Angeles Times

Secret recordings of Anaheim power brokers suggest the city “was tightly controlled by a small cadre of individuals,” according to an FBI agent. An illustration:

The self-described cabal arranged retreats for power brokers and held so much sway that the political consultant drafted a script about a bond measure – with input from [Chamber of Commerce head Todd] Ament and a person identified as an employee of [an unidentified] Company A – for a City Council member to use at a March 2021 meeting, then mocked his delivery. “[Elected Official 1] reads your script so poorly,” the employee of Company A wrote in a text message to the political consultant intercepted by the FBI. “Lol,” the consultant responded. “He doesn’t practice.”

Much of the recent turmoil revolves around the proposed $320 million sale of Angel Stadium:

In the search warrant affidavit, [FBI agent Brian] Adkins alleged that [Mayor Harry] Sidhu provided confidential information to the Angels on at least two occasions during the city’s negotiations with the team over the 150-acre stadium property and obstructed an Orange County Grand Jury investigation into the deal. The mayor, Adkins wrote, hoped to solicit $1 million in campaign contributions from the Angels in exchange for his help. The affidavit – which shows the FBI suspects the mayor of bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering – doesn’t accuse the Angels of any wrongdoing or indicate the team knew about his plan.

BLM Gave Millions to Co-Founder's Family and Friends
Washington Examiner

The family and friends of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors reaped millions in lucrative contracts and payments from the charity after it received a windfall of cash amid nationwide protests in the summer of 2020, according to charity tax documents. This article reports:

Damon Turner, the father of Cullors's only child, raked in $969,459 from the embattled charity through his art firm, Trap Heals, BLM's Form 990 disclosure shows. An LLC run by Cullors's brother, Paul Cullors, received $840,993 for "professional security services." Shalomyah Bowers, a member of the BLM board of directors and a close associate to Cullors, pulled in $2,167,894 to his company for consulting and management services. New Impact Partners, an LLC run by the sister of BLM operations director Raymond Howard, received $107,000 for "fundraising counsel activities." … BLM also reported spending $5,923,811 on its mansion in Los Angeles, which was purchased with donor cash in October 2020.

Report: U.S. Taxpayers Fund Palestinian Terrorists
Washington Free Beacon

The Palestinian Authority allocated over $150 million to convicted terrorists in 2019, and another $191 million was paid to the families of terrorists who were "martyred" while conducting attacks against Israelis and Americans, according to a non-public State Department report issued to Congress. Those numbers – the latest available – may rise, this article suggests, as the Biden administration pushes to increase U.S. aid dollars to the Palestinian Authority, which were terminated during the Trump administration in response to its "pay-to-slay" program.

More than $360 million in U.S. funding was given to the PA in 2021, potentially in violation of a bipartisan law known as the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits the American government from giving the Palestinians aid as long as they pay terrorists. The Biden administration maintains that the aid programs do not violate the law, though it is unclear what safeguards have been put on the funding to ensure it is not used to pay terrorists and their families. The State Department confirmed that no "economic support funds" were withheld as a result of restrictions in the Taylor Force Act.

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Coronavirus Investigations

Nevada: Connected COVID Lab Missed 96% of Cases
ProPublica

When Nevada required student athletes to be tested regularly for COVID last winter before participating in matches, many parents were happy to learn that the 15-minute rapid tests indicating their child had the virus were incorrect according to the lab results from the more reliable PCR test. But, this article reports, the PCR analyses performed by one company, Chicago-based Northshore, were almost always incorrect.

As evidence mounted that Northshore was telling infected people that they had tested negative for the virus, government managers in Nevada ignored their own scientists’ warnings and expanded the lab’s testing beyond schools to the general public. Ultimately, state public health officials found that Northshore’s PCR tests missed 96% of the positive cases from the university campus — errors that sent people infected with COVID-19 back into the community. But to date, neither state nor county health officials have alerted the public to the inaccurate tests.

How did his happen?

ProPublica’s investigation also found that Northshore used political connections, including contracting with the sons of a close friend to the governor, to fast-track its state laboratory license application and secure testing agreements with five government entities in the state. Those agreements not only gave Northshore the exclusive right to test and bill for thousands of people a week, they also gave its lab a legitimacy lacking among upstart testing companies that had set up shop in strip malls and parking lots across the country.