RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 4 to September 10, 2022
Featured Investigation:
How Blatant Anti-White Racism
Won Acceptance in Elite America
In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski traces the roots and ascendancy of the new anti-white racism in the American elite -- featuring one academic lecturing at Yale on her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way” and another writing in a peer-reviewed journal on ”whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition.”
In an escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric, in a week that ended with progressives heaping vitriol on "racist" Queen Elizabeth II upon her death, President Biden insinuated in a fiery campaign speech in Philadelphia that Trump supporters are “white supremacists,” as his administration pursues “equity” disfavoring whites throughout government.
Murawski writes:
- The new rhetoric is coming not from losers at society’s margins. Rather, it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and opine from major media platforms.
- Those most militant about policing “hate speech” against minorities, women, gays and trans people are often the most tolerant of ugly slams aimed at whites and men.
- Even as the Civil Rights era seemed to place beyond the pale the denigrating of entire groups, the underlying justifications for the trash talk percolated for decades.
- A movement on the left shaped by Michele Foucault and Herbert Marcuse produced a double standard for speech in which “oppressed” groups are protected and “oppressors” are not, on the rationale that equal treatment was a form of social control.
- In the ultimate sign of its success, anti-white bias has taken hold in schools, workplaces, medical journals, science and even diversity training in federal agencies.
Featured Investigation:
Despite Wind at Its Back,
America's Dominant Abortion Provider
Faces a Struggle to Adapt
Planned Parenthood's fortunes look rosy lately, with fundraising reportedly up dramatically and galvanized liberals, especially women, bent on countering the Supreme Court’s rejection of Roe v. Wade and federal primacy over abortion. But close observers say there’s limited potential for the organization to achieve the broader role it now envisions, Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations:
- Abortion clinics are shutting down, a trend likely to continue in conservative states no longer burdened by Roe.
- Chemical abortions via telemedicine aren’t a slam-dunk alternative. Planned Parenthood’s shift away from surgical abortions faces competitive challenges, since abortion drugs are widely available over the Internet, and there are new risks, since those drugs more easily evade regulatory scrutiny.
- Giving kids hormones to change their gender is fraught with risks. Planned Parenthood embraces an expansion of “gender-affirming care.” But journalist Abigail Shrier quotes a Planned Parenthood worker describing end-runs around sex-change protocols because credentialed counselors are lacking at clinics.
- Planned Parenthood has exaggerated its versatility in the past. The liberal Washington Post has dinged it in fact-checks for minimizing its role in abortions and falsely exaggerating its role in mammograms and other women’s health services.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
Judge Orders Special Master Review
of Trump Raid Materials
New York Times
In a Labor Day order, Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon granted former President Donald Trump’s request that a special master be appointed to conduct an independent review of the materials federal investigators seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump’s legal team sought the neutral arbiter to protect the former President's rights in the wake of the unprecedented raid. Until the judge's order, federal authorities alone decided which materials could or could not be used in their investigation.
The special master would be tasked with “manag[ing] assertions of privilege and mak[ing] recommendations thereon” regarding the property seized, and “evaluating claims for return of property” to the former president – essentially checking the government’s work, and, in Judge Cannon’s words, “ensur[ing] at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances.”
On at least two occasions, according to the ruling, investigators had been exposed to materials only later designated as potentially privileged. “Those instances alone, even if entirely inadvertent, yield questions about the adequacy of the [government’s] filter review process,” whereby authorities reviewed and segregated protected materials, said Judge Cannon.
The order, according to the New York Times ...
... also temporarily barred the Justice Department from using the seized materials for any “investigative purpose” connected to its inquiry of Mr. Trump until the work of the arbiter … was completed.
The order would prevent, at least for now, federal prosecutors from using key pieces of evidence as they continue to investigate whether the former president illegally retained national defense documents at his estate, Mar-a-Lago, or obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to get them back.
While halting the government’s use of the Trump trove in its investigation of the former president, the order permitted the intelligence community’s continued classification review and damage assessment regarding the seized materials.
A separate article detailed some of the materials investigators had seized. These included “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information,” according to the judge – underscoring the argument that a special master might be merited given the personal and sensitive nature of some of the materials in the haul, and the damage to the former president should they be leaked.
The order itself proved revealing in other ways as well. This article highlights seven of them, led by the fact that President Biden had been more directly involved in the decisions leading up to the Mar-a-Lago raid than previously reported.
Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway
FBI's Thibault Said to Stifle Debrief of Bobulinski on Bidens NY Post
Hunter Set Up China Embassy Dinner for Client NY Post
Add Billions More to Biden's Mega College Debt Wipeout Daily Wire
Ala.: DOJ Goes After Group Fighting Child Sex Changes Just News
FBI Got Americans to Waive Gun Rights in 'Pre-Crime' Push Daily Caller
Biden Oil Leases at Over Half-Century Low WSJ
Jet-Borne Eco-Czar Kerry's 9.5M-Pound Carbon Footprint Free Beacon
Calif.: Rep. Karen Bass's Free USC Degree Part of Bribe Case LA Times
Ex-Sen. Sgt. at Arms Lobbies for China National Pulse
The Humiliating History of the TSA The Verge
How Billionaire Secretly Funded Right-Wing Causes ProPublica
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
How Marijuana Became
the New OxyContin
Tablet Magazine
For 30 years, Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new: A level of psychosis in patients far more acute than that exhibited by abusers of these often-harder drugs. The culprit? Cannabis. This article reports on the disturbing parallels between a drug now decriminalized and increasingly normalized, and OxyContin:
As billions of dollars have flowed into the new above-ground industry of smokable, edible, and drinkable cannabis-based products, the drug has been transformed into something unrecognizable to anyone who grew up around marijuana pre-legalization. Addiction medicine doctors and relatives of addicts say it has become a hardcore drug, like cocaine or methamphetamines. Chronic use leads to the same outcomes commonly associated with those harder substances: overdose, psychosis, suicidality. And yet it’s been marketed as a kind of elixir and sold like candy for grown-ups.
“I got into addiction medicine because of the opioid crisis,” said Dr. Roneet Lev, an addiction medicine doctor in San Diego who hosts a podcast about drug abuse. Years ago, she advocated against the overprescription of opioid painkillers like OxyContin. Now, she believes she’s seeing the same thing all over again: the specious claims of medical benefits, the denial of adverse effects. “From Big Tobacco to Big Pharma to Big Marijuana—it’s the same people, and the same pattern.”
What is it that makes today’s weed so much more dangerous than that enjoyed by the seemingly harmless stoners of yesteryear?
If you’re over 30 years old and you used to smoke weed when you were a teenager, the strongest you were smoking was probably 20% THC. Today, teenagers are “dabbing” a product that’s three, four, or five times stronger, and are often doing so multiple times a day. At that level of potency, the impact of the drug on a user’s brain belongs to an entirely different category of risk than smoking a joint or taking a bong rip of even an intensively bred marijuana flower. It’s highly addictive, and over time, there’s a significant chance it can drive you insane.
In related drug news, this article reports that the Biden administration is set to spend $3.6 million to deploy vending machines filled with drug supplies in rural Kentucky, in a purported bid to reduce the stigma for drug users. The “harm reduction kiosks” will contain “injection equipment, naloxone, fentanyl test strips, hygiene kits, condoms, and other supplies.”
RealClearInvestigations has previously reported on the harm reduction model, and San Francisco’s experience with it.
How Colleges Lower Standards
in the Name of Diversity
Daily Caller
Colleges rely on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) standards to vet students and faculty rather than evaluate them on their merits.
Universities have axed standardized test requirements while mandating DEI statements in applications and curriculum requirements. Specifics:
- Applicants to the University of Tennessee are required to submit stateements on advancing DEI the school, which they are judged on.
- The University of California, Berkeley, grades how candidates have contributed to furthering DEI, according to the school website. Its tool also allows candidates to be judged on their “knowledge and understanding” of DEI.
- Indiana University School of Medicine updated its standards for promotion and tenuring of professors, requiring them to “show effort toward advancing DEI.”
A related article reports that elite medical schools are deliberately recruiting woke activists. According to a review of the application process for America’s top 50 medical schools:
Nearly three-quarters of these institutions — and 80% of the top 10 — ask applicants about their views on diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism and other politicized concepts. The clear goal is to find the students who will best advance divisive ideology, not provide the best care to patients. ... Many schools explicitly ask applicants if they agree with statements about racial politics. Others gauge applicants’ views on or experience with woke concepts.
Secretive Family Offices
Serving Silicon Valley's Elite
Puck
Among the problems faced by billionaires? The need to manage the myriad headaches that are the curse of vast lucre. Enter family offices – the investment-and-lifestyle shops the uber-rich build to manage their assets, their profiles, and their vacations. Their remit can include everything from managing family meetings to advising on “intergenerational wealth transfers,” to tax hacks like "opportunity zones," to managing serious kidnapping threats and obtaining second passports. This article reports that ...
... while the family-office industry has been around since the days of John D. Rockefeller, it is now bigger than the $4 trillion hedge-fund industry and is catching up in sophistication. Family offices these days are engaging in shareholder activism campaigns, launching E.S.G. initiatives galore, even spinning out entities to manage external capital from other wealthy families who want to invest together.
And yet unlike hedge funds, there is practically zero regulation of these entities by the S.E.C., and, more often than not, practically zero scrutiny. Critics describe these family offices as almost a shadow financial system. That misses the mark in many ways—billionaires are typically more interested in capital preservation rather than capital accumulation—but yeah, they’ve got some power beyond moving the yachts and aircraft into position and herding butlers and horses at their estates. And when family offices start executing these tactical or strategic initiatives, the staffing can swell into the hundreds of employees.
Given their secrecy-by-design, family offices are also a totally underexplored facet of how our economy, politics, and culture works these days.
A related article gives readers insights into the fears of the technology industry’s billionaire “preppers.”
Championship Cheat Chill
Churns Chess
Wall Street Journal
Magnus Carlsen’s 53-game unbeaten streak had been over for only a few hours when the reigning chess world champion made a move that indicated something was off.
Carlsen had lost to 19-year-old American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann at a prestigious tournament in St. Louis called the Sinquefield Cup when he announced, without explanation, that he was withdrawing from the whole event. The chess world was quick to read the tea leaves.
“I think Magnus believes that Hans probably is cheating,” said Hikaru Nakamura, an American grandmaster ranked No. 6 in the world, who added that the allegation remains “unproven.”
This article reports on what has become a supercharged scandal that is short on details and long on breathless speculation.
