RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 30 to November 5, 2022
Featured Investigation:
With States Hands-Off,
Home Schools Take Off
Homeschooling is growing robustly amid the devastating impact of pandemic lockdowns on learning, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations -- growth boosted by a movement that has overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the last decade to impose new ones in many states.
Checking in on South Dakota, Missouri, and other states, Bielski reports:
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The number of young South Dakotans homeschooled rose more than 20% in both of the last two school years, reflecting a national trend.
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Last year the Mount Rushmore state ended the requirement that homeschool students take standardized tests. Plus, parents no longer have to annually register their intent to homeschool a child.
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This freedom contrasts with the powerlessness public-school parents feel as their kids are instructed in gender ideology, critical race theory or other material to which they object -- in the face of plunging reading and math scores post-pandemic.
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Beyond a few core subjects like math and English, homeschool parents are free to pick their kids’ educational content.
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History can focus on the Founding Fathers, the oppression of people of color -- or pretty much whatever. For many homeschoolers, history is taught through a Christian lens.
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Since schools don’t see these kids regularly, the trend raises difficult questions about the responsibility of states to protect kids from sex abuse or other traumas.
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But homeschool advocates don’t face much political opposition.
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That could soon change. Teachers’ unions have a motive to become adversarial: Public schools have been losing students, and thus funding, at historic rates.
Featured Investigation:
Biden's Migrant Policy Worsens
Central America's 'Root Causes,' Critics Say
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports on the growing chorus of critics who say the Biden administration has severely worsened “root causes” of America’s immigration crisis that it vowed to alleviate: Central American crime, poverty, and instability.
Varney reports:
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The critics take a dim view of the results over a year since Vice President Kamala Harris visited the region vowing to address the problems driving people to leave their countries.
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Unabating flows of people northward have delivered billions of dollars to the coffers of human smuggling rings, the critics say, and drug cartels have taken advantage of America’s overwhelmed border patrol to deliver fentanyl and other deadly substances to the United States.
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These criminal organizations, experts say, have stoked rampant corruption, especially in Mexico, as they pay bribes to police and other local officials to ease passage of their cargo.
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The migrants themselves are prey to gangsters that, according to one estimate, leaves more than two-thirds of them victims of crime and nearly one-third of the women subjected to sexual assaults.
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Lately a major route to the U.S. for tens of thousands of illegals originates in Venezuela, an oil state impoverished by its socialist dictatorship.
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The trip from Caracas, the capital, to San Diego is more than 3,500 miles, an overland odyssey that crosses at least 6 countries, including crime-ridden Honduras (5th in the world in per capita crime) and nearly as bad El Salvador (8th).
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More than 3 million migrants have crossed into the U.S. since Joe Biden’s inauguration – more than the population of Chicago, third-biggest city in the U.S.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
What Have Democrats Delivered to Black Voters? Washington Post
Why Democrats Are Losing Hispanic Voters Atlantic
Billionaires Fuel Record Political Spending New York Times
Arizona Governor Defies Biden, Builds Own Border Wall Intercept
The Impeachment of Joe Biden Atlantic
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Truth Cops: DHS's Plans
to Police Disinformation
The Intercept
The Department of Homeland Security was widely ridiculed this year when it announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board” which would police misinformation, disinformation and something called “malinformation” that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, this article reports that its censorious spirit lives on through other initiatives:
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. … There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.
This article reports that the government has never clearly defined disinformation “and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.”
How Russians Ran
a 'Cleansing' Operation in Bucha
AP, PBS, and SITU Research
On March 4, Russian soldiers massacred dozens of civilian men in Bucha, Ukraine. When the bodies were later found strewn along the streets and packed in hasty graves, it would be easy to think the carnage was random, this article reports. Residents asking how this happened would be told to make their peace with their losses, because some questions just don’t have answers. But surveillance camera footage from Bucha obtained by the Associated Press and the PBS program “Frontline,” show that “there was a method to the violence”:
What happened that day in Bucha was what Russian soldiers on intercepted phone conversations called “zachistka” — cleansing. The Russians hunted people on lists prepared by their intelligence services and went door to door to identify potential threats. Those who didn’t pass this filtration, including volunteer fighters and civilians suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops, were tortured and executed, surveillance video, audio intercepts and interviews show.
After detailing the murderous operation, this article reports that Ukraine is scrambling to build a system that can handle tens of thousands of complex war crimes investigations. There are more than 3,500 investigations in Bucha alone, and things have fallen through the cracks. “Such grave tortures — we never had such a huge number of them,” Yurii Bielousov, the head of Ukraine’s war crimes department, told the reporters. “That’s why I’m sure that, unfortunately, especially in Bucha, because it was one of the first, lots of mistakes were done at the first stage.”
Even Greenpeace Admits
Recycling Doesn’t Work
City Journal
A new Greenpeace study concludes that the recycling of plastic is an environmental “dead end,” John Tierney writes:
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: Forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
Tierney, who has written about the issue for a quarter century, reports that these problems have been clear for decades. The environmental price of this misguided effort has been high because the plastic in American recycling bins has gone to developing countries with primitive waste-handling systems. Much of it ends up illegally dumped, burned (spewing toxic fumes), or reprocessed at rudimentary facilities that leak some of the plastics into rivers. Virtually all the consumer plastics polluting the world’s oceans comes from “mismanaged waste” in developing countries.
Much media coverage of an illegal immigrant intruder's attack on Paul Pelosi at the San Francisco mansion home of him and his wife, Nancy, the Speaker of the U.S. House, was more focused on contriving a way to link the violence to Republicans than to the Democrat-run city's inequities and social pathologies. While this article doesn't mention the Pelosi attack, it provides context on the latter issues nonetheless. It reports that a luxury Four Seasons apartment high-rise located steps from San Francisco's notorious open-air drug market has sold just 13 of its 146 units in the two years since the building opened.
The Tower Residences, which features a $49 million penthouse, views of the San Francisco Bay, and a host of amenities – including a car elevator – is located smack in the middle of the downtown Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods, which, as Leighton Woodhouse reported for RealClearInvestigations, have become the epicenters of the beleaguered city's crime and drug problems. The Daily Mail reports:
Both the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods are home to a pair of drug treatment facilities opened by San Francisco, which locals complain have done little more than attract scores of dangerous addicts to the streets. The Tenderloin Linkage Center was opened in January 2022 with the intent of helping the city's homeless population and drug addicts to find help. … Critics noted that only 0.1 percent of people who visited the center for help were directed to treatment in the first five months. Between January and April, just 18 of the 23,367 drug users who visited the site were referred for treatment. And a prominent feature of the Linkage Center was providing a 'safe space' for users to shoot up, which critics say did little to solve anything. Instead of treating the problem, the center transformed into an open-air drug market, with users camped out inside the center and on the surrounding streets, shooting up freely in the open passing out where they sat. And down the road in SoMa, residents say they are arming themselves with baseball bats and stun guns after a newly-opened drug sobering facility drew violent addicts to a previously peaceful neighborhood.
Coronavirus Investigations
Documents Reveal Crisis
Inside Wuhan Lab
Vanity Fair/Pro Publica
The COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident,” according to an interim report drafted by a nine-person team commissioned by Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina. This long article focuses on and fleshes out those findings through independent reporting. Highlights:
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Documents show that workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had longstanding worries about safety and security at the site. “They repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”
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In the fall of 2019, the dispatches from the Institute took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On November 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the most secure area used for the most danger work, the Biosafety Level 4 lab, appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.
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Documents suggest that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was concerned enough about safety at the lab, just as the pandemic was beginning in late 2019, that instructions about lab safety were written in his name.
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The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program. Experts said this strongly suggested that Yusen’s team had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.
This article has received pushback from several quarters.
