RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

By The Editors, RealClearInvestigations
January 21, 2023
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week 
January 15 to January 21, 2023

 

Featured Investigation: 
The Rise of the Single Woke 
(and Young, Democratic) Female

Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females – the new “SWFs” – as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics, Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams report for RealClearInvestigations:  

  • The 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave.  

  • While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, some 68% of unmarried women voted for Democrats.   

  • Longer-term trends show that single, childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats’ most reliable supporters.   

  • The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today.  

  • Since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13% to 27% in 2019. 

  • There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. SWF role models: Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team.  

  • Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and millennial voters tend to live in cities and share a woke ideology that sets them apart from older women. 

  • One paradox: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense, yet much of the party embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics.   

In RealClearInvestigations, Richard Bernstein examines the striking public reluctance to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic attackers unless they are white – even though attacks by blacks and other minorities appear to have risen dramatically. Apparent reason: Attention to such hate crimes doesn’t conform with the narrative of white “systemic racism.” Bernstein writes: 

  • A groundswell of antisemitism has received wide notice across the country in recent years, but police authorities are vague about or don’t report the ethnicity of the perpetrators – although available evidence indicates many are young black men.    

  • Instead, media and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white racism, invoking the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, or the 2018 synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. 

  • Rationalizations can be strained: When billionaire black rap entrepreneur Ye, formerly Kanye West, went antisemitic last year, black activist Shaun King explained in Newsweek, “you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist.”    

  • There’s a new term for the underplayed hatred: “inconvenient antisemitism.”  

  • At universities, Jews are increasingly targeted, but on campus the explanation – or excuse – is leftist opposition to Israel’s policies. 

  • Assaults against Jews increased by 34% between 2021 and 2022, the Anti-Defamation League reports. It says the number of Americans “harboring extensive antisemitic prejudice” has reached “the highest level in decades.”     

 

Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

Justice Dept. Trusted Biden Team
to Find Secret Files  
Wall Street Journal 

One of the more significant moments during the email scandals of 2016 was the FBI’s decision not to demand that the Democratic National Committee hand over its allegedly hacked servers for forensic analysis. Instead, the bureau allowed the Democrat-aligned tech firm CrowdStrike to perform the direct analysis and then largely accepted the company’s claim that the Russians had stolen the material, some of which later appeared on Wikileaks. As Aaron Maté has reported for RCI, this allegation was highly problematic – no definitive proof that the Russians or anyone else exfiltrated data from the servers has ever been found – and yet it became a foundation of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. This history came to mind as the Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Justice Department considered – but decided against – having FBI agents monitor a search by President Biden’s lawyers for  classified documents  at his homes: 

Instead, the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys  would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them.  

The article reports the DOJ’s thinking, which makes little sense: “One reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile, current and former law-enforcement officials said.” The FBI can, of course, take a hard line whenever it wants, as the SWAT team arrest of Roger Stone and the raid on Mar-a-Lago make clear. 

Former President Bill Clinton was paid north of $250,000 when he spoke at the disgraced FTX CEO’s Crypto Bahamas  Conference in April. 

Shortly thereafter, Bill and Hillary Clinton invited the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried – known as “SBF” in crypto circles – to speak at their annual Clinton Global  Initiative in New York – an effective endorsement of the former FTX CEO that played a pivotal role in elevating his reputation among politicians and deep-pocketed investors alike. … Sources told The Post it was  former Hollywood agent Michael Kives who served as an aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton who helped connect the two. Kives – who now runs a venture firm called K5 Global – nabbed $300 million last year from FTX’s now-defunct investment arm, Alameda Research, according to reports.  

This article also reports that many beneficiaries of Bankman-Fried’s money have handed everything back. Political action committees like the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC  vowed to return millions. Beto O’Rourke’s Texas gubernatorial campaign returned $1 million. The Clintons, on the other hand, have remained silent. 

Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

Abortion Pill Websites
Sharing Data With Google 
ProPublica 

Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to  end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis of 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication has found:

These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone. This information helps websites function and helps tech companies personalize ads. … Representatives for the nine sites did not respond to requests for comment. All were recommended on the popular website  Plan C, which provides information about how to get abortion pills by mail, including in states where abortion is illegal. Plan C acknowledged that it does not have control over these sites or their privacy practices. 

The article also reports that law enforcement can obtain people’s data from tech companies such as Google, whose privacy policies say the companies reserve the right to share users’ data with law enforcement.  

In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports that “hundreds of federal, state and local U.S. law-enforcement agencies  have access without court oversight to a database of more than 150 million  money transfers  between people in the U.S. and in more than 20 countries. … [D]ata includes the full names of the sender and recipient as well as the transaction amount.” Officials say it helps law enforcement crack down on drug cartels and money laundering. 

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana has been unlawfully destroying its deputies’ disciplinary records for at least 10 years, according to records provided by state officials responsible for overseeing the retention of records by state, parish and local agencies:

The finding comes at a time when the sheriff’s office is facing multiple lawsuits involving allegations of excessive force, racial discrimination and wrongful death at the hands of Jefferson Parish deputies. Attorneys have accused Sheriff Joe Lopinto of  failing to discipline  deputies and a lack of transparency when it comes to releasing records that might shed light on their history of complaints and disciplinary action. The illegal destruction of disciplinary records can make it harder to hold deputies accountable in a court of law or track problem officers moving from department to department. 

From the Annals of You Can’t Make This Up: A number of investigators responsible for cracking down on jail officers who lie about being sick have themselves been absent from work for significant periods. A New York Times review of personnel records showed that several investigators have taken so many sick days that they could have been classified by the city as “chronic sick” – a designation that can bring increased scrutiny. The special unit they work for, known as Squad 1 ...

... focuses on misconduct inside one of America’s most notoriously troubled jail systems, and most of its investigators are Correction Department captains and officers temporarily assigned to the Department of Investigation, the city’s chief integrity watchdog. … None of the investigators, who worked for a unit that conducted surveillance and home visits of jail officers suspected of lying about being ill, have been disciplined for sick-leave abuse. After being presented with The Times’s review, the Department of Investigation placed one under investigation for potential sick-leave abuse and disclosed that a second was already under investigation. The department said that its review so far showed that the others had medical documentation for their sick days, but that the review had not been completed. 

Coronavirus Investigations 

Pharma Pressured Twitter
to Censor Calls for Generic Vaccine  
Intercept 

Before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the social media platform appears to have been a vehicle the rich and powerful used to squelch views they did not like. While the documents released by Musk – the so-called Twitter Files – have extensively revealed how government officials pressured the company to silence critics, this article reports that Big Pharma also used Twitter to control the debate. 

Stronger, a campaign run by Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, regularly communicated with Twitter on regulating content related to the pandemic. The firm worked closely with the San Francisco social media giant to help develop bots to censor vaccine misinformation and, at times, sent direct requests to Twitter with lists of accounts to censor and verify. … Many of the tweets flagged by Stronger contained absolute falsehoods, including claims that vaccines contained microchips and were designed to intentionally kill people. But others hinged on a gray area of vaccine policy through which there is reasonable debate, such as requests to label or take down content  critical  of vaccine passports and government mandates to require vaccination. 

This article also reports that internal Twitter emails  show regular correspondence  between an account manager at Public Good Projects and various Twitter officials, including Todd O’Boyle, a lobbyist with the company who served as a point of contact with the Biden administration. The content moderation requests were sent throughout 2021 and early 2022. The entire campaign, newly available tax documents and other disclosures show, was funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a vaccine industry lobbying group.  



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