RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 13 to October 19
Featured Investigation:
Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats
Turns out violent crime did not decrease in 2022 as the FBI originally reported – and Democrats have repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail. It rose, instead, by 4.5% according to the Bureau’s updated numbers. Government agencies are constantly revising their data but, John Lott reports for RealClearInvestigations, these changes are raising questions because the FBI appears to have worked to bury the politically inconvenient numbers.
- The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release regarding violent crime stats.
- RCI discovered the change by noticing a cryptic reference on the FBI’s website – a footnote stated "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023" – that led us to download the crime data and compare those numbers to the earlier report.
- The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. These include an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.
- This lack of transparency has deceived many media outlets. After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: "Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape."
- The FBI’s crime stats revisions reveal how much guess work is involved in even the “final” numbers often seized on by politicians. The FBI doesn't simply count reported crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data. The Bureau also makes estimates for cities that report no data at all. The FBI's method of generating these estimates changes over time, and it affects the figures they report.
- Jeffrey Anderson, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021 told RCI, “The [FBI's] processes, such as how it tries to 'estimate' unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice's actual statistical agency.”
- Anderson said when he headed the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “we definitely would have” highlighted in a press release or a report the 6.6% change recorded for 2022, which moved the numbers from a drop to a rise in violent crime."
Featured Investigation:
Buying the News: How Leftwing Donors Are Taking Over Local Journalism
As American journalism has been battered by falling revenue and the declining trust of the American people, well-financed nonprofits have jumped into the breach. But, Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations, this life lifesaving funding may further erode confidence in journalism because the lion’s share of it comes from leftwing organizations connected to efforts to promote the Democratic Party.
- The National Trust for Local News, which has a goal of raising $300 million to further its stated mission as a “non-profit newspaper company dedicated to protecting and sustaining community news,” has received significant financial support from two of the largest sources of left-wing political funding – the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.
- Both the National Trust for Local News and States Newsroom, which was founded just six years ago with the goal of “nonpartisan coverage of state policy,” have received funding from controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has spent nearly half a billion dollars on American left-wing causes.
- Some of the largest donations to The American Journalism Project, which says it has committed $55 million to “rebuilding local news,” are from the foundations of high-profile Democratic megadonors including The Emerson Collective, which is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.
- A growing concern is the content of these new progressive donor-funded local news sites slants liberal in ways that many of the old independently owned regional newspapers that were accountable to their subscribers for revenue did not.
- Courier Newsroom, which operates local news sites is many states was created by a former journalist who worked on Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, was created to blur the line between political advertising and journalism.
- Courier has hired ex-Facebook employees and spent millions of dollars promoting its stories into Facebook and Instagram feeds using targeting tools with the goal of effecting specific election outcomes. According to Wired magazine, one metric Courier relies on to gauge success is how much they spend on Facebook ads per vote gained.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books
Chicago Mayor Returned Suspect Donations, RCI
Waste of the Day: Spending at “DeSantis University”, RCI
House GOP Addicted to Earmarks, RCI
$50 Million For a Lake, Minus The Water, RCI
No Show Job for NYC Mayor’s Girlfriend?, RCI
Election 2024 and the Beltway
Biden Has Canceled 1 Million Loans for Public Workers
Associated Press
Just two years ago, the federal government had forgiven about 7,000 students loans taken out by public service workers. After the Biden administration updated the program, this article reports, the number has soared – now surpassing the one million mark.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was created in 2007, promising college graduates that the remainder of their federal student loans would be zeroed out after 10 years working in government or nonprofit jobs. But starting in 2017, the vast majority of applicants were rejected because of complicated and little-known eligibility rules. … Declaring that the program was “broken,” the Biden administration in 2021 offered a temporary waiver allowing borrowers to get credit for past periods of deferment or forbearance, among other changes. A year later, the Education Department updated the rules to expand eligibility more permanently.
This article reports that the forgiveness is part of a larger effort by the administration which says “it has now canceled $175 billion for about 5 million borrowers using several existing programs. Public Service Loan Forgiveness accounts for the largest share of that relief, while others have had their loans canceled through income-driven payment plans and through a 1994 rule offering relief to students who were cheated by their schools. … Republicans in Congress slammed Biden for working to forgive loans rather than make college less expensive. ‘The Biden-Harris administration is circumventing Congress to shoehorn graduate degree holders and high-income borrowers into a program they were never eligible for and forcing hardworking Americans to pay for it in the process,’ said Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.”
Other Election 2024 and the Beltway
Kamala Harris’ Sputtering Electric School Bus Program, Just The News
Crypto Billionaires Could Flip the Senate to the GOP, Intercept
Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem, Substack
Iran's Illicit Oil Revenue Is Gushing Under Biden-Harris, Washington Free Beacon
Federal Employees Fear Trump Comeback, Politico
DOJ Lawsuits Argue Employment Tests Are Racist, Daily Wire
Liz Cheney Contacted J6 Witness Behind Lawyer’s Back, Just the News
Pa.: Shapiro Advisor Gets $20M to Push School Segregation, Free Press
Tracing Trump's 'Swiss' Watches to Wyoming, CNN
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
The Atlantic
Shoplifting has soared over the past three years. One authoritative study of 26 big retail companies with, collectively, more than 22,000 stores, calculated the total retail losses due to theft to be $7.1 billion in 2022, up from $4.9 billion in 2019. Retailers say stores are closing because they can’t make up their losses, and because some employees are scared and don’t want to work there anymore. This richly detailed article reports that stores have still not figured out an effective response.
When Mike Mershimer worked as a store detective in the 1980s and ’90s, the primary tools deployed against shoplifters were handcuffs, shame, and mockery. He’d see shoplifters swipe a belt or Air Jordans, and “I’d grab him, throw him on the ground, and cuff him,” he told me. Customers would ridicule the thief as Mershimer marched him out the door. “I never saw those shoplifters again,” he said. Today, Mershimer advises retailers and major brands on store security. Clients are looking for fixes, but though Mershimer can offer constructive advice, he’s well aware that there’s no simple solution. “I get a helpless pit in my stomach,” he told me. “I don’t know what to tell them.”
This article describes some of the contemporary challenges stores now face as they try to limit theft. “New engagement rules at many retail stores discourage police and security guards from using force to stop offenders—they can no longer grab and cuff shoplifters. Some chains, their lawyers eager to avoid injuries to employees, have made even chasing down shoplifters a fireable offense.” Dressing the guards in black tactical gear or equipping them with a German shepherd or a handgun often ends up intimidating customers, just as locking up some products deters not only shoplifters but customers from getting products. “Some stores have started locking their front doors, buzzing in only people who look like paying customers. But what does a paying customer look like? Door buzzers are invitations for a discrimination lawsuit.”
In a separate article, The Atlantic reports on the epidemic of carjackings, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to rise. “In Washington, [D.C.] the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing – to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.”
Captured Docs Show Hamas's Deadly Terror Plans Against Israel
Washington Post
Years before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, Hamas’s leaders plotted a far deadlier wave of terrorist assaults against Israel, potentially including a Sept. 11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper, according to documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza. This article reports:
Electronic records and papers that Israeli officials say were recovered from Hamas command centers show advanced planning for attacks using trains, boats and even horse-drawn chariots — though several plans were ill-formed and highly impractical, terrorism experts said. The plans anticipate drawing in allied militant groups for a combined assault against Israel from the north, south and east. The trove of documents includes an annotated, illustrated presentation detailing possible options for an assault as well as letters from Hamas to Iran’s top leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters.
The article reports that the plans assume Hamas’s closest allies would fully join the fight. The group’s former leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by Israel last week, believed that the Oct. 7 attack on Israel would spark a broader regional war against Israel.
University of Michigan Bet on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?
New York Times
A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, creating what is believed to be the largest DEI bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching. But, this article reports, as DEI comes under “withering attack” around the nation and peer schools including MIT and Harvard pull back on their commitment to it,
[Michigan] has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0. According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
Nevertheless, this article reports a backlash is brewing in Ann Arbor, “one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.”
The U.K. Puts the Brakes on Gender Medicine
City Journal
When Britain founded its Gender Identity Development Service in 1989, it initially saw fewer than ten young patients yearly. Since 2009, this article reports, the numbers have exploded.
In that year, 15 adolescent females and two female children were referred to the service, along with 24 adolescent males and ten male children. In 2016, the figures were, respectively, 1,071 and 426, and 138 and 131. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, the numbers more than doubled, from 314 to 689 for female adolescents and from 125 to 293 for female children. Incidentally, these rises were paralleled in other Western countries. By 2023, 3,115 or more children and adolescents were being referred annually to the gender identity clinics in Britain.
“What accounted for this vertiginous rise?,” asks the author of the article, Theodore Dalrymple, a retired physician. One explanation, he offers, is the similar rise “in all other manifestations of child and adolescent distress” during the same period. “I was startled to read in the report, for example, that between 2017 and 2021, the incidence of eating disorders among young women aged 17 to 19 rose from 1.6 percent to 20.8 percent and among men from 0 percent to 5.1 percent. Figures for other conditions are similar.”
