RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

July 27 to August 2

Featured Investigation:

Supreme Court Kills Universal Injunctions

in Name Only

The Supreme Court's June 27 decision which appeared to limit the ability of judges to issue universal injunctions pausing a president's orders may not be the "GIANT WIN" Trump was hoping for. Ben Weingarten reports for RealClearInvestigations that the president's opponents have already found workarounds, especially through class-action lawsuits, to effectively nullifying the Court's restrictions.

• The Court's 6-3 decision in the case CASA vs. Trump found lower courts had "likely" overstepped by ordering universal injunctions. Trump hailed it as a "GIANT WIN" against his opponents' "most potent legal weapon."
• Within days, challengers pivoted to class-action suits. One group quickly brought suit in New Hampshire seeking to block Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship on behalf of "a nationwide class of all other persons similarly situated." On July 3, courts in New Hampshire and D.C. ruled in plaintiffs' favor, with D.C. Judge Randolph Moss certifying a class covering everyone subject to Trump's asylum restrictions.
• Justice Samuel Alito warned lower courts could render the CASA decision "moot" by taking a "too-lax approach to class actions," allowing "the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of nationwide class relief." Legal scholars agree CASA's impact may be limited. Stanford's Mila Sohoni said the court "may have accomplished little beyond handing the executive branch a litigation victory."
• The Court left multiple workarounds intact, including third-party standing for states and Administrative Procedure Act vacatur powers that allow courts to "set aside agency action." Congressional Republicans are responding with legislation. Senator Chuck Grassley introduced the Judicial Relief Clarification Act to prevent vacatur from circumventing universal injunction prohibitions.
• The Supreme Court has been "playing whack-a-mole with lower courts" that continue defying its rulings, with Chief Justice Roberts emphasizing that precedent "squarely controls."

Featured Investigation:

Christopher J. Ferguson reports for RealClearInvestigations that modern society’s obsession with “dopamine addiction” has led to a flood of pseudoscientific claims about behaviors like video gaming, smartphone use, and social media.

• Popular media and health experts often cite dopamine “hits” and “blowouts” to justify fears over everyday activities, despite little scientific backing. Legitimate research connects dopamine spikes to drugs and alcohol, but these physiological effects do not extend similarly to routine behaviors like gaming or scrolling social media.
• Neuroscientists warn that overusing “addiction” labels trivializes the struggles of people with real substance dependencies and fuels moral panics. Experts like Dean Burnett criticize this trend as “science garnish,” masking personal disapproval of youth culture in scientific-sounding language.
• Widespread distrust in science, fueled by academic scandals, has enabled the dopamine myth to flourish alongside vaccine skepticism and similar movements. Scientific evidence shows dopamine surges from drugs like cocaine reach over 1,000% of baseline, whereas common pleasures like food or sex top out around 150-200%.
• Researchers argue that behavioral “addictions” often reflect pre-existing mental health issues rather than the addictive nature of the activities themselves. Historical moral panics – such as 1950s fears over comic books – mirror today’s anxieties about technology, especially among youth.
• Policies like cellphone bans in schools frequently backfire, worsening student outcomes while failing to address underlying psychological needs.
• Critics conclude that dopamine pseudoscience oversimplifies complex human behavior and diverts attention from real mental health concerns, potentially harming the very people it aims to help. This article argues that it’s time to abandon dopamine-driven moral panic narratives and instead focus on genuine psychological well-being, allowing kids healthy freedom rather than unnecessary restrictions.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

“Low-Value” Medicare Treatments, RCI

America’s Pricey Birthday Party, RCI

N.C.’s Half-Finished Event Center, RCI

Throwback Thursday - Million-Dollar Show, RCI

Texas Border Security Spending Is Too High, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Obama Officials Threatened Russiagate Whistleblower, Federalist

Docs Suggest Soros' Alleged Ties to Russiagate, Fox News

FBI's Patel Found Russiagate Docs Inside 'Burn Bags', Fox News

How Trump Is Transforming U.S.-Mexico Border, Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump Jr.’s Drone Ventures Could Make a Killing, Intercept

The Inside Story of Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin, Wired

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Mass Rape, Forced Pregnancy,

Sexual Torture in Ethiopia 

Guardian

More evidence is emerging of mass rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and sexual torture committed by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers in their war against forces in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. By the time the ceasefire was signed in November 2022, between 300,000 and 800,000 people in Tigray are believed to have died from violence or starvation. In June, the Guardian revealed a pattern of extreme sexual violence where soldiers forced foreign objects – including metal screws, stones and other debris – into women’s reproductive organs. This article reports that:

Many of the survivors [interviewed by health care workers] said soldiers expressed their desire to exterminate the Tigrayan ethnicity – either by destroying Tigrayan women’s reproductive organs, or forcing them to give birth to children of the rapist’s ethnicity. … Women were frequently assaulted in public, by multiple attackers, and in front of family. The attacks included significant breaches of taboo in Tigray, including anal rape and attacks on menstruating women. The resulting stigma meant that some survivors were divorced by their husbands, rejected by families, or socially excluded. … As well as direct victims of sexual attacks, health professionals described treating children who had experienced “forced witnessing”, where they were made to watch parents and siblings being raped or killed, causing severe psychological trauma.

A doctor whose clinic had treated “thousands of rape survivors” told the Guardian: “Some [trends] stand out during the war. One is gang raping. Second is the insertion of foreign bodies, including messages and broken rocks or stones … Then, the intentional spread of infection, HIV particularly. I am convinced, and see strong evidence, that rape was used as a weapon of war.”

ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Now?

New York Times

The impacts of President Trump’s efforts to close the southern border and deport illegal immigrants residing in the United States are being felt across the country. The Department of Homeland Security asserted this week that those policies have contributed to sharp declines in violent crime in major cities. This New York Times article reports companies that have long relied on undocumented workers, including Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, are feeling the pinch.

For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance – new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone [after a June raid by immigration authorities]. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.

This article reports that the meatpacking company’s owner, Gary Rohwer, a registered Republican who says he voted for Democrats in 2024, couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice. Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company’s frozen steak. Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations.

Air Traffic Recruits Wash Out of Training that Feels Like 'Hazing' 

Washington Post

The U.S. aviation system needs more air traffic controllers – the FAA reports that its current roster of 11,500 certified controllers is about 3,000 short of its goal. Some of that shortfall, this article reports, can be attributed to the high dropout at training schools. Chronic shortages put safety at risk and force flight delays when towers are understaffed, requiring controllers to work grueling overtime schedules that contribute to fatigue and burnout.

Overall, about 20 percent of trainees fail to certify as a controller at the first assigned facility, according to FAA data. Some get a second chance, but almost 1,400 recruits hired since 2010 never became a controller. … Experienced controllers said in interviews that the training is intense and rigorous by design - and that they need to be able to force out candidates who don’t have what it takes to do the demanding job safely. One controller described tough treatment as a kind of test, and a chance for trainees to show they can bounce back after a bad day.

This article reports that the training may be overly tough because of “an ill-defined mystique associated with air traffic control, a belief among some controllers that people are essentially born to do the job. … Controllers act like gatekeepers, demanding recruits prove they are worthy of entry to their club, said Linda Pierce, a retired FAA psychologist who studied how controllers are trained. ‘It’s this professional guild, but to me it also felt like a college hazing,’ she said. ‘It was hostile.’”

Students Charged with Crimes for Videos, Memes, Tweets 

ProPublica

This article reports that “widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country.” In response, authorities are monitoring social videos, memes and retweets and sometimes pursuing criminal charges against students in order to deter them making threatening posts that can spread rapidly.

In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke. Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”

This article reports that some school districts are providing training so that school officials can better distinguish between youthful folly and real threats.

Crypto Kidnapping: Gangs Hunting Internet's High Rollers 

NBC News

It’s a modern twist on an age-old crime: crypto kidnapping. This article reports that as the value of cryptocurrencies has soared and facial recognition technology has allowed assailants easy access to victims’ phones – and their money – a small but growing number of kidnappers around the world are cashing in.

Crypto-related abductions increased every year since 2019, the NBC News analysis found. In 2024, NBC News identified 17 instances of cryptocurrency-related kidnappings, the highest reported number in the last decade. 2025 has already seen that many reported cases. NBC News identified [a total of] 67 incidents of crypto kidnapping involving a target or their family member in 44 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. … The kidnappings are part of a wider category of incidents known as “wrench attacks” – when perpetrators attack their victims in the real world as a means of acquiring their cryptocurrencies. The term “wrench attack” comes from a comic where two figures talk about stealing someone’s cryptocurrency by hitting them with a “$5 wrench.” NBC News identified over 150 alleged wrench attacks worldwide in the past decade and spoke to three individuals who shared their personal experiences. In these examples, perpetrators attempted to obtain the victim’s cryptocurrency through home invasion, extortion, blackmail, armed robbery, swatting, assault or even murder.

In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports on con artists who posed as heirs to famous American fortunes – one scammer called himself Thomas Astor Mellon – to steal $400 million from the Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who wanted to make a big bet on bitcoin. “I feel like an absolute idiot. How could I fall for this?,” said Salinas Pliego in an interview.