RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

August 17 to August 23

Featured Investigation:

Billionaires Backing Woke Math

Doesn't Add Up Amid DEI Rollback

Lee Fang reports for RealClearInvestigations that billionaire foundations are funding a radical transformation of K-12 mathematics education based on social justice principles, despite a lack of evidence showing improved student outcomes.

• The Heising-Simons Foundation, led by Liz Simons (daughter of deceased hedge fund legend Jim Simons), has shifted from supporting basic math and science research to funding social justice math initiatives with nearly $1 billion in assets.
• Major foundations including Gates, Heising-Simons, and Spencer have poured millions into programs that reject traditional math instruction, claiming practices like "showing your work" and finding "right answers" are vestiges of "white supremacy culture."
• The Heising-Simons Foundation awarded $2.5 million over six years to Danny Bernard Martin's Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project, plus an additional $800,000 grant in 2025 for wider implementation. Martin advocates for black students to boycott traditional math education, seek instruction only from black teachers at "independent black institutions," and resist "advanced coursework and mathematics-related employment."
• Practical applications include Alexandria, Virginia, kindergartners counting picture book characters by race and selecting books with the fewest white characters as "mathematics education."
• The movement promotes "numberless word problems" stripped of numerical computation to counter "European ways of knowing and doing," potentially disadvantaging non-native English speakers who excel at calculation.
• Real-world results show mixed outcomes: San Francisco's removal of eighth-grade Algebra 1 failed to close achievement gaps, while Dallas's increased academic rigor boosted black participation in advanced math from 17% to 43%.
• Critics argue the approach will harm the very students it claims to help, with one math teacher noting advocates are "building a brand, not doing research that improves outcomes for disadvantaged children."

Featured Investigation:

Hunger Games: AI’s Demand for Resources

Poses Promise and Peril to Rural America

Meta is constructing its largest data center, dubbed Hyperion, in Holly Springs, Louisiana – a $10 billion project slated for completion by 2030 that promises economic development but raises concerns about resource consumption and community impact. James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations that the massive facility represents the opportunities and challenges facing rural communities as tech companies build AI infrastructure across America.

• The Richland Parish complex will be Meta's biggest in a constellation of 28 data centers across 19 states, Europe and Singapore. The facility will eventually cover six square miles of flat Louisiana farmland, large enough to contain Heathrow International Airport.
• Data centers are insatiable in their power demands, expected to consume 12 percent of all U.S. energy by 2028 – more than California, Florida and New Jersey combined. Hyperion will require 2.26 megawatts daily, equivalent to double the power used by tens of thousands of New Orleans air conditioners on a sweltering August day.
• The facility will consume over 1 million gallons of water daily for cooling systems. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club question sustainability, while Meta claims it will use a "closed-loop system" and become "water positive" by 2030, though activists dispute these environmental promises.
• Economic benefits include 5,000 construction jobs and 500 permanent positions paying an average of $75,000 annually – 150 percent of the area's median salary. The project promises $1.2 billion in construction wages, with $240 million going to local residents, plus $160 million in new state sales taxes over five years.
• Local residents express unease about the lack of community input and transparency surrounding the project. There were no town hall meetings or public notices before the announcement, leaving many feeling blindsided by the dramatic change to their rural landscape.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Earmarks Return from the Dead, RCI

Foreign Swimming Pools Get $1.2 Million, RCI

Hospital CEOs Stick Taxpayers with the Bill, RCI

Throwback Thursday - $2M Wine Tasting, RCI

 Illinois Subsidizes State Fair, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Fauci and Others Suppressed Intel about COVID Lab Leak

Daily Caller

Another front has opened in Spygate. This article reports that some of the same agencies that fueled the Trump/Russia collusion hoax concealed classified intelligence that COVID-19 came from a lab from the president and the public, granting Anthony Fauci’s inner circle extraordinary influence while silencing their own scientists.

Evidence pointing to a lab leak included signals intelligence collected from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders in 2019 between Beijing and Wuhan revealing a major emergency, one former official told the DCNF. An increasingly political deep state concealed it from President Donald Trump during the first two months of the pandemic, deflecting blame from China as political rival Joe Biden sought to lay responsibility for the pandemic squarely at Trump’s feet. … scientists at four intelligence agencies and four other government officials spoke to the DCNF on condition of anonymity to reveal previously unreported details about censored intelligence under two presidential administrations.

This article reports that the scientists also found evidence of human engineering in the COVID-19 genome. But this evidence was conspicuously omitted from public reports released by the intelligence community under then-President Biden, as senior officials instead elevated the analyses of Fauci’s inner circle, who argued the virus was assuredly natural.

Other Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

IRS Suddenly Stopped Clinton Foundation Probe, Daily Caller

Flashback: Whiffing on Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers, RCI

Biden’s DOJ Threw Red Flag on Autopenned Pardons, PJ Media

How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies, ProPublica

ODNI 2.: Tulsi Gabbard Launches Historic Intel Overhaul, RCP

GOP Considers U-Turn on Electric Postal Vehicles, Associated Press

How Obscure Firm Became Trump Family's Go-To Dealmaker, Wall Street Journal

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

As Arctic Becomes Global Hotspot, Cold Tests Troops 

Wall Street Journal

Elite combat troops minimize tend to be lean and mean – but in the Arctic, where international tensions are simmering, that can kill you. The cold eats away at soldiers, who lose on average 3,000 calories a day while on exercises in the Arctic Circle, even while eating full rations and before they have taken part in any strenuous activity. This article reports:

The war in Ukraine has given the world a glimpse of future armed conflict. The Arctic is different. In Ukraine, killer drones swarm the skies and dominate the front line. … Defending the high north relies largely on old-school methods: infantry in white uniforms, on skis and snowmobiles. … In the Arctic, fuels freeze and batteries die suddenly. Drones in the high north run on jet fuel or diesel, and are equipped with deicing systems and robust propulsion to withstand Arctic winds. As a result, they are usually so large they need a trailer or a runway to launch. Ships and aircraft require special lubricants and hardened exteriors. The ice provides cover for submarines but also poses operational challenges for navigation and communication. It is an area where Russia, with stealthy, ice-breaking submarines with long-range missile capabilities, has an advantage.

Because Russia dominates the Arctic, this article reports, the West can use the region to deter Russian aggression by implicitly threatening its interests, such as shipping lanes and infrastructure. … Military experts and commanders believe Russia is unlikely to attack a NATO country while embroiled in the war in Ukraine, or in its immediate aftermath. Moscow, however, could be ready to attack a NATO country within five years, according to the alliance’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

A separate article in RealClearDefense reports that an August 2025 joint statement by the United States and the Cook Islands in the Pacific not only advances the Trump administration’s intention to establish America as an international leader on deep-sea mining but signals a counterattack against an expansive set of agreements between the Cook Islands and China revealed earlier in the year, which laid a foundation for Chinese involvement with lucrative resource deposits.. 

Report: Red State Institutions Also Tilt Left 

Federalist

Electing Republicans at the state level may have a less of an impact than conservatives might hope.

A new report authored by the State Leadership Initiative (SLI) and obtained by The Federalist reveals how many Republican-run states “remain deeply entangled in the same bureaucratic bloat, cultural drift, and economic stagnation” that are features of those run by Democrats. While red and blue states often differ on major political issues (ex. gun rights and tax policy), the 2025 State Leadership Index shows how the implementation of these policies — specifically those in red states — “often operate within a [left-wing] framework that remains fundamentally unchanged.” … SLI found an “alarming” level of federal dependency among red states. According to the analysis, “7 of the 10 most federally dependent states are red,” with federal dollars comprising “nearly 40% of [the] state budgets” of states such as Mississippi and West Virginia. “This is not sovereignty; it is soft capture,” the index reads.

This article reports that SLI found that overregulation continues to be a problem in many red states, with SLI noting, “excluding outliers, there is hardly a difference between the average number of regulations in red states vs blue ones.” The report’s sub-category included additional discoveries, such as that “[s]tate budget growth (per capita) is comparable between Red and Blue states” and “[i]ndustrial strength in red states is fragmented and inadequate.”

The High Costs of Classroom Disorder 

City Journal

Most coverage of the “teacher exodus” plaguing public schools has focused on pay. Deteriorating classroom conditions may be even more of a factor. Teachers cite chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout, ranking it above workload and even pay. This article reports that some of the problem is attributable to the breakdown of discipline practices introduced under Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), a widely adopted framework for managing student behavior. PBIS is hard to describe simply; complex and adaptable it is “a management system, not an intervention.” But this article reports that the approach – which stresses discussion and “cultural understanding” rather than suspension, detention and other traditional forms discipline – was widely adopted as a backlash against zero-tolerance policies.

PBIS’s rapid growth in the 2000s and 2010s paralleled a broader backlash against the strict school discipline and crime policies of the 1990s. “Zero-tolerance” policies had emerged in reaction to rising crime rates and gained momentum after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, which heightened fears over school safety. Early critics complained about the rigidity of these rules in schools, especially the harsh punishments for relatively minor infractions. But rather than advocating for more balanced approaches, many pushed to relax disciplinary practices broadly, arguing that most forms of school punishment were inherently prone to abuse. The final blow to zero-tolerance policies came with the rise of the “school-to-prison pipeline” narrative, which claimed that strict discipline practices effectively criminalized black and Hispanic students.

This article reports that the approach permits disorder that hurts all students. “Research shows that exposure to disruptive peers can harm students’ long-term outcomes, and disordered classrooms contribute to teacher burnout and turnover. While PBIS may succeed in limiting the use of exclusionary discipline, it isn’t the right approach for the challenges that teachers and administrators now face.”

New Terminal Cancer Reality:

Longer Lives, More Uncertainty 

Brianna Abbott, WSJ

After Gwen Orilio learned she had stage-four lung cancer, she arranged her life around her death. But, this article reports, a string of new treatments that manage but don’t cure the disease mean that 10 years later she is still alive – and still figuring out how to plan her life.

Orilio is part of a new era of cancer treatment challenging the idea of what it means to have and survive cancer. A small but growing population is living longer with incurable or advanced cancer, navigating the rest of their lives with a disease increasingly akin to a chronic illness. The trend, which started in breast cancer, has expanded to patients with melanoma, kidney cancer, lung cancer and others. The new drugs can add years to a life, even for some diagnoses like Orilio’s that were once swift death sentences. They also put people in a state of limbo, living on a knife’s edge waiting for the next scan to say a drug has stopped working and doctors need to find a new one. The wide range of survival times has made it more difficult for cancer doctors to predict how much time a patient might have left. For most, the options eventually run out.

This article reports that more than 18 million Americans are cancer survivors, over 5% of the total population, and their ranks are expected to grow to 26 million by 2040. Of these, 690,000 people were projected to be living with stage-four or metastatic disease of the six most common cancers – melanoma, breast, bladder, colorectal, prostate or lung cancer – in 2025, according to a 2022 report from the National Cancer Institute.