RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
October 12 to October 18
Featured Investigation:
While Sen Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated endorsement of socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign reflects the dominance of her left-wing ideology over the Democratic party, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations that her public policies are often at odds with her personal financial decisions.
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Despite earning nearly $1 million annually and criticizing the wealthy for not paying their "fair share," Warren donated less than 3% of her household income to charity in 2024—far below the average millionaire's rate and the Obamas' typical 20% donations.
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Warren's charitable giving appears to increase during campaign years. She donated $81,858 (9% of income) when launching her 2020 presidential bid, compared to just $26,669 last year.
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While demanding higher taxes on "millionaires and billionaires," Warren maximizes tax deductions, writing off used clothing, books, and in-flight WiFi. She's had to correct past returns for inflating values and she would not herself be subject to her proposed "Ultra-Millionaire Tax."
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Warren's investment portfolio, valued between $1.9 million and $6.8 million, is heavily invested in Wall Street funds holding companies she publicly demonizes—including Exxon, Shell, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Apple, and even Fox News parent NewsCorp.
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Despite advocating fiercely for affordable housing and attacking NIMBY zoning rules, Warren owns homes worth over $5 million in heavily restricted neighborhoods in Cambridge and D.C. Her Cambridge Victorian mansion has appreciated eight-fold to $4 million, benefiting from the restrictive zoning she criticizes elsewhere.
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Warren's office has served as a revolving door to Wall Street, with former staff—including her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief of staff—taking positions at firms like BlackRock, despite her condemning such practices.
Featured Investigation:
Maggie Phillips reports for RealClearInvestigations on the growing threats to Christians in Nigeria. While violent attacks, which some call genocide, are drawing attention to the troubled nation, many Nigerian Christians say relatively peaceful, and constitutionally legal steps – especially the introduction of blasphemy laws by the Muslim-dominated government – are key factors driving the erasure of Christians and their culture, especially in the northern part of the country.
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More than 200 Christians were massacred in coordinated attacks in Nigeria’s Middle Belt in June, part of a wave of killings that has claimed 7,000 lives this year. Since 2009, Islamist extremists such as Boko Haram and ISIS affiliates have murdered over 52,000 Christians, displaced five million, and destroyed thousands of churches and schools.
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The Biden administration removed Nigeria from the U.S. list of countries of concern for religious persecution in 2021, a move Senator Ted Cruz seeks to reverse, citing “executions for faith” and forced adherence to sharia law.
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Yet many Nigerian Christians say the violence is not solely religious. Banditry, kidnapping, and local militias target all groups, while a weak central government allows chaos to flourish. “The bullets don’t look for a Christian or spare a Muslim,” said a leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria.
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Boko Haram, whose name means “western education is forbidden,” began as a jihadist movement but evolved into a criminal enterprise preying on both Christians and Muslims. Foreign terrorists and ethnic conflicts have since added layers of complexity.
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Nigeria’s dual legal system permits sharia courts in 12 northern states. Christian leaders warn this has created systemic discrimination against Christians in education, land access, and politics. Blasphemy laws have led to long prison sentences and mob killings.
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Deep ethnic divisions and political cronyism further erode national unity. President Bola Tinubu’s Muslim–Muslim ticket in 2023 heightened Christian fears of marginalization.
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Despite interfaith ties and shared suffering, mistrust runs deep. Analysts argue that restoring rule of law and reaffirming Nigeria’s secular constitution are essential to halt the violence and prevent the erasure of Christians from the north.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books
Trump 2.0 and the Beltway
Leak Exposes Young Republicans’ Racist Chat
Politico
This article reports that leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked – “but they kept typing anyway.” In the 2,900 pages of chats shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans – many of whom work inside government or party politics – between early January and mid-August:
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery. William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
This article claims “the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely – and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.” It also reports that prominent New York Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik and New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, have denounced the chat.
Other Trump 2.0 and the Beltway
Covert C.I.A. Action Authorized in Venezuela, New York Times
Group that Helped Topple Roe Sets Sights on UK, New York Times
Did This Algorithm Rig the 2020 Census?, Substack
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
High Default Rates Threaten Federal Loans at Many Colleges
College Fix
More than 1,000 colleges are in the “danger zone” of potentially losing access to federal student loans because of high default rates, according to a new study.
The Cohort Default Rate measures the percentage of borrowers who default on their loans, and require a repayment plan, within a three year period. If the percentage gets too high, meaning graduates are taking on more debt than they can afford, the school can lose the ability to offer taxpayer-backed student loans. … “Over 1,000 colleges are flirting with the default rate threshold necessary to trigger a loss of access to federal student aid,” [study author] Preston Cooper wrote in an analysis on his Substack. … Of these 1,000 colleges, 400 of them “have a student loan nonpayment rate above 40 percent, which could trigger a loss of some federal aid in just one year.” “Another 700 have a nonpayment rate between 30 and 40 percent, which would trigger a loss of aid if sustained for three years,” he wrote. “Several hundred more colleges have a nonpayment rate between 25 and 30 percent – close enough to the danger zone to make them nervous.”
Cooper said it could be several years before enforcement action is taken, if at all. A separate article in the Atlantic reports that the problems in America’s education system are widespread.
Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic” – meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4 – the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.
In a separate article, Medical Press reports on a new study which found that 22.4% of young adults in the US said they use cannabis or alcohol to help them fall asleep.
Los Angeles Times
Although lawsuits over police shootings and protest tactics tend to receive the most scrutiny, officer-involved traffic incidents remain an intractable and costly problem for many cities. This article reports that Los Angeles has spent at least $90 million in negotiated payouts or verdicts in more than 1,200 lawsuits related to bad police driving over the last decade. A Los Angeles Times investigation found:
Despite training on how to speed safely through traffic, more than 500 collisions every year involve LAPD and other law enforcement vehicles citywide, according to state records. Just under half of the time, officers were found to be at least partly at fault. Most are minor fender-benders, but several incidents have been fatal. In December 2023, a female officer was put under internal investigation after slamming into and killing a 25-year-old man with her police cruiser. … Another driver was killed in a collision with police on May 26 in North Hollywood, followed by the most recent fatal crash, on Sept. 19 near a community carnival in Highland Park. In that incident, an LAPD vehicle speeding to search for an assault suspect fatally struck a young filmmaker, who, according to an online fundraiser for his family, was on his way home from work.
This article reports that the department has adopted new restrictions to limit high-speed pursuits, including by increasingly relying on its helicopters to track fleeing drivers. LAPD claims that some drivers have tried to milk their injuries for a bigger payday.
ProPublica
The medical director of Michigan’s St. Clair County’s Health Department wrote a three page memo in June arguing that the county should “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” This article reports that the memo – part of a larger national push to ban fluoridation, led by Robert F. Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, who has called fluoride “industrial waste” – has ignited a firestorm of debate.
Drinking water fluoridation, which was pioneered in Michigan in 1945, led to a massive drop in tooth decay. Even with the rise of fluoride in toothpaste and other products, it’s credited with a 25% decrease in cavities. But skeptics increasingly hold sway in government, as ProPublica recently reported. … Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their approaches to fluoride in drinking water, and Utah and Florida became the first states to ban fluoridation.
Despite the national push, this article reports that local communities are on the front lines of the fluoride wars in most states, typically deciding whether or not to continue fluoridating their drinking water by council vote or community referendum. “The public conversation in St. Clair County offers a vivid example of how contentious the issue can become. Advocates from well beyond its borders are getting involved, saying that what happens in the county has implications for the entire state.”
CNN
Fraudsters are now using cryptocurrency ATMs to fleece Americans. The scam itself is tried and true, this article reports: Crooks trick marks into believing they are in legal trouble, their bank accounts have been hacked or that they must pay off debts immediately. To fix the "crisis," they’re told to feed cash into the crypto ATM – where it is promptly routed to scammers' accounts. This article reports that Americans, often retirees, lost around $240 million to crypto ATM scams in the first six months of this year, according to the FBI – about double the pace of similar scams last year. Crypto ATM operators, who have not been connected to the criminal activity, have done little to police the fraud, this article reports, because their markups on the transactions, often 20 to 30 percent, are so high.
The companies have also largely failed to adopt measures that could stifle scammers, such as strict transaction limits, and have heavily lobbied state legislatures to neuter laws that would force them to better protect victims. Some states have passed or proposed laws that closely match model legislation with fewer protections pushed by industry lobbyists. “These machines are nothing more than conduits for fraud and criminal activity. Period,” said New Jersey state Sen. Paul Moriarty, who sponsored a bill in his state to outright ban the machines. “There’s no other use for them, because if you wanted to buy cryptocurrency you could buy it somewhere else for less.”
This article reports that local police officers “are seething as they respond again and again to the same machines and find themselves unable to help victims. One sheriff’s deputy in Texas even wielded a power saw to break into a crypto ATM to retrieve cash a victim deposited.”
