RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
November 23 to November 29
Featured Investigation:
He Paid When Undocumented Man Stole His Identity
New York Times
As RCI has previous reported, illegal immigration has led to widespread identity theft as undocumented workers seek social security numbers and other papers they often need to work. This article focuses on two men – a victim and his perpetrator. It reports that the real Dan Kluver, a 42-year-old factory worker from rural Minnesota, saw his life turn into a financial nightmare when a man from Guatemala mostly living in Missouri stole his social security number more than a decade ago.
Some years the other Dan Kluver had earned more than his own salary at a local sugar beet factory, which pushed the total income under his Social Security number into a higher tax bracket as the debt started to mount. Twice, he’d contacted law enforcement and filed an identity theft report with the federal government, where it landed in a pile along with tens of thousands of similar reports filed each year. He waited for relief while the I.R.S. docked his annual tax returns and garnished a few of his paychecks, costing him thousands. Finally, a few months before their wedding in 2012, [and his wife] Kristy decided to pay off the balance, emptying her savings and sending in a check for $6,000. Their relief lasted until the next tax season, when a new bill arrived – this one for $22,000.
The article does not address one of the more salient issues it raises – how the government could insist Kluver pay back taxes based on the premise he was working jobs in Minnesota and Missouri at the same time. The article also tries to paint a sympathetic portrait of the man who stole Kluver’s identity – who seems to have turned his life around after “a string of D.U.I.s and other minor offenses” led to him being deported back to Guatemala in 2005, 2008 and 2009. But the reporter never asks this church going man to address in any detail the havoc he has caused in Kluver’s life. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating article.
In a separate article, the Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids have rattled schools across the country.
The federal government does not release comprehensive data showing where arrests or detentions are taking place, but a Washington Post review of news reports found instances of parents arrested near campuses in at least 10 states so far this year. … The effects of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Charlotte [for example] tore through schools last week, disrupting learning as more than 20 percent of students stayed home from class. At many schools, children were either missing or rattled. One wore a tag that read “I’m a U.S. citizen”; another carried an American passport to elementary school. Two kindergartners showed up to class with whistles around their necks to blow if they saw immigration agents.
The article does not address how heated coverage of the efforts to enforce the nation’s immigration laws has stoked fear among parents and children who are living in the country legally.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books
Trump 2.0 and the Beltway
Mar-a-Lago No-Fly Zones Angers Other Millionaires, Washington Post
Trump Admin Snaps Up Stakes in Private Firms, New York Times
Trump's Anti-Crime Task Force Strains Memphis Jail and Courts, Associated Press
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
He Hunted Alleged Groomers on Roblox, Then He Was Banned
WIRED
Pedophiles have always gone where the children are, and that now includes gaming platforms. This article reports on the growing concerns that one of the most popular platforms, Roblox, has become a hunting ground for pedophiles preying on its youngest and most vulnerable users, Several states have launched high-profile legal actions against it. According to one of those lawsuits, the company has sought to silence one self-described “predator hunter,” who goes by the name Schlep.
Schlep claims his work reporting individuals directly to law enforcement and collaborating with vigilante groups like Pedophile Poachers and EDP Watch has led to the arrests of six men that he alleged were trying to sexually exploit young children. Once they have identified someone they believe to be a pedophile, these vigilante groups typically lure their targets into real world meetings by pretending to be an underage boy or girl. At the meeting, the groups will film their encounters with their targets, before uploading the footage to their social media channels. … But on August 8, Schlep received a cease-and-desist letter from Roblox, and instantly, all of his accounts were banned. His predator hunter days were over. “While Roblox acknowledges that your stated intentions may be to protect children, and while it recognizes the serious nature of online predatory behavior, your methods, including failing to immediately report suspicious activity to Roblox through proper channels, are actively interfering with Roblox’s established safety protocols and, critically, are exposing Roblox’s users to increased risk,” the company wrote in the letter reviewed by WIRED.
This article reports that Schlep – who has amassed 2.3 million subscribers on his YouTube channel – and his allies have received pushback from other corners. Despite these pedophile hunting groups’ stated intentions of protecting children, extremism researchers and law enforcement officials have criticized their methods as being more focused on gaining followers than securing prosecutions. Some have also faced their own criminal charges; The New York Times reported in March that pedophile hunters were behind over 170 violent vigilante attacks since 2023.
City Journal
Following the rise of the Black Lives Matter in 2020, it became fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice – and law enforcement – rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, the thinking went, the crime problem could be largely solved. Drawing on the work of the late sociologist James Q. Wilson, this article argues “the truth is otherwise.”
The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31. The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners – the core of America’s incarcerated population – had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City . . . involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.”
Given crime’s extreme concentration, this article argues, the most practical and proven response is incarceration, which separate “the antisocial few from the pro-social many.”
Wall Street Journal
Risk-taking is back for individual investors, this article reports, and few people have done more to stoke those spirits than the 38-year-old Vlad Tenev, chief executive of Robinhood Markets. His trading app makes it easy not just to buy and sell ordinary stocks, but to invest in options, cryptocurrencies and other exotic financial products, even to make sports bets and play the prediction markets.
A host of new products have entered retail-investment markets in recent years and worked their way into the mainstream. Investors are wagering on the price of bitcoin and piling into ultrarisky types of options, such as the “zero-day” variety that expire rapidly and require perfect timing. They are buying futures contracts tied to all sorts of events, betting on whether a Taylor Swift album will top the Spotify charts or whether the Green Bay Packers will beat the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day. Abishek Gopal, 35, said he wakes up at 6:30 a.m. to start trading zero-day options. It’s a hobby he said he never would have picked up if not for how easy it is on Robinhood. “The thrill gets me going,” said Gopal. “If $500 can get me $50,000 or $60,000, let me just try.”
This article reports that the company’s critics liken the environment to a casino, but its fans credit Robinhood with democratizing the lucrative world of sophisticated investments. In the most recent quarter, customer trading generated more than half of Robinhood’s revenue, and 78% of that transaction-based revenue came from crypto and options trading. Robinhood’s stock has more than tripled this year.
Fox News
This article reports that a new feature on X that allows users to inspect where a given account is based reveals that many popular accounts posing as American "patriots" or "constitutionalists" are being run from foreign countries.
One account with the handle "@1776General_" boasts over 140,000 followers and has a user biography describing the owner as a "constitutionalist, patriot and ethnically American." The biography claims the account is based in the U.S., but X's new feature reveals it is actually based in Turkey. … Another account, "@AmericanVoice__" had over 200,000 followers before the update rolled out. The new feature exposed that it was being run from South Asia, and the owners simply deleted the account. … The phenomenon is not limited to American politics, however. Many accounts claiming to have been reporting on alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza also appear to be misleading users. One user, Motasm A Dalloul, uses the handle "@AbujomaaGaza" and claims to be a "Gaza-based journalist." His account has over 197,000 followers, but X says the owner is actually posting from Poland.
This article also suggests the difficulty of determining the truth in the digital age, Dalloul, for example, has pushed back on claims that he is lying to his followers, posting a video that appeared to show him on the ground in Gaza. Many users, however, have argued about whether the video was digitally altered.
