RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

December 14 to December 20

Featured Investigation:

Equal but Separate: How the Gender Divide Is

Rewiring American Politics, Culture, and Civic Life

Samuel J. Abrams and Joel Kotkin report for RealClearInvestigations that men and women are increasingly inhabiting separate psychological and civic universes, with profound implications for marriage, fertility, and democratic stability.

• The share of U.S. adults ages 25-54 without partners rose from 29% in 1990 to 38% in 2019. In 2021, one-quarter of 40-year-olds had never married. The gender divide now determines party affiliation more than traditional political identities.
• Women now hold 47% of college degrees compared to just 37% of men—a gap that has widened dramatically. Law schools, medical schools, and major media organizations have become majority female, elevating characteristics like empathy over traditional male values.
• Political polarization follows gender lines. Nearly 70% of Democrats refuse to date Trump voters, a stance especially common among younger women. Young men increasingly support Trump and drift toward right-wing politics, with European men under 30 backing traditionalist parties at twice the rate of women.
• Technology accelerates the divide. Women show higher rates of social media addiction; men gravitate toward online gaming. Algorithms curate separate identities rather than fostering understanding, with AI companions potentially reducing human interaction further.
• U.S. fertility rates have fallen from above replacement level in 2007 to just 1.62 children per woman. South Korea's rate hit 0.72—the world's lowest. One in six American women now reach the end of childbearing years without children, up from one in ten in the 1970s.
• The decline of marriage and family weakens civic engagement, democratic institutions, and economic dynamism. The authors argue that integrating autonomy with obligation is essential for societal survival.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Feds Pay Nonprofits That Sue the Government, RCI

Taxpayers Subsidize Football Coach Severance, RCI

Obamacare Failed Test, Approved Fraudulent Subsidies, RCI

Studying India’s Politics for a Fee, RCI

Taxpayers Front Salary of Terrorists' Lawyer, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Inside Clintons’ Fight to Not Testify in House Epstein Inquiry

If you want to show your friends an article illustrating the partisan bent of New York Times’ political coverage, this piece fits the bill. The story revolves around GOP Rep. James R. Comer’s threat to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress if they fail to appear in person for depositions about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Comer is almost certainly playing politics with the former president and secretary of state, but the Times’ account pretends that Democrats’ long effort to tie Trump to Epstein is legitimate while the targeting of the Clintons is untoward. The second paragraph of this article reports:

The [contempt] threat is the starkest example yet of the attempt by House Republicans to shift the focus of the Epstein affair away from President Trump and his administration and onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the convicted sex offender and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Translation: Our spin is the only spin. Democrats (and some Republicans) have said they are demanding the release of the Epstein files so the public can know what powerful men may have done to vulnerable girls. In an article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein published after this one that reports (one again) that there is no evidence tying the current president to Epstein’s crimes, the Times notes that “it is unclear what new information may emerge” when all the material the government has concerning Epstein is released. This article on the Clinton’s, by contrast, suggests we already know everything about their relationship with the late financier – which was not much.

Mr. Clinton was acquainted with Mr. Epstein – an association the former president described in his memoir – but never visited his private island and cut off contact with him two decades ago. Mr. Clinton took four international trips on Mr. Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs, and an undated photograph of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Epstein signed by the former president … .

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, that timeline ignores the fact that Epstein’s fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, attended the wedding of the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea in 2010. In fairness, the article almost comes cleans about its partisan intent at the end when it chooses to quote a Clinton ally to make dubious claims about what this kerfuffle means (note, too, the use of the world forced):

Philippe Reines, who worked for Mrs. Clinton when she was forced to testify before Congress during the Benghazi hearings, said Republicans would pay a political price in the midterm elections for targeting the Clintons in this case. Even a first-year law student “knows finding someone politically contemptible isn’t the basis for legal contempt,” he said. “But if Republicans want to spend 2026 fixated on their endless vendetta against the Clintons rather than runaway prices, we’ll happily take the extra House seats.”

Other Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Trump's Chief-of-Staff, Susie Wiles, Tells All, Vanity Fair

Ex-DOJ Lawyers Claim Pressure to Violate Ethics, Los Angeles Times

$900M in Dark Money Flowed to Harris & Trump in 2024, New York Times

Biden 'Ignored Warnings' About Terror-Linked Afghans, Telegraph

Thousands of Carveouts Weakening Trump's Tariffs, Politico

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

How DEI Derailed the Careers of Young White Men 

Compact

Even though the tide seems to have turned against DEI because it unfairly discriminated on the basis of race, it is often portrayed as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. That “may be how [ensconced] Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI,” this article reports, but for white male millennials pursuing careers in the media and academia the negative impacts have been devastating.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life. In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man – and then provided just that. … If you were forty in 2014 – born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s – you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall. … In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you – in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

Even as this article provides a broad range of evidence showing how racial barriers have worked against young white men, the writer of this article, who had hoped to be a screenwriter, also takes some responsibility for his plight.

It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections – they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

Fraudulent Chinese Ads Profit Center for Meta 

Reuters

Meta came to an ugly conclusion last year about its Chinese advertising customers: They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users worldwide. After the company calculated that about 19% of the money generated from China – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, it established an a vigorous anti-fraud program to protect users. Deploying a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then, this article reports, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in.

“As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed. But after Zuckerberg’s input, the [internal] documents [seen by Reuters] show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. … The upshot: Within a few months of Meta’s brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta’s China revenue.

This article reports that the revelations about Meta’s China business come at a time when the social media giant is already under fire for failing to curtail a deluge of advertising that promotes fraud and banned goods. Reuters reported last month that Meta earns $7 billion a year just from the portion of scam ads it considers “high risk,” and that 10% of the company’s 2024 revenue – about $16 billion – was projected to come from ads for scams, illegal gambling and banned products.

The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich 

New York Times

For the barrels of ink that have been spilled on Jeffery Epstein one central mystery remains, how exactly did this college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? This very long, deeply reported article provides some answers while also underscoring the constancy of character: the immorality Epstein demonstrated in his sex life was not a kink but a feature.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. … A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power. … Epstein seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long haul as sources of connections and prestige. … Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.

This fascinating article, unfortunately, fails to shed light on Epstein’s relationship with Les Wexner, the billionaire who built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. While noting it “would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a plutocrat with palatial estates,” the article states that “one unsolved mystery of the Epstein era is what exactly Wexner got out of their relationship. He has repeatedly refused to answer questions, including ours. But Epstein’s modus operandi with other wealthy men – including the private-equity billionaire Leon Black – was to instill fear that their finances were a mess, that their advisers and even family members were inept or exploiting them and that only one man had the wherewithal to save them.”  

UK Cops Arresting 30 People a Day for Online Messages 

London Times

America remains exceptional for many reasons, but none more so than its continuing protection of free speech. That is not the case in Britain where, this article reports, the police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.

Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail. Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. … They include David Wootton, 40, who is appealing against a conviction for dressing up as the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, for a Halloween party last year. He had posted images on social media showing him wearing an Arabic-style headdress, and the slogan “I love Ariana Grande” on his T-shirt, and carrying a rucksack with “Boom” and “TNT” written on the front. Wootton was arrested and admitted sending an offensive message online. He faces up to two years in prison.

Journalist Toby Young, the founder and director of the Free Speech Union, told the Times: “[Prime Minister] Keir Starmer emphatically denied there is a free speech crisis in Britain when JD Vance raised this with him at the White House, but this data suggests we have a serious problem.”