RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

April 5 to April 11

RCI Podcasts & Videos

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek about his new book “Killed To Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary.” Read an excerpt from the book here.

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller interviews RCI contributor Paul D. Thacker about the history and fate of birthright citizenship following the recent Supreme Court hearing on the issue. In a separate episode she speaks with Jeremy Portnoy about his recent RCI article on ballooning debt in Texas’ public schools.

Featured Investigation:

Frozen Fuel: Alaska Eyes Another Epic Pipeline

For RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports that Alaska sits atop an estimated 35 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves on the North Slope, and a proposed 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the Kenai Peninsula – backed by Governor Dunleavy, President Trump, and developer Glenfarne Group – could export that gas to energy-hungry Asian markets. But the project faces steep financial, logistical, and political obstacles.

• Glenfarne Group, a multinational energy firm, holds a majority stake in the pipeline project; Alaska retains 25 percent ownership. Cost estimates have risen from $38.7 billion in 2020 to as high as $100 billion by some legislative estimates.
• Engineering challenges include tunneling beneath the mile-wide Yukon River and building a liquefaction plant – costing $5–10 billion per unit – to convert gas to LNG for export.
• Instability in the Middle East, where roughly 20 percent of global LNG supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, has strengthened the case for Alaska as a secure alternative supplier for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
• Glenfarne reports securing customers for 13 of the 16 million tons per year needed to finalize project financing, including TotalEnergies and Tokyo Gas.
• Governor Dunleavy's proposed tax swap – reducing pipeline property tax revenue from an estimated $880 million to $68 million annually – faces strong resistance in the legislature and is unlikely to pass in its current form.
• Alaska itself urgently needs the gas: Cook Inlet fields supplying in-state consumers are depleting, raising the prospect of energy imports despite the state's vast reserves.
• The legislative session ends in May, leaving little time to resolve financing transparency, tax structure, and state oversight before the project's momentum stalls.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Maryland Ignored Audit Warning, RCI

U.S. Fiscal Doomsday in Sight, RCI

Lawyers Cash in on Wrongful Convictions, RCI

Smokey Bear Balloon Price Tag, RCI

NYC Agency - “Office of Mass Re-Election”, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

DOJ Misled Judge About How It’s Using Voter Roll Data, Wired

Video of Minneapolis Shooting Undermines ICE Account, New York Times

Gov-Funded Censor Targeted Conservative Outlet, Federalist

Troubling DHS Spending Probes from Kristi Noem’s Tenure, Washington Post

ICE Is Using Powerful Spyware, NPR

Private Spies: Christopher Steele’s Assertions, London Review of Books

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

The Most Connected Hospice Doctor in California 

CBS News

The red flags just keep coming as citizen sleuths and media outlets burrow into government spending. This article reports that, of the roughly 1,800 licensed hospices in Los Angeles County, “federal and state data show 742 of them – about 42% – have multiple indicators of fraud.” It then focuses on one provider, Dr. Rajiv Bhuva, who is connected to more hospices than any other doctor.

In 2024, his name appeared on Medicare claims across 126 hospice companies in California – 115 of them in Los Angeles County alone … [and] on Medicare claims for nearly 2,800 patients across 126 California hospices in 2024, according to the last full year of available data. In 2024, Medicare paid out tens of millions in taxpayer dollars for care attributed to Dr. Bhuva – a figure that surpassed nearly every other hospice physician in the state. The average California hospice doctor cares for about 140 patients a year. In 2024, claims with Bhuva's name were submitted for 2,791 terminally ill patients.

This article reports that only one hospice doctor in California was identified as receiving more Medicare reimbursement than Bhuva in recent years: Dr. Domingo Barrientos. His reimbursements totaled $90.3 million. Barrientos is currently in federal prison for conspiracy to commit health-care fraud.

In a separate article, City Journal reports that California Governor Gavin Newsom – who is already embroiled in fraud scandals involving unemployment insurance, hospice care and food stamps – can add another problem to his plate: In-Home Supportive Services Program, or IHSS, which pays family members and other individuals to provide home-based care for the elderly and disabled, at a cost of nearly $30 billion per year.

On the surface, IHSS presents itself as an instrument of compassion, directing billions to caregivers who help with cooking, personal care, laundry, and other daily needs inside recipients’ homes. But a growing number of experts and critics argue that the program is rife with fraud, losing roughly an estimated $6 billion to $12 billion yearly to scammers. Meantime, the state’s powerful home-care unions collect more than $149 million in membership dues, funneling money into the political network supporting Newsom and California Democrats.

In a separate article, the Los Angeles Times reports major problems in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ $300 million program to move homeless people to interim housing. Launched in December 2022, the goal of Inside Safe was to help the homeless transition to permanent housing. Instead, “a growing number are winding up back on the street. The longer the program exists, the greater the share of participants who have returned to “unsheltered” homelessness … In December, as the program finished its third year, about 40% of the people who had gone indoors – 2,300 of the 5,800 – were back on the street.

Trump Purged Immigration Judges

to Speed Deportations 

Nehamas et al., NYT

The Trump administration has been replacing immigration judges – who serve at the president’s pleasure – to increase deportations of illegal immigrants. This article reports that more than 100 immigration judges out of about 750 in place when Trump returned to power have been dismissed.

At the same time, the administration has reshaped the immigration bench, announcing the appointments of 143 permanent and temporary judges, including many who previously worked as immigration prosecutors for the Department of Homeland Security or as military lawyers. By many measures, the administration is achieving its goals. The number of people being ordered deported has risen sharply, while judges have approved asylum claims in fewer than 10 percent of cases this year, the lowest rate for which data is available, The Times found.

This article reports that “the administration has instructed judges to stop granting bond to immigrants who crossed the border illegally, a change from decades of practice. The new policy has required people to remain in detention for extended periods even if they do not have a criminal record and have lived in the country for years. Immigration lawyers say that many of their clients have agreed to leave the country rather than stay locked up. The Times found that the number of people in custody abandoning their cases has risen sharply.”

Common Drug Tests Lead to

Thousands of Wrongful Arrests 

Holly Yan, CNN

This article reports that bird poop scraped off a man’s car appeared on a drug test as cocaine. A toddler’s ashes registered as methamphetamine or ecstasy. And a great-grandmother’s medicine tested positive for cocaine – spawning a 15-month legal nightmare, forcing her to refinance her home, and spurring a new state law that could set a precedent across the country. All of these mistakes can be traced to cheap, portable drug test law enforcement across the country used to screen for various substances in the field. But now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania report that the test leads to false positives at alarming rates.

While the actual error rate nationwide is unknown, previous studies by manufacturers have put it around 4%. But the UPenn researchers believe the actual rate is much higher, from 15% to 38%. And a study by the New York City Department of Investigation showed test error rates from 79% to 91% in some correctional settings. From lost jobs to months in jail, innocent people “are at risk of having their lives derailed by these inaccurate tests,” said Des Walsh, founder of the Roadside Drug Test Innocence Alliance.

This article reports that Colorado just enacted the nation’s first law banning arrests based solely on the results of these colorimetric drug tests.

The Legacy of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" 

Substack

Twenty years ago, Al Gore received a standing ovation from climate scientists and scared untold numbers of people around the globe when his book, and later his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” warned of a global meltdown from climate change. This look at the Gore’s legacy by Roger Pielke Jr. details what Gore got right – the world is warming – and what he got wrong: his warning of flooded cities and coastal areas creating a massive refugee problem as the Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable. But Pielke also focuses on how Gore’s message helped change – some would say corrupted – science.

He implored the scientific community to join him in overt climate advocacy. The fuel that Gore added to the fire of pathological politicization of the climate science community is the most important legacy of An Inconvenient Truth (AIT). … Gore was part of a broader trend in which leaders of the scientific community were increasingly associating themselves with Democratic politics. … To understand the underlying dynamics, it helps to understand how catastrophism came to take root in the climate science community – and also how science came to play a central role in catastrophism.

Pielke uses data to show that members of a key body promoting catastrophism, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “rank among the most like-minded” of any major social group in the United States.” He then draws on scholar Michael Barkun’s work describing the rise of “New Apocalypticism” – a secular variant of religious millenarianism – to argue this groupthink is more religious than political. “Gore’s orations perfectly followed the script of the ‘New Apocalypticism’: The identification of an existential crisis, the diagnosis of human sin as its cause, the urgency of transformation, and the comfort of redemption for those who heed the warning. The climate science community readily embraced this script and adopted the language of believers and deniers to differentiate those with faith and those yet to be converted, and who risked excommunication.”

How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics 

New Yorker

From the Annals of Leftwing Conspiracy Theories, this article builds on false narratives about rampant “white supremacists” and “Christian nationalists” to report that Gen Z conservative men – whose population totals in the many millions – influenced by the white nationalist vlogger Nick Fuentes (whose nightly streaming show reaches a few hundred thousand people of various stripes) are poised to take over the country.

Followers of Fuentes are known as Groypers. They once constituted a tiny subculture of America’s young right; now they hope to overtake it. “I wasn’t really animated by politics until Trump came along,” G. told me. “I was, like, ‘Wow, America could be something great.’ ” Lately, Fuentes has supplanted Trump as the figure who most embodies that sense of promise. G. told me that all the conservative men he knew, and, increasingly, everyone he spent time with, were Groypers, too.

While ignoring the fact about birds of a feather, The New Yorker’s famed fact-checkers never seemed to ask the reporter to find out how many people G actually knows. It recalls the famed remark by the magazine’s longtime movie critic, Pauline Kael, who said around the time Richard Nixon won 49 states in his re-election bid, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” Nevertheless, this is all good enough for yet another warning from the left that massive yet mostly invisible hordes of barbarians are preparing to storm the gates.