RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
May 3 to May 9
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 Gary Saul Morson, a scholar of Russian literature at Northwestern University, about what Dostoevsky and Russian history can teach us about modern progressives.
Featured Investigation:
Super Power To Spare: How Battery Tech
Illuminates Competition Between U.S. & China
James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations that China's dramatic recent advances in electric vehicle battery technology – including a battery capable of delivering 320 miles of range from a five-minute charge – have raised alarms about America's ability to compete with its chief rival. But experts say the picture is far more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and that U.S. battery technology remains world-class in several critical sectors despite regulatory burdens and questions about the effectiveness of billions in government green energy spending.
- China's EV battery edge is real but narrow, driven largely by $500 billion in state subsidies, cheap labor, abundant raw materials, and a willingness to ignore environmental costs – not purely superior technology.
- Battery technology advances slowly, at only 3-5% annually, and China's superfast charging comes at a cost 20-50 times higher than overnight charging, with the required infrastructure largely nonexistent.
- In grid storage, defense, and uninterrupted power supply systems, the U.S. leads the world, with American factories now capable of supplying 100% of domestic energy storage needs.
- Biden administration green energy spending was criticized for targeting political allies and focusing too heavily on EVs, while burdensome regulations continue to hamper U.S. battery manufacturers.
- Emerging U.S. technologies, a recent discovery of 2.3 million metric tons of domestic lithium, and nearly $100 billion in projected private investment by 2030 suggest America's battery future remains promising.
Featured Investigation:
From DOJ to Ballot Box: The Rise of Lawfare Candidates
Julie Kelly reports for RealClearInvestigations that a small but growing wave of former federal prosecutors is seeking Democratic congressional seats by campaigning on their records of pursuing President Trump and his allies.
- J.P. Cooney, running in Virginia's 7th Congressional District, served as Jack Smith's top deputy in the January 6 indictment against Trump and drafted an early DOJ strategy for pursuing Trump and J6 participants – a plan so aggressive it was immediately rejected by FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump fired Cooney after Inauguration Day.
- Ryan Crosswell, running in Pennsylvania's 7th District, resigned from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York after the DOJ moved to drop corruption charges against former NYC Mayor Eric Adams, framing his candidacy around opposing Trump's influence over federal prosecutions.
- Julie Le, seeking to replace Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis, gained national attention after an emotional courtroom outburst over the DOJ's overwhelming immigration caseload, and was subsequently fired.
- Cooney's record extends beyond the J6 case – he pursued aggressive sentencing in the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, sought to investigate Trump's ties to a "J6 Prison Choir" recording, and played a central role in the "Arctic Frost" investigation into Republican officials and donors over the so-called fake electors plan.
- Trump's trial counsel, John Lauro, contends that Cooney and Smith weaponized the DOJ against a political movement, while Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley has accused Cooney of "literally trying to destroy" the country. Both the House and Senate have opened investigations into his conduct.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books
Drought Money Lacks Details, RCI
Super Bowl Freebie, RCI
Autism Medicaid Misspending, RCI
Trump 2.0 and the Beltway
Trump Admin Deleting Reams of Gov Data, Guardian
U.S. Debt Hits Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices, New York Times
Lina Khan’s Antitrust Effort Failed – but Her Ideas Are Spreading, City Journal
Partisan Activists Ran FBI's Domestic Terror Program, Federalist
JB Pritzker Bankrolling Dems Before Expected Prez Run, Daily Caller
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Iran Has Hit Far More US Military Assets Than Reported
Washington Post
From the Annals of On the One Hand and the Other, this article reports that Iranian airstrikes have destroyed far more U.S. assets across the Middle East that has been publicly acknowledged – damaging or destroying at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites including hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. On the other hand, this article also reports that some of the damage may have occurred after U.S. troops already left the bases, making protection of the structures less vital. Experts said they do not believe the attacks have significantly limited the U.S. military’s ability to conduct its bombing campaign in Iran.
The images show that airstrikes damaged or destroyed what appear to be numerous barracks, hangars or warehouses at more than half of the U.S. bases that The Post reviewed. “The Iranians have deliberately targeted accommodation buildings across multiple sites with the intent to inflict mass casualties,” said William Goodhind, an investigator with the open-access research project Contested Ground who reviewed the imagery. “It is not just equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure under fire, but also soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”
This article reports that satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. “Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the U.S. government – their biggest customer – to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. … For this examination – one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to U.S. facilities in the region – The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system.”
U.S. Targets China's Stranglehold on Drone Production
Wall Street Journal
With drones revolutionizing the battlefield in Ukraine, Iran and beyond, this article reports that the U.S. is striving to dominate this latest evolution in military technology the way it has with previous wartime innovations. There is just one problem: China got there first. Many of the drones used by Russia and Ukraine, for example, use numerous parts manufactured at least partially in China: batteries, motors and even central “brain” chips.
China has already shown a willingness to weaponize its control over the drone supply chain. In late 2024, Beijing blacklisted California drone maker Skydio for selling drones to Taiwan. Cut off from Chinese suppliers, the company was forced to ration batteries, which prompted Chief Executive Adam Bry to accuse Beijing of trying to “eliminate the leading American drone company.”
This article reports that drones may be easy to build, but their sheer number in use – Ukraine has been burning through roughly 10,000 unmanned aircraft every month for more than a year – requires production at a scale that gives China an edge. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vowed to break China’s dominance in drones with a $1.1 billion program he calls Drone Dominance. The initiative aims to rev up American drone production and bring down costs by pledging to buy more from U.S. suppliers.
New Climate Report Eliminates Most Extreme Scenarios
Roger Pielke Jr. Substack
The international committee responsible for the official scenarios that feed into climate modeling that are the basis for most projective climate research and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has eliminated as "implausible" the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades. Although Roger Pielke Jr.’s article is highly technical, he (thankfully) offers bottom lines that nonexperts can understand.
Tens of thousands of research papers have been – and continue to be – published using these (now discredited) scenarios, a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organization have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation. We now know that all of this is built on a foundation of sand. … We’ve known since 2017 that upper-end climate scenarios are fatally flawed. Nine years later, that understanding has now become officially recognized. That is good news. We can debate whether nine years is short or long for the overturning of scientific understandings with massive economic and policy implications. But today, that overturning is undeniable.
Pielke concludes: “Science is self-correcting. What matters now is what happens next.”
Georgia Officials Hid Water Pollution from Local Mill
Atlanta Journal Constitution/AP/Frontline
Growing up in Calhoun, Georgia, Stormy Bost and her family drank pitchers of sweet tea made with tap water almost every day. As a parent, this article reports, Bost made sweet tea the same way for her own children – until a few years ago when she learned the local tap water contained toxic chemicals called PFAS.
Bost and her husband are raising two daughters in Calhoun, the same small river town dominated by the region’s multibillion-dollar carpet industry where she was reared. For decades, textile mills relied on PFAS in popular brands like Stainmaster and Scotchgard for stain resistance. Some of the chemicals that didn’t stick on carpets were flushed with the industry’s wastewater into local sewer pipes and, eventually, the region’s rivers. The same odorless, colorless chemicals in tap water here have accumulated in Bost’s body, blood tests show. Her PFAS levels are higher than national health guidelines consider safe and, at 34, she has been diagnosed with liver and thyroid conditions – the types of ailments that research has linked to PFAS.
An investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the AP and “Frontline” has found Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division did little to confront the problem, issuing neither fish advisories nor do-not-drink orders to the public even as concerns grew among scientists and federal regulators about the dangers of PFAS. Testing by the University of Georgia, for example, alerted the industry and state in 2008 that the local Conasauga River that supplies the region’s drinking water was polluted. The state’s own testing, which did not occur until 2012 and 2016, confirmed the university’s results.
LA Arson Suspect Obsessed Over Luigi Mangione
Daily Wire
From the Department of the Virology of Violence, this article reports that the suspect accused of starting one of the largest wildfires in Los Angeles history, fixated on Luigi Mangione weeks before starting the blaze out of resentment for the rich.
Federal prosecutors said in a trial memorandum that 30-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht demonstrated an obsession with Mangione in the days before he started the Lachman and Palisades Fires on January 1, 2025. Mangione has developed a cult following among the Left after he was arrested for gunning down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. … Prosecutors described Rinderknecht becoming “fixated” on Mangione in the weeks leading up to the fires, saying his internet search history revealed queries like “free Luigi Mangione,” “lets take down all the billionaires,” and “reddit lets kill all the billionaires.”
This article reports Rinderknecht has been charged with destroying property by fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and setting timber afire. Facing over 40 years in prison, he has pleaded not guilty. The trial memo said that Rinderknecht had an obsession with fire and had previously burned a Bible.
In a separate article, City Journal reports that Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization that initially focused on climate, has become increasingly radicalized after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Last September, after years of mission drift, Sunrise shifted its purpose to “getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.”
As part of this revamped mission, Sunrise has embraced increasingly confrontational tactics: training students to manufacture conflict with college administrators, coordinating campaigns to pressure corporations linked to ICE, disrupting hotel guests with late-night protests, goading workers into non-cooperation with federal law enforcement, and laying the groundwork for student mass general strikes. What was once a narrowly focused activist organization has increasingly become an incubator for a wide array of legally questionable tactics.
This article reports that Sunrise’s drift highlights the growing extremism of America’s activist infrastructure – extremism that routinely turns to lawbreaking. Indeed, the group’s actions raise questions about whether Sunrise is still operating in a manner consistent with its original nonprofit filing status or has instead become a vehicle for organized disruption that crosses legal and regulatory lines.
