RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today

RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

By The Editors, RealClearInvestigations
July 04, 2026
RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week
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RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

June 28 to July 4

 

RCI Podcasts & Videos

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, J. Peder Zane speaks with Duke Professor Adrian Bejan about his new book, “Diversity through Freedom” and the physics of politics.

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Ben Weingarten about his RCI article reporting on the national security threat posed by the reliance of America's supply-chain on China.

Featured Investigation:

Alive and Kicking: News of Woke’s Death

Is Greatly Exaggerated

Despite visible retreats in corporate DEI programs and university bureaucracies, John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations that "wokeness" is far from finished. Rooted in decades of academic scholarship and nonprofit funding, the movement represents a durable cultural paradigm – not a passing fad – that continues reshaping American institutions, law, and public life even as the Trump administration works to roll it back.

  • Wokeness is grounded in a coherent philosophy: social structures privilege certain groups (whites, males, heterosexuals, Christians) at the expense of others, and redistribution through affirmative action, diversity programs, and inclusive language is required to equalize outcomes. Critics argue this framework expands endlessly, generating perpetual culture wars.
  • Racial equity initiatives persist despite conservative pushback. At least five states and dozens of cities have active reparations task forces. New York City's 375-page equity plan – released under Mayor Zohran Mamdani – frames the city's history as one of "colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression."
  • Transgender advocacy has eclipsed racial equity as the movement's leading edge, encompassing demands for biological males' access to women's spaces, K-12 gender-transition policies concealed from parents, and puberty blockers for minors. A federal court recently ruled a biological male must be admitted to an all-women's nude spa.
  • The normalization of polyamory is gaining ground in municipal governments and progressive churches. New York State replaced "mother" and "father" in family law with "gestating parent" and "non-gestating parent."
  • Conservative countermeasures – funding threats, standardized testing, DEI rollbacks – have had limited effect, as universities often rebrand rather than eliminate equity programs.

Featured Investigation:

On the Cutting Edge of Wokeness

A federal appellate ruling requiring a women's-only Korean spa in Washington state to admit a transgender individual with fully intact male genitalia illustrates how once-fringe academic gender theories have migrated from university journals into binding law. John Murawski traces the intellectual origins of this transformation for RealClearInvestigations, examining two new books by Ivy League scholars that codify the emerging "queer paradigm."

  • Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues in Sex Is a Spectrum that the biological binary of male and female is a recent cultural invention, drawing on examples from the animal kingdom – lactating bats, sex-changing fish – to contend that human bodies are similarly fluid. He asserts that perceived athletic differences between males and females are largely cultural, not biological.
  • University of Pennsylvania gender studies professor Beans Velocci goes further in Sex Isn't Real, arguing that most people don't fit the male/female binary, that "cisness" is an unnatural political construct rooted in "white, colonial, bourgeois brutality," and that traditional sex categories are incoherent inventions of Western imperialism.
  • Both authors situate the biological binary as a product of European colonialism that suppressed pre-colonial, multi-gender traditions – though neither offers robust cross-cultural human evidence for the claim.
  • Velocci's own research reveals an irony: the early 20th-century eugenics movement laid the experimental groundwork for modern transgender hormonal and surgical interventions – a history that raises uncomfortable questions about the continuity between past and present medical experimentation.
  • A dissenting federal judge in the spa case captured the backlash: calling the majority opinion a "Frankenstein social experiment," he argued courts were dismantling longstanding protections for women and girls in deference to ideological imperatives never debated by the public.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Trump's Sons To Profit from His Mining Deal 

New York Times

President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick achieved an important deal in September when Kazakhstan’s president agreed to give America access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods. But, this article reports, the American people weren’t the only beneficiaries.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in the Kazakhstan project. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fundraising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

This article reports that the arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by the Times.

Crazy Loophole Driving Up Medical Costs 

New York Times

From the Annals of Unintended Consequences, this article reports that a law meant to protect patients from surprise billing by providers not in their insurance plan often results in astronomical payouts – especially to surgeon assistants whose work often consists of retracting skin and suturing. Under the law, this article reports, providers can file for arbitration, where they are able to make a case for much higher payments than they could otherwise receive from health plans.

Across the country, assistants are sometimes earning up to 25 times what the doctor makes, according to data reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with officials who manage large health plans. … In March, for example, a surgical assistant in Dallas earned $50,456 through arbitration for a prostate removal operation. The surgeon, who accepted the patient’s insurance, earned $1,843.

This article reports that the giant payouts are approved by arbitrators, who sometimes act as rubber stamps. One assistant, for example, earned $50,546 for a prostate surgery. “That assistant’s employer, Precision Assist of Dallas, has filed over 960 disputes and won nearly 90 percent of them.” Unfortunately, the article does not include interviews with any of the arbitrators, so it is hard to understand their thinking.

What 911 Calls by Inmates Say About Local Jails 

Scott et al., Marshall Project

This article reports that, when local officials try to block the public from seeing what goes on in a jail, the calls they make to 911 can offer a view into how people there are being treated, and which problems jail employees struggle to address on their own. To see how local jails are handling emergencies, The Marshall Project’s teams in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi, analyzed months of 911 records. 

Workers at the Cuyahoga County jail in Cleveland called 911 for emergency assistance 845 times last year, according to data provided by the city. Many of the calls were for overdoses, chest pains or other medical emergencies typical for a facility that houses about 1,500 people at a time. But there were also calls triggered by people detained at the jail ingesting batteries or bleach, and others were for “near hanging, strangulation or suffocation.” Other calls pertained to people dealing with psychosis, catatonia or altered mental status from alcohol or drug withdrawal. … Assaults were one of the most common reasons that emergency medical personnel were called to the St. Louis city jail over a three-month period between September and December last year, according to records provided by the city’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services. Emergency calls for help give a rare view into the jail’s dependence on first responders to both break up fights and provide aid after an attack.

This article reports that the Raymond Detention Center in Hinds County, Mississippi, called 911 for help twice a day last year, on average. A former county jail administrator said that she was disturbed by the frequency of calls at the facility. “That number alone is alarming, and speaks to a much broader systemic failure,” said Kathryn Bryan, who oversaw the jail until 2022. “Staffing levels, training, command support, almost every core competency in jail operations has to fail in order to come up with an annual number as exorbitant as that.”

In a separate article, the Free Press profiles Josh Smith who spent five years behind bars on drug charges, turned his life around, and now is trying to deliver on Trump’s criminal-justice reforms.

Some Americans See Stars and Stripes as Red Flag

NBC News

As our polarized nation marks its 250th birthday, this article reports that many Americans are hesitant to fly the flag. “If we do fly the flag, we will also put out signs to make it clear that we are not MAGA,” said Bruce Watson, a 72-year-old man who lives in a small New England town.

The American flag is a symbol striped with many meanings, whether it’s hung on front porches, waved in parades, protests and World Cup matches, or stamped on lapel pins and boxing trunks. Like so much else in American life, it has also been tangled up in politics and the policies of President Donald Trump. NBC News asked readers to share their feelings and practices around the flag in a moment, polls suggest, when patriotism, national pride and optimism for the country’s future are all fraying. Like Watson, some say the flag can be taken as an endorsement of the current administration. For others, it isn’t tied to any one party but is a way of life.

This article reports that “rather than not fly the flag, several readers said they plan to show their patriotism – and protest Trump – by flying it upside down to signal that the country is in distress.”

 



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