RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

July 5 to July 11

RCI Podcasts & Videos

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, J. Peder Zane speaks with Noah Rothman of the National Review about his insightful new book “Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.”

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller interviews John Murawski about his recent article in RealClearInvestigations reporting that the death of wokeness has been greatly exaggerated.

Featured Investigation:

When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist,

What Could Go Wrong?

While the bankruptcy of Ascend Elements — a battery recycler that received nearly $320 million in federal funding before collapsing in April — has renewed scrutiny of the Biden administration's strategy of using taxpayer money as venture capital for green energy companies, James Varney reports that RealClearInvestigations' larger review of $1.68 billion in 2023 Energy Department grants reveals systemic problems with government-directed investment.

• Economists identify three core failures when government picks private-sector winners: inferior information compared to market investors, political rather than merit-based decision-making, and no performance-based accountability. The Obama-era Solyndra bankruptcy – $535 million lost on a niche solar panel maker – established the template.
• Several large grants went to companies with stronger footholds abroad than in the U.S. Belgian-owned Syensqo received $178 million yet highlighted European expansion in its response to RCI, noting its U.S. production remains based in France. Group 14, which received $100 million for a Washington state factory, acquired a stake in a South Korean facility last year.
• Corporate recipients are accountable to shareholders, not taxpayers, making it difficult to track how grant money is spent or assess its impact. The Energy Department did not respond to multiple RCI inquiries about the grants.
• Some economists defend a limited government role, pointing to the SBA's small-business innovation program and historical federal support for university research that produced breakthroughs like radar and the internet. But they distinguish these from large discretionary grants to for-profit companies.
• The controversy is bipartisan and growing: the Trump administration is now demanding equity stakes in companies it funds, while Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed giving the government 50% ownership of major AI firms – raising new questions about political influence over private enterprise.

Featured Investigation:

Mythbuster: U.S. Much Safer Than Many Peer Nations

John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations that, contrary to conventional wisdom that the U.S. is the world's most violent developed nation, victimization survey data show that Australia and Canada – both praised for strict gun laws – actually have significantly higher rates of violent crime than the United States, despite the U.S. maintaining a higher murder rate.

• The U.S. murder rate (about 4 per 100,000 in 2025) is roughly twice that of Australia and Canada, but homicides make up only a tiny fraction (0.21%) of all U.S. violent crime, which is heavily concentrated in a small number of counties.
• Police-reported statistics dramatically undercount actual crime: Canada's victimization survey found a violent crime rate nearly 10 times higher than police reports, while only about 37% of robberies and sexual assaults in Australia were reported to police in 2024.
• Using victimization survey data, Australia's rape/sexual assault rate is roughly three times the U.S. rate, its assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher; adjusting for repeat victimizations pushes Australia's violent crime rate 15% higher still.
• Canada's overall violent-crime victimization rate was 175% higher than the U.S. in 2019 after methodological adjustments, with robbery 268% higher and burglary 259% higher.
• Conviction rates for reported sexual assault are strikingly low – just 11% in New South Wales, Australia—fueling public reluctance to report such crimes, while only 8.1% of Canadian violent crime victimizations led to arrest and charges, compared to 20% in the U.S.
• Older International Crime Victimization Survey data corroborate the pattern: Australia's violent-crime rate was 104% higher than the U.S. in 2000, Canada's was 40% higher, and England, Wales, and Scotland were about 40% higher.
• Experts cited argue that reliance on police statistics, rather than victimization surveys, misleads cross-country comparisons of crime and public safety.

 Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

• A Stroke of Luck, RCI
• Double-Duty Employee, RCI
• VA Phantom Travel, RCI
• Tuition Tax Credit Disaster, RCI
• Double Dipping Local Benefits , RCI

 Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

• Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign, New York Times
• The Tense Final Hours of Graham Platner’s Campaign,  Politico
• Immigration Hawks Challenge Trump’s Deportation Numbers, Free Press
• Trump Admin Slams Smithsonian’s History of America, Daily Signal
• How Trump Became the President of Washington, DC, Semafor
• Trump Administration Redefines Discrimination, New York Times
• Flashback: Trump 1.0 Moved to End 'Disparate Impact', RCI
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Curious Resurgence, Politico

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Trump Surges Deportation of Minors 

ProPublica

This article reports that a first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office.

In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term. The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed.

This article reports that the Trump administration has rolled back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country based on the assumption that unaccompanied immigrant minors – ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults – are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation. Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands.

In a separate article, the Free Press reports that immigration hawks are not convinced by the Trump administration’s claim that it has deported three million people.

Counterfeit Air-Bag Parts Are Killing U.S. Drivers

— and the Government Can’t Stop It

Wall Street Journal

When Eui Seok Kang lost control of his Chevrolet Malibu in torrential rain, this article reports, his car spun sideways across two lanes of a Texas road and was struck by a pickup truck. When his air bag deployed, it tore apart his jaw. The air bag, it turned out, had been purchased on eBay and installed by the Texas dealership that sold him the used car. When he crashed, it sent metal shards flying into Kang’s face.

Kang survived, which made him luckier than others. The aftermarket air bag in his Malibu contained a dangerous component tied to at least 10 fatalities in the U.S. since 2023, according to a later report by federal safety officials and a government email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Three others have been severely injured, including a driver as recently as June in Louisville, Ky. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is racing to stop more drivers from being killed or injured by air-bag parts it says appeared to originate from the Chinese manufacturer called Jilin Province Detiannuo Safety Technology, also known as DTN Airbag.

This article reports that a traditional recall is unlikely if not impossible. “Normally, carmakers can easily trace where potentially problematic parts originated and how they were imported, but with the substandard air-bag parts, there are no records of who sent them to the U.S. and distributed them.”

Saving America’s Story

White House

A 162-page White House report titled “Saving America’s Story” assails the leadership of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for “explicitly adopt[ing] an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

The Museum confronts visitors with materials intended to undermine faith in American institutions and the longstanding shared ideals of the American people. As this report shows, the Museum purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.

Regarding the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the report states:

NMAH has refused to celebrate the Nation and its history. It has not created any exhibit dedicated to presenting a general narrative of American history or telling the story of any of our Founding Fathers, the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, or the achievement of independence and the establishment of the constitutional rule of law – even in the 250th anniversary of the first of those pivotal events.

In separate articles, the New York Times and Reuters reported on the Smithsonian’s response to the criticism and how its leadership is weathering the administration’s critiques.

Americans of All Ages Spending Less Time Socializing 

Axios

Americans are spending less time hanging out than they were 20 years ago – and the trend cuts across every generation, according to Axios' analysis of new American Time Use Survey data. Average time spent socializing per day has fallen from 45 to 35 minutes over the last 20 years.

The decline is steepest among young people: 15- to 24-year-olds went from spending an hour a day hanging out with others to 35 minutes. We're all on our smartphones, often interacting through screens instead of face to face … Teens, in particular, spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to Gallup. The shift to remote work – and life – during the pandemic has persisted, keeping more of us homebound.

In a separate article, the Washington Post reports the story of John Dekalb, a 58-year-old divorced man from Oregon who has found that making friends wasn’t as easy as it had been during his youth. So, one evening at the end of spring, he attended his third “speed-friending” get together, where participants spent one minute talking to each attendee, and if he clicked with anyone, they could exchange contact information and try to form a friendship later.

Most of the two dozen people there that night were around Dekalb’s age, but they were a disparate group. A divorcee fresh from Florida announced she would not be speaking to any men. A 70-year-old who spends his free time at the theater sat next to a younger woman who said she loved hair metal bands. And in the back, a locksmith chatted with a retired heavy-machine worker who’d bailed the last time he signed up to speed-friend and almost bailed again because it felt safer to stay home with his dog.

This article reports that DeKalb’s first two speed-friending events had gone poorly, but this one – whose interactions are detailed – was better. “Dekalb had collected information from six people – three women and three men.” A few days went by, then two weeks, and Dekalb realized that as hard as going to the event had felt, it was nowhere near as stressful as doing the work of building real friendships.

CIA Uses Cash, Diamonds & Viagra to Recruit Foreign Spies 

NBC News

The mythology of espionage leans on silenced pistols and numbered accounts, yet the real toolkit the CIA uses to turn foreigners into informants has often been stranger and far more human. Former intelligence officers have told NBC News that money is rarely the main reason a foreign agent agrees to betray their country, though it reliably greases the wheels of the relationship.

The fuller picture, drawn from declassified court files and decades of first-hand accounts, shows case officers reaching for whatever a person quietly wants, from medical care to school fees. …. What the work rarely resembles is the tidy fiction of a spymaster pressing diamonds into a stranger's palm. Officers in the human intelligence business often reduce motivation to a blunt shorthand: money, ideology, coercion, and ego. James Lawler, a former CIA officer who spent decades recruiting foreign spies, told the intelligence site SPYSCAPE that in his experience, money almost never stood alone as a motive. He described it instead as a means to an end, whether that meant educating a source's children, covering medical bills, or clearing a gambling debt.

This article reports that the single most memorable inducement in the CIA's recent history surfaced in Afghanistan. In 2008, The Washington Post described a CIA officer handing an ageing Afghan chieftain four Viagra pills as a gift. The officer returned days later to an enthusiastic welcome and a wealth of detail about Taliban movements and supply routes, followed by a request for more pills.