RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 15 to August 22

 RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 15 to August 22

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 the Substacker who writes under the pseudonym “Yuri Bezmenov” (he tells us why) about his reporting on the network of awards, fellowship, teaching gigs and other lucrative and prestigious incentives that reward people who espouse progressive ideas.

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Ben Weingarten to about his recent RCI investigation into how Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza are reshaping American politics. 

Featured Investigation:

A Call to Power: Islamic Leaders See Ballot Box as Path to Paradise 

As Muslim Americans win local power across the country, Paul Sperry reports  for RealClearInvestigations that Islamic organizers are advancing a nationwide plan to bankroll friendly candidates with more than $140 million a year in mosque donations. An RCI review of Federal Election Commission filings found Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary with at least $315,000 in funds tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been linked to terrorism.

• Republicans warn that Islam draws no line between religious and civic life, and that Shariah sanctions polygamy, forced child marriage, honor killings and militant jihad. Citing roughly 900 European no-go enclaves, Rep. Bob Onder, R-Mo., called tolerating such beachheads “civilization suicide”; Democrats call the fears Islamophobia.
• Outside Dallas, Islamic leaders are planning a 400-acre development that Texas’ attorney general says is meant as the “epicenter of Islam in North America.” Imam Yasir Qadhi, who chairs the Fiqh Council of North America guiding 3,500 U.S. mosques, has preached that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “filthy.”
• Qadhi’s Fiqh Council issued a fatwa this year unlocking zakat – Muslim charitable giving – for political spending. Activists have launched super PACs, and Virginia state Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim introduced a bill criminalizing “prejudice toward Islam” that legal scholars say likely violates the First Amendment.
• CAIR, which denies a 2009 federal court finding of “ample evidence” linking it to Hamas, plans to elect 30 Muslims to Congress and is grooming more than 200 for state and local office. 
• Muslims run several small cities, including Hamtramck, with its all-Muslim council, and Dearborn, Mich.; Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top New York staff is almost entirely Muslim. Communities have renamed streets after Arab homelands and mandated Islamic holidays and halal-only school lunches.
• Counterterrorism experts fear that as Muslims win control of towns and cities, they may weaken the nation’s separation of church and state while creating the kind of dangerous “no-go” areas for non-Muslims that authorities now identify in some 900 enclaves of Europe with heavy concentrations of Muslim immigrants. 

This article is the sixth in a series of RCI articles on the Rise of Islam. The series so far:

• GOP Battles Sharia: Is Islamic Law a Threat or Dog Whistle?
• Sharia’s Growing Influence on U.S. Finance
• How Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Transforming American Politics
• The Rising ‘Anti-Zionist’ Funding Network
• Anatomy of the ‘Islamophobic’ Shooting That Wasn’t | RealClearInvestigations

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

• Denver Theater Defaults, RCI
• Chicago Is Late on Taxes, RCI
• Too Many Diapers, RCI
• Millionaire Mortgages, RCI
• Tax Money for Baltimore Mayor’s Wife, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

• Census Bureau: Over 24,000 Noncitizens Voted in 2020, Just the News
• Inside Trump’s Failed Hunt for Noncitizen Voters, ProPublica
• FBI Docs Detail Swalwell's Chinese Spy Ties, Pleasanton Weekly
• Trump Admin Keeps Finding New Ways to Hide Records, Reason
• Trump Says White House Needs 'Military Complex', Washington Post
• How Trump’s Exec Assistant Became the Talk of Washington, WSJ

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

The U.S. Military's $1 Trillion Black Box 

ProPublica

The sums spent by the Pentagon are vast, but the explanations for the spending too often range from vague to inscrutable. In an ongoing series of articles, ProPublica cross-referenced thousands of pages of financial tables, accounting records and congressional committee documents to determine what all this public money is paying for.

The scale is hard to fathom. Congress appropriated $1 trillion for defense this year, more than the combined appropriations for agencies overseeing health, veterans affairs, education, housing, agriculture and justice – twice as much, in fact. If the president prevails in his priorities for next year’s budget, defense spending will soar dramatically higher still, to $1.5 trillion. That would be more, adjusted for inflation, than the country spent annually on defense during the height of World War II. The Pentagon’s balance sheets are opaque even to the Pentagon itself: The agency as a whole has never received a passing grade on a comprehensive financial audit. … One thing is clear: Vast sums are funneled into developing costly weapons systems that often come in over budget, get delivered behind schedule or are rendered obsolete by the time they’re finished – if they’re finished at all.

This article reports that the Trump administration “says that it is undertaking its own reforms and promising new accountability. Yet some fear Pentagon spending is becoming even more unrestrained. “Two of Trump’s marquee Pentagon programs, panned by some as boondoggles, are estimated to collectively cost more than $1 trillion. Companies connected to the president’s family and appointees have scooped up numerous DOD deals.”

A City’s War on Surveillance Cameras 

The Free Press

This article reports that activists in Troy, New York are leading an intense local rebellion against Flock Safety, a company whose automated licenseplate readers have rapidly expanded nationwide. Residents argue the cameras create a taxpayerfunded surveillance state, enabling police misuse, immigration enforcement, and dangerous errors – such as innocent people being repeatedly stopped at gunpoint due to faulty data. 

In May, several buildings across town were spray-painted with anti-Flock graffiti, and just two months later, Vincent Harrington, a 25-year-old Troy resident, was arrested after allegedly sawing down a Flock camera in the city. For some, the fight isn’t just about Flock. The company has become a totem of what they see as a ruthless, anti-democratic tech industry dead set on remaking the world for its benefit by forcing AI and mass surveillance down everyone’s throats. What we’re seeing in Troy, and across the country, is a war over the future, and who gets to build it.

This article reports that more than 50 localities have successfully banned Flock, though not everyone is waiting for democracy to work. From Alabama to Kentucky, Flock cameras have been shot at and sawed down by frustrated residents. 

Recalls Surge As Parked Cars Burst into Flames 

Washington Post

The growing number of electronics and batteries packed into modern vehicles is increasing the risks of an ancient hazard: fire. This article reports that an estimated 3.2 million vehicles are currently under recall for concerns that they could burst into flames – even when they’re parked.

Late last year, when Sarah Lammersen learned her 2022 Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid was being recalled because the high-voltage battery could catch fire at any time — even when the vehicle was parked – she jokingly texted the dealership, “I hope the car doesn’t catch on fire while we wait to schedule an appointment.” Days later, the Jeep burst into flames. No one was injured in the blaze, which occurred while Lammersen’s daughter drove the vehicle, but the Jeep was destroyed, according to a lawsuit over the incident.

This article does not report on the number of cars that have spontaneously combusted, but it does not appear to be many. It also does not report what car manufacturers are doing to reduce the threat which seems to setm from a design flaw: today’s vehicles today run hotter and have more components packed tightly under the hood, providing more opportunities for fires to start than older vehicles.

Private Voucher Schools Face Little Accountability 

ProPublica

Although officially private, a growing number of schools across the country receive almost all their funding from state governments through expanding voucher programs. This article focuses on one particular school in Milwaukee to argue that current laws do not require them to provide much transparency or hold them accountable.

Atlas Preparatory Academy in Milwaukee was a 100% school in my city that had low test scores and declining enrollment while also receiving more than $4.3 million in voucher money for 357 students in grades K-12. … [Such] voucher schools, for instance, are not required to serve all children with disabilities. Public schools are. Another major difference is transparency. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, information about public schools — good, bad or mundane — can be gleaned through open meetings, district YouTube channels and robust websites with detailed agendas, minutes, reports, statistics and information about enrollment, curriculum, special education services and more. Districts have to abide by Wisconsin’s open records law, meaning that reams of records are available to anyone who formally requests them. Not so for the private schools. Voucher schools must, by law, have at least two opportunities a year for parents to meet with the governing board. But the schools do not have to make those meetings accessible to the general public.

The article also suggests that many people connected to Atlas, including its executive director ($175,000 per year) and school administrator ($150,000 per year), are overcompensated. While the article raises excellent points about a lack of oversight, it also pretends that the systems in place to monitor public schools, which it tacitly endorses, are working. The vast majority of students in Milwaukee public schools, for example, are not considered proficient in math and reading. It also suggests that taxpayer dollars belong to the government, when the money also belongs to residents (and parents)who pay them.

The Nobel Laureate Who Experimented on Children 

New Yorker

The late pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek won wide public acclaim – capped off by a Nobel Prize in 1976 – for his work researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that exists only in remote, eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. He was also hailed as a great humanitarian for bringing more than 50 children, mostly young boys whose parents had died from the disease to live with him in his Maryland home. There, this article reports, he funded their education and sexually abused them.

In his journal, Gajdusek sometimes described sleeping in the same bed, naked, with his children, specifically the younger boys. Luwi said that Gajdusek commented on the growth of his penis and testicles and encouraged him to masturbate. Luwi couldn’t categorize what Gajdusek was doing. “I just kept shut,” he told me. “I could pretend that I was home, in the bush.” His earliest memories of Gajdusek in Waieti also involved sexualized lessons. “He would take us to a safe place where we would feel free, and then ask us, ‘What’s the name of this thing?’ ” Luwi said. “He would ask about certain plants, the hands, the feet, the genitals. He would grab our balls and say, ‘What do you call this?’ ” … During Luwi’s third year in the U.S., Gajdusek read Henry James’s first two novels, “Roderick Hudson” and “Watch and Ward.” Both novels are about “would-be benefactors” who are “basically sexually crippled, gifted persons,” Gajdusek observed. He was struck by James’s insights about “the sense of undeserved obligation, and imprisonment or slavery or mind washing” in youth drawn into a benefactor’s orbit.

This article reports how colleagues, institutions, and the broader scientific community overlooked glaring warning signs for decades, while detailing the lasting trauma of the survivors.