RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

Halloween could come early this year. The Democrats have named their price to avoid a government shutdown come October – an additional $350 billion for healthcare over the next decade. Critics say a big chunk of that money may go to ghosts. At issue are the generous subsidies the Biden administration created for Affordable Care Act policies, sweeteners that are slated to expire in December. Making healthcare essentially free for millions of Americans, those policies have skyrocketed enrollment in Obamacare plans. But a recent study found they have also sparked a curious...

As it emerges from bankruptcy, Bed, Bath & Beyond has announced plans to open 300 new stores in the next two years – though not a single one will be in California, the state that used to be a center of its operations. The home goods retailer, which once operated 90 stores in California – the highest number in any state – is seeking a fresh start in business-friendly Southern states. Its first location opened in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 2024 under the new name “Bed Bath & Beyond Home.” “California has created one of the most...

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment. Liz Simons is using some of the money made by her hedge fund math whiz father, Jim Simmons, to push math informed by social justice.  @CommunityChange YouTube channel What Liz...

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.    It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive...

The classroom subject of “civics” evokes antiquated images of Cold War-era conformity, but Andrew Hart describes a recent teacher workshop on civics with a schoolboy’s exuberance: “It was really refreshing. I was, like, wow.” The weeklong seminar at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia delved into the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and civil rights titans W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.  “We spent the first full day just talking about...

Three years ago, RealClearInvestigations reported that the FBI was undercounting the number of armed civilians who had thwarted active shooters by a factor of three. Even though the FBI acknowledged the issue at the time, it never corrected the error involving the politically fraught issue. In the years since, the problem has only gotten worse. Since RCI’s 2022 article, the FBI has acknowledged just three additional incidents of armed good Samaritans stopping active shooters from 2022 to 2024, and none in the last two years. In contrast, the Crime Prevention Research...

When Jeffrey Clark was tapped to lead the second Trump administration’s chief regulatory review office, it marked an astonishing redemption.  For years, congressional investigators and prosecutors had pursued the former Department of Justice official primarily over an unsent letter he drafted, in support of President Trump’s 2020 election challenge, calling for Georgia to consider launching a last-minute legislative session to review its results. Trump’s return to power has not ended Clark’s troubles: Washington, D.C.’s legal disciplinary authority has...

This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities, particularly those with vibrant downtown cores such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of other iconic American cities. Most visions of the future still view urban cores as the uncontested centers of production, consumption, and culture, with rural areas, small cities, and suburbs relegated to the backwaters...

Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia.    Reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for articles that used classified leaks to advance the Russigate hoax. Columbia University, Photo by Eileen Barroso Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of...

HOLLY RIDGE, La. – More than three millennia ago, indigenous people built a massive ceremonial mound a few miles from here, an engineering marvel called Poverty Point and one of the oldest known building projects in North America. Today, this is ground zero for what may prove a defining feature of the 21st century’s landscape. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is constructing a gargantuan, $10 billion data center that tech executives, lawmakers, and business leaders say will bring much-needed prosperity to this rural area in northeast Louisiana. Set to be operational...

This is the second of a two-part series on the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read the first installment here. The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20th century. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and...

Domestic violence is often framed as a crime perpetrated by men against women. There’s a federal Office of Violence Against Women dedicated to domestic and sexual violence, but no male equivalent. News media articles overwhelmingly cover male perpetrators of domestic violence, and, when females are the aggressors, they often portray them as acting in self-defense. Hollywood portrayals of domestic violence generally tell a similar narrative.  A recent study, however, challenged the assumption that gender violence is a one-way street. Canadian...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – On Friday, August 26, 2005, Hurricane Katrina was just another nuisance storm lurking in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly headed our way. I was more concerned about Ohio State’s first-ever game against Texas in two weeks. As people from Houston to Tallahassee have done for decades when hurricanes come calling, we planned to stock up on bottled water and batten down the hatches, then rake up piles of debris after Katrina passed. Then Katrina became a monster overnight. While I slept, the Category 3 storm intensified into a Cat 5 as its whirlpool clouds filled the...

I was heartened to see my former employer, Duke University Health System, quietly reverse its commitment to woke racism this year. I had joined the internal resistance to its diversity, equity, and inclusion crusade and was fired because of it. Here’s my story.  Without public notice, the 38,000-employee organization scrubbed its website of the commitment to DEI it had trumpeted in 2021, when it proclaimed racism a “public health crisis,” and “equity” as its cure. Now, all such fealty to DEI has been discarded with its new 2025...

Molecular biologist Mike Rossner, who has committed his life to following the science, now finds himself playing an unexpected if urgent role – exposing the fraud of his fellow scientists.  Rossner is part of a network of experts that sniff out researchers who intentionally or recklessly fabricate, falsify, or plagiarize evidence. Rossner, a consultant specializing in identifying manipulated and duplicated images in journal papers – a telltale sign of deceit – has been dismayed by his findings at U.S. research centers. Scientists often have deleted the data...

The Obama intelligence community’s claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized dirty tricks to try and help Donald Trump win the 2016 election was based on "one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard [intelligence] reports," according to a just-declassified report that had been locked away in a CIA vault. Nevertheless, former CIA Director John Brennan ordered agency analysts to use the claim in the Intelligence Community Assessment issued during the Obama administration’s final days – even though the ICA itself noted...

A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them. According to the report, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been "related to activities" of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax, who were accused of...

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Colin Williams, coordinator of the USGS Mineral Resources Program, who responded to RCI’s request for comment after publication. On July 11, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Wyoming’s top elected officials were in the Cowboy state celebrating something that last happened when Dwight Eisenhower was president and the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series: The United States opened a rare earth mine. Ramaco’s Brook Mine in Ranchester, Wyoming, is the first such domestic mine in 70 years. The...

On June 27, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump what he hailed as a “GIANT WIN,” finding that lower courts had “likely” overstepped in ordering universal injunctions blocking many of the president’s policies. While the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Trump v. CASA appeared to disarm Trump’s opponents of perhaps their most potent legal weapon, his adversaries had other ideas. In the weeks since, Trump’s challengers have seized on the ruling’s openings – especially the use of class-action suits in which...