RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
January 29 to February 4, 2023 The advance of black reparations in the United States has inspired a global movement to redress perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups, John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations: The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations --– and Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning slavery and genocide in the New World. Some warn that reparations could open a bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of abuses against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants. Already gay reparations have been won for victims of Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nazi Germany. Proposals have also been floated for reparations for abused psychiatric patients and aged-care patients as well as all women, whether they work or not, for the alleged income gap. California offers a dramatic example: It's reviewing a task force's proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some blacks. But people like Barack Obama not descended from 19th century free or enslaved blacks could be excluded -- while whites with black slaves in their lineage might cash in. Where does this all end? Skeptical pundits like to joke that fat, short and ugly people will be next in line. A columnist for conservative site Breitbart morbidly joked: “And dare we ask: Should there be compensation for victims of … abortion? Okay, okay, it might be hard to find anyone to compensate for that loss of life.”
Echoing the private financing of public elections that critics saw as heavily favoring Democrats in 2020, several of America’s richest foundations are pouring money into a similar effort now, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations: A nonprofit called the Audacious Project, whose supporters include the Gates and MacArthur foundations, has committed $80 million to the Mark Zuckerberg-aligned Center for Technology and Civic Life, to provide grant funding to run local elections. The CTCL became a focus of controversy in 2020 when it helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook’s Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to help run elections during the pandemic, which prompted ad hoc rule changes minimizing in-person voting. While the outside assistance was touted as nonpartisan, post-election analysis found that the so-called “Zuckerbucks” were distributed on a partisan basis that favored Democrats. The CTCL is sending operatives to local elections offices, examining practices and equipment, and acquiring the sorts of data coveted by political campaigns. Despite public claims of transparency, the center has refused to provide basic information about its operations. In response to concerns about the private money, 24 states and 12 counties have sought to prohibit elections offices from accepting it. But Democratic governors in three of the states overrode legislation banning it, stoking more concern that the grants are a ruse for partisan infiltration of elections offices. Biden, Trump and the Beltway The legacy media’s failings in not just covering, but cheerleading, the Hillary Clinton campaign's Trump-Russia collusion hoax have been thoroughly documented by RealClearInvestigations and others. Still, it is significant that much contrarian and responsible journalism by the likes of Paul Sperry, Aaron Maté and Tom Kuntz of RCI has now been vindicated in the left-leaning Columbia Journalism Review, as CJR presents its reporter's own fresh revelations. The four-part series by Jeff Gerth, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times, documents the “undeclared war between an entrenched media” and President Trump with a special focus on the coverage by his former paper. Gerth’s deeply reported, book-length article stretches from the 2016 campaign, when Clinton’s campaign cooked up and spread the Trump-Russia hoax, through the investigations of the conspiracy theory by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller in the years that followed. The years-long affair wounded the president even as the probe debunked the claims against him. Almost every step of the way, Gerth reports, the Times and others suspended their skepticism to publish misleading articles. At the end of his must-read series, Gerth writes: My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences. … the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. In a separate column, RCI’s Articles Editor J. Peder Zane summarizes some of Gerth’s main findings. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway In Going Litigious, Hunter Biden Finally Admits Laptop His New York Post
Hunter Biden Pressures Delaware AG, a Family Ally, for Probe Free Beacon
Texts: Hunter Biden Blackmailed Aide for FaceTime Sex Daily Mail
Combative Trump Took Fifth Hundreds of Times in Deposition CBS News
The Evolution of Lies in George Santos' Campaign Biography Washington Post
Retired Air Force Intel Boss Kept Hundreds of Top Secret Docs Daily Beast
Job Market Hot for Ex-Biden Officials Politico Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The Biden administration has been quite willing to grant requests for emergency asylum. Just last month, the president announced plans to allow Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans fleeing persecution priority asylum status as long as they arrived by plane and had private sponsors ready to help them resettle. Earlier he granted emergency asylum to tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their war-ravaged country and the first group of Afghans airlifted into the United States amid the chaotic U.S. evacuation in August 2021. One group that has not received such a warm welcome is Chinese Christians who have left their homeland and are now stranded in South Korea, Thailand and other countries. Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics reports: When it comes to Chinese Christians trapped in limbo, the Biden administration is balking, while offering no explanation for the dramatically different treatment of these groups of foreign nationals seeking asylum. Human rights advocates believe they already have the answer: The Biden administration is wary of further rocking the boat with China amid efforts to repair basic lines of communication. That calculation, even if it proves temporary, is a break from America’s long tradition of standing for religious freedom at home and abroad. Advocates also warn that U.S. indifference to the plight of the exiled Chinese Christians puts them in imminent danger of arrest and deportation back to China. China’s top nuclear-weapons research institute has bought sophisticated U.S. computer chips from companies including Intel and Nvidia at least a dozen times in the past two and half years, circumventing decades-old American export restrictions meant to curb such sales. A Wall Street Journal review of procurement documents found: The chips, which are widely used in data centers and personal computers, were acquired from resellers in China. Some were procured as components for computing systems, with many bought by the institute’s laboratory studying computational fluid dynamics, a broad scientific field that includes the modeling of nuclear explosions. The article reports that most of the chips are widely available on the open market showing, as one quoted expert said, how “insanely difficult” it is to enforce many export restrictions. Private equity has notched decades of high returns for investors by following a well-worn strategy: acquire distressed or undervalued companies or real estate, increase profits and then sell them. Greatest hits include foreclosed homes, highway rest stops and coal mines bought out of bankruptcy. Now, this article reports, “franchising has become one of private equity’s targets du jour.” According to the research firm FRANdata, the number of franchise brands acquired by private equity firms and other investors rose from 52 in 2019 to 149 in 2021 and was on track to nearly equal that total in 2022. This article focuses on a husband-and-wife team, the Ciancis, who bought a workout facility for youngsters through a franchise chain called The Little Gym. Everything was great, they say, until The Little Gym was acquired by a private equity-backed firm called Unleashed Brands. According to legal filings, internal documents, and interviews with more than half a dozen other franchisees – most of whom requested anonymity so as to avoid retaliation – Unleashed began to demand higher fees and institute more stringent requirements, which the independent owners thought would threaten their profits. The day after Ms. Cianci organized her fellow franchise owners into an association to push back against the changes, the corporate office told her it was terminating her license on the grounds that she was chronically late in paying her fees. Given the timing, Ms. Cianci maintains in the legal filings that it constituted retaliation. Coronavirus Investigations The trillions of dollars in COVID relief shoveled out by the federal government have been a windfall for criminals. This article reports that the fraudsters who abused the system included thousands of federal employees who may have wrongfully obtained coronavirus bailouts by claiming to be unemployed, with some even doing so from their desks at government offices. It reports that the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General has found: ... [N]early 2,000 applications for “Lost Wages Assistance” and unemployment insurance payouts had the names of DHS employees who were ineligible since they were, of course, employed by the government agency. In fact, of 2,393 applications filed with DHS employees’ names, only 584 could be confirmed as actually eligible for the program — and even some of those bore signs of fraud, such as incorrect amounts. Benefits could also be paid to people whose hours were cut back because of the pandemic, but in 366 cases, the name associated with the unemployment claim actually worked overtime during the relevant period. | 