RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
January 7 to January 13, 2024

Featured Investigation
Updated for 2024:
Timeline of the Feds' Pursuit,
or Lack Thereof,
of Biden Family Corruption

Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books

$68M Pre-Paid to Energy Contractors, RCI
Med School Hires Dean’s Poet Daughter, RCI
Biden Admin's $100K to Palestinian Girls, RCI
FAA's Flight of Fleecing, RCI
IRS Tax Credit Where Credit Isn't Due, RCI

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Kyiv Mayor Was Hunter Biden Business Associate, New York Post
Filing: Georgia DA Paid Boyfriend in Trump Case, Journal-Constitution
Defense Sec'y's Vanishing Act Not Surprising, Politico
Secret Service Schedule Undercuts Key Dem J6 Narrative, Just/News
GOP Rep. Estimates 200 Agents at Capitol on Jan. 6, Daily Signal
Instagram Bans Conservative Group After Hunter Biden Post, Daily Signal
How Hillsdale College Got Involved in the 2020 Election Plot, NY Times
Leftists Look to Skirt Arizona’s ‘Zuckbucks’ Ban in '24, Federalist

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Mega-Study: Minorities Don’t Get
Harsher Criminal Punishments
Daily Wire

Contrary to the media drumbeat, a meta-analysis of 20 years of academic literature found almost no evidence that minorities are mistreated by the criminal justice system when it comes to punishment. RCI contributor Christopher J. Ferguson and Sven Smith, both professors at Stetson University, found “most crimes, criminal adjudication in the U.S. is not substantially biased on race or class lines”: 

When combining the 51 studies, the numbers “did not reach evidentiary standards to support the hypothesis that race or class are predictive of criminal adjudication” when it comes to all crime types, violent crimes, or juvenile crimes. For drug crimes, “small disparities were found … suggesting that race/ethnicity is associated with between 1.6 to 1.8% of the variance in criminal adjudication” among blacks and Hispanics facing drug charges, versus whites – a percentage so small that policy discussions focused on it are unlikely to solve any problems.

This article reports that some of the studies found no evidence of racism in criminal sentencing and said so clearly, but their findings were simply ignored by the media, politicians, and other academics, who at times did not acknowledge a single paper dissenting from their hypothesis in their citations. Other times, academics seemed to question their own findings:

A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence, writing: “However, simple claims that race does not matter are also not supported by existing knowledge,” concluding the situation was “nuanced,” because, in certain sub-categories, the numbers differed slightly by race – even though if racism were actually to blame, such factors would be across the board, and all in one direction.

In a separate article, the City Journal reports that the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) has become “consumed with the idea that the profession suffers from ‘systemic racism,’ requiring a revolution in training and practice.” According to a report by an APA commission, psychoanalysis is rife with bigotry, affecting everything from who pursues a career in the field to training curricula to “the experience of race on the couch.” Tellingly, this article notes, the report’s authors concede that they don’t have enough data to assess racism in the practice of psychoanalysis, yet they still feel confident in addressing the topic because of “personal experiences of commission members.” 

Skipping School:
Hidden U.S. Education Crisis
ProPublica/New Yorker

Absenteeism has long been a problem in high poverty areas. But, this article reports, it has worsened dramatically since the pandemic. Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism – defined as missing at least 10% of school days, or 18 in a year – nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to 28% of students. The consequences are immense:

Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health – exacerbated by social isolation – and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours. But schools are using relatively little of the billions of dollars that they received in federal pandemic-recovery funds to address absenteeism. The issue has also attracted surprisingly little attention from leaders, elected or otherwise, and education coverage in the national media has focused heavily on culture-war fights.

This article focuses on a still small private company, Concentric, which has been hired by some school districts to find out why kids are going to school and see what they can do to change that. Home visits are key to its approach, whose impact remains unclear:

These sorts of home visits are so new that there has been little chance to assess them. A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of Concentric in the Baltimore school district – its largest contract – during the 2021-22 school year reported that a majority of home visits found nobody there. The evaluators struggled to judge the impact even of the visits that did reach family members, because there was no attendance data from the pandemic year of 2020-21 to compare the new numbers with.

Bill Gates’ Charity Gave Millions
to Chinese Government Groups
Daily Caller

Even as China threatens war against Taiwan and represses ethnic minorities within its borders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid out or approved for future payment roughly $23 million in grants to Chinese government organizations during its 2022 reporting period, this article reports:

Recipients included the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese National Health Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, among others. These government entities cumulatively received $11.3 million from the Gates Foundation. Several of the entities funded by the Gates Foundation report to the China’s State Council, the “executive body of the supreme organ of state power,” according to the Chinese government. The State Council is largely composed of members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Moreover, the Gates Foundation funded Chinese universities that regularly perform defense work for the Chinese military.

This article also reports that in June 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping called Gates an “old friend.” In January 2023 Gates said that “China’s rise” is “a huge win for the world.”

Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
New York Times

America’s mental-health crisis appears to have taken to the road with lethal results. This article reports that from 2020 to 2021, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day. The fatality figures were somehow even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits. Data showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs. How come?

“Drivers were frustrated,” says [Deborah] Kuhls, now a professor of surgery at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at U.N.L.V. and chief of trauma at an affiliated public hospital. “My own theory is that whatever personal conflicts they had were exacerbated because they’d been sheltering in place during COVID. So they’d get on the road having self-medicated with drugs or alcohol, or they’d just be incredibly reckless.” To Kuhls, it felt as if all the deadly habits that were on such flagrant display during the early months of the pandemic had become normalized. “We’ve all gotten stuck,” Kuhls told me. “That’s true here; it’s true nationally. And it’s a scary thing to comprehend.”

Thousands of U.S. Homes
Flooded Over and Over
Washington Post

A rising number of U.S. properties – at least 44,000 structures – have suffered flood damage covered again and again by taxpayers, in some cases with cumulative payouts that exceed a property’s worth, this article reports:

One property in Virginia Beach has flooded 52 times – including four floods in 2020 and another two in 2021 – with total payments amounting to $784,967. Another property on the Outer Banks of North Carolina has flooded 44 times, with payments totaling more than $2.2 million. There are 30 properties that have flooded at least 30 times, the data shows. Although such properties account for only about 1 percent of the federal flood insurance program’s nearly 5 million active, they are responsible for more than 10 percent of the agency’s claims.

This article reports that the rising number of repeatedly flooded properties backed by federal insurance represents only one aspect of the nation’s troubled federal flood insurance program, which an array of advocacy groups, the Government Accountability Office and even FEMA have said is in need of an overhaul by Congress:

Since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast in 2005 and forced massive payouts, the NFIP has remained firmly in the red. Subsequent catastrophes such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and several hurricanes in 2017 – which led to the second-largest number of claims in the program’s history – have left the program’s current debt to the treasury at more than $20 billion.

Joe Manchin’s Wife’s Commission Received $200M from Omnibus Bill

Throwback Thursday: Air Force Brass Flew in Posh Private Jet