RealClearInvestigations'
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January 28 to February 3, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly examines a Beltway power couple with apparent conflicts of interest drawing little critical scrutiny in the media: Max Stier, a Democratic anti-Trump campaigner who tarred Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh as a sexual abuser; and Stier’s wife, Judge Florence Pan, who now has key Trump issues such as presidential immunity before her in court. Kelly reports: Judge Pan, a Biden appointee, has been lionized on the left since she put a Trump lawyer on the spot by asking pointedly: “Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?” Her courtroom zinger was exploited to advance the specter of Trump as a lawless menace. Her husband, meanwhile, is a longtime advocate of the federal workforce now warning darkly of Trump’s vow to convert “deep state” bureaucrats into political appointees who can be fired without cause by the president. Moreover, Stier, an ex-Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, has pushed his own unproven recollections of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misdeeds as a student, decades after the supposed fact. Some speculate Stier’s role in the Kavanaugh scandal was retaliation against former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for allowing his wife’s earlier nomination as district judge to expire with the end of the Obama administration. For months progressives have insisted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from Trump cases because of his wife Ginni’s politics. But they have yet to express similar worries about Pan’s objectivity. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books EPA Spent $620K on Guns and Ammo, RCI
Richest U.'s Get $45B of Taxpayer Money, RCI
Turtle Stew Over Tax-Paid Galapagos Trip, RCI
Over $1 Billion in Weapons Missing In Ukraine, RCI
$3.5M in Free Apts. for Illegals in Maine, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Trump Haters Turned Trump Voters, Intelligencer
Historians Tell Top Court Trump Can Be Kicked Off Ballot, Guardian
Texas Billionaire Quietly Becoming New George Soros, Free Beacon
5 Years for Leaking Trump's and Thousands of Others' Taxes, NBC News
Recording Suggests Ga. Prosecutor Axed Whistleblower, Free Beacon
Steve Garvey Whiffs 'Family Man' Image, Kids Say, Los Angeles Times
W. Va. Gov. Jim Justice Loved by All Except Creditors, Wall Street Journal
Whistleblowers: Feds Plan to Go After Private Gun Sales, Empower Oversight Other Noteworthy Articles and Series One of the major challenges for those who say COVID-19 originated in nature, jumping from beasts to people, is that no one has yet found the virus in the wild. This article reports that newly revealed documents may explain why: “The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world,” writes the esteemed science journalist Nicholas Wade. He reports that documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA. The science is complicated, but the gist is that the documents – which are connected to a 2018 proposal, titled DEFUSE – show that the SARS2 virus that causes COVID-19 could have been created in a lab: When SARS2 first appeared in the world, it had all the unique properties that would be expected of a virus made according to the DEFUSE recipe. Instead of slowly evolving the ability to attack human cells, as natural viruses must do when they jump from animals to humans, SARS2 was immediately infectious to people, possibly because it had already been adapted in humanized laboratory mice to the human cell receptor. The DEFUSE proposal, which was ultimately turned down by the Department of Defense, was authored by Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, with partners including Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Wade reports “the Chinese members of the group may have decided to find their own financing and go ahead unilaterally. This is plausible, as Baric and Shi were collaborators but also rivals. With Baric blocked for lack of DARPA funds, Shi may have seen the chance to race ahead if she could acquire funds from Chinese sources.” In response to a crisis of faked data and research, champions of scientific integrity are keeping researchers and science journals on their toes by using special software, oversize computer monitors and their eagle eyes to find flipped, duplicated and stretched images, along with potential plagiarism. This article reports that one of them, a California microbiologist named Elisabeth Bik, has had great success: Based on her work, scientific journals have retracted 1,133 articles, corrected 1,017 others and printed 153 expressions of concern, according to a spreadsheet where she tracks what happens after she reports problems. She has found doctored images of bacteria, cell cultures and western blots, a lab technique for detecting proteins. “Science should be about finding the truth,” Bik told The Associated Press. She published an analysis in the American Society for Microbiology in 2016: Of more than 20,000 peer-reviewed papers, nearly 4% had image problems, about half where the manipulation seemed intentional. The U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate Inc. has become one of the most feared operators in media due to its zeal for censoring political speech with which it disagrees. In the U.S. it has pressured companies like Google to demonetize or remove sites including ZeroHedge and The Federalist. In Britain, the leading figures in the CCDH are perhaps best known for a relentless campaign to tie former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn to accusations of antisemitism, while worldwide the group gained renown during the pandemic for efforts to remove the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” from Internet platforms, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This article reports that IRS documents show the center “provided incorrect information to the IRS in its application to receive tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status. The status allows donors to CCDH to treat donations as a write-off and indicates that US authorities have determined the organization is involved in non-profit activities in the public interest.” Paul Holden reports that the CCDH in Britain has never been a registered charity. In combing the tax records, Holden details the group’s ties also to influential individuals and organizations: The Center for Countering Digital Hate Inc. was formed and registered in Delaware on December 11, 2020. By April 2021, CCDH Inc. boasted four directors, including Simon Clark, who was listed as both Director and President, and Imran Ahmed, who combined three roles as Company Director, Secretary and Treasurer. CCDH’s application forms were signed by Clark. Clark is one of the leading figures of the misinformation world, through his work with the Atlantic Council think tank, and its related anti-disinformation entity, the Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Atlantic Council is lavishly funded by transnational banks like Goldman, Sachs, weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, and government entities like the Bahrain Embassy to the U.S., and the U.S. Department of State. The DFR Lab was featured in the Twitter Files and has been a prominent player in the “anti-disinformation” space, chosen to help companies like Facebook root out “inauthentic activity,” with a focus on Russian state actors. President Biden’s suddenly tough talk on illegal immigration (albeit without walk) seems easy to explain, since polls show the issue is a major threat to his re-election. The larger question is why Biden allowed the crisis to emerge through rhetoric that seemed to beckon millions of migrants and executive orders that have effectively rewritten immigration law. Michael Lind reports that the answer is politics, specifically the Democrats’ determination that it had to create a large pool of new voters: … [T]he Democratic Party is an alliance of interests threatened with long-term demographic decline – declining industries, declining states, declining cities, declining churches and nonprofits. These civic downtrodden have united around the hope that they can reverse the unpopularity of their offerings among U.S.-born Americans by importing new citizens en masse. A politics founded on this idea – namely, that if not enough American voters like what you are offering, you should compensate by importing supportive voters – may seem like something from Alice in Wonderland. But that’s exactly what the leadership of the Democratic Party is doing, by refusing to enforce existing immigration laws and preventing states from securing their borders – while counting on the Democratic bureaucrats and judges to enforce the dubious legality of such moves. In a separate article, the crack staff at the New York Times has finally realized something that has been clear to most everyone else for years: millions of migrants have crossed the border because they are “certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay. Forever.” In a separate article, Legal Insurrection suggests that inadequate health screenings at the southern border may be contributing to a sharp rise in syphilis cases. Late last year RCI reported that the re-emergence of other diseases, including leprosy, measles and polio, may be tied to the influx of migrants. Some of the food that winds up on American tables may not be prison slop, strictly speaking, but it can be traced back to maximum-security lockups. This article reports: The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor. Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime. This article also reports that the clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year. |
