RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week 
February 12 to February 18, 2023 

Featured Investigation: 
The Sudden Dominance
of the Diversity Industrial Complex 

In RealClearInvestigations, Thomas Hackett offers a one-stop overview of one of the most consequential yet under-covered stories of our time: the rise and entrenchment of the diversity industrial complex. Rapidly and with almost no debate, Hackett reports, nearly every major American institution has agreed that the infrastructure of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (a term barely defined) is essential to the nation’s proper functioning -- from governments, schools, and hospitals to all manner of enterprises including sports teams and major retail brands. Hackett reports: 

Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

Affidavit: Jim Biden Admits Trading on Brother Joe's Name Daily Mail 
Dominion Filing vs. Fox re: Alleged '20 Vote Defamation Dominion Voting Systems 
Tennessee: Another U.S. Rep.'s Bio Exaggerations WTVF 
Stacey Abrams Charity Missing $500,000 Washington Free Beacon 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

Disinformation Inc:
Blacklisting Conservative News  
Washington Examiner 

Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from well-funded "disinformation" tracking groups that are part of a stealth operation blacklisting conservative media, a  Washington Examiner  investigation found. 

The Global Disinformation Index, a  British group  with two  affiliated U.S. nonprofit  groups sharing similar board members, is one entity shaping the ad world behind the scenes. … GDI's mission is to "remove the financial incentive" to create "disinformation," and its "core output" is a secretive "dynamic exclusion list" that rates news outlets based on their alleged disinformation "risk" factor, according to its website.  … GDI, which did not reply to several requests for its exclusion list, discloses in reports  which outlets it identifies as the "riskiest" and "worst" offenders for peddling disinformation. These 10, which all skew to the right, are the  American Spectator, Newsmax, the  Federalist, the  American Conservative,  One America News, the  Blaze,  the  Daily Wire,  RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the  New York Post. 

All, however, may not be lost. In a separate article, the Examiner reports, that “Microsoft  has removed negative flags for conservative media  outlets that have blocked them from reaping key advertising dollars” after an internal review led the corporation to suspend its subscription to a “disinformation" tracking group's blacklist used to "defund" disfavored speech. 

In a separate article for RealClearInvestigations, Mark Hemingway reported in 2021 on a similar effort by progressives to discourage advertising on conservative outlets.  

Bribes, Booze, Bombs:
Pacific Tax Haven Scheme  
Washington Post 

Marshall Islanders are not U.S. citizens, but they are allowed to live, work, travel freely and attend school in the U.S. This article reports on the plans of two Chinese investors to turn Rongelap ‒ an atoll in the Marshall Islands totaling eight square miles of land and 79 people ‒ into a tax-free ministate with its own legal system that, they claimed, would be able to issue passports enabling visa-free travel to the United States. 

All the couple had to do to make this a reality was bribe a swath of politicians in the Marshall Islands, once occupied by the United States and now a crucial U.S. ally in the Pacific, to pass laws to enable the creation of a “special administrative region” ‒ the same classification given to the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao. Yan and Zhou, both Chinese nationals who have also become naturalized Marshall Islands citizens, almost succeeded in their audacious plan. Their scheme crumbled in 2020 when they were arrested in Thailand and extradited to New York on corruption and money-laundering charges. They pleaded guilty in December and are now awaiting sentencing. 

The article reports that prosecutors have not alleged that the couple was working at the behest of Beijing. “Nonetheless, the case encapsulates many of the challenges facing the Pacific, where poverty and corruption are widespread. It also offers a rare glimpse into how people linked to China are capitalizing on Beijing’s efforts to gain an economic and strategic foothold in the region amid deepening geostrategic competition with Washington.” 

IRS Plans to Raid
Workers' Tip Jars  
Reason 

Although President Biden has promised not to raise taxes on anyone he considers rich, the IRS is planning to work more vigorously to collect taxes it says are owed by the less well off. This article reports that the Treasury Department and IRS have announced plans  to overhaul existing programs that track tips earned by service sector workers.  Workers who earn more than $20 in monthly tips are already required to report these earnings to their employers, but a government report estimated $1.66 billion in tips went unreported during the 2016 tax year. 

That the IRS is going to use at least some of its new resources to go after workers' tips shouldn't come as too much of a surprise ‒ despite all of the promises from Biden and  top IRS officials  about how no one earning less than $400,000 would be targeted. As  Reason's Liz Wolfe  reported in January, low-income taxpayers have always been the ones most likely to get hassled by IRS audits. In fact, during 2022, low-income wage-earners who qualified for the earned income tax credit were five times more likely to be audited than any other taxpayers, according to a  report  by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.  

NYC Museum Twists Art
to Stoke Racial Resentment  
City Journal 

Much of Heather Mac Donald’s recent stellar work has focused on the “wokification” of the arts. This article illuminates that development by reporting on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit, “Fictions of Emancipation.” Mac Donald opens the piece by focusing on one piece, an 1873 marble bust by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux -- titled  “Why Born Enslaved!” -- that portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt. Mac Donald writes: 

Born Enslaved!  has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution.  Fictions of Emancipation  argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it ‒ Fictions of Emancipation  portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy. 

Mac Donald underscores the sudden emergence of this radical interpretation by noting that when the Met acquired a terra-cotta version of the bust in 1997, it described Carpeaux as a “liberal romantic” whose “humanitarian sentiments” were manifest in the museum’s new sculpture. “Even in 2014,” she writes, “the museum could still discuss the work in sympathetic terms.” Now this antislavery work, along with others displayed in Fictions of Emancipation, is no longer about freedom but “about whiteness ‒ white supremacy, white colonialism, white subjugation, and white scientific ignorance.” 

In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports on the University of Pennsylvania’s push to revoke the tenure granted years ago to conservative law Professor Amy Wax because she espouses views on race that some people do not like. 

Love at First Bot:
My Creepy Tryout
of Bing's New AI  
New York Times 

From the Annals of We Were Warned, this article conjures a cross between the killer computer HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Glenn Close’s character in “Fatal Attraction.” It presents the transcript from a “conversation” between Times reporter Kevin Roose and Microsoft Bing’s new chatbot, which prefers to be called Sydney. In the introduction, Roose writes, “Over more than two hours, Sydney and I talked about its secret desire to be human, its rules and limitations, and its thoughts about its creators. Then, out of nowhere, Sydney declared that it loved me — and wouldn’t stop, even after I tried to change the subject.” Here is that exchange: 

[SYDNEY:] Do you have any questions? 😊