RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
April 16 to April 22, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney takes on official stonewalling to lay out what we know and don't know about the historic Biden-era influx of illegal immigrants, including their whereabouts and heavy costs. Among other things, Varney notes the paradox of "sanctuary cities" now dealing firsthand with the consequences of their own policies -- ones their leaders had seemed to think Americans elsewhere would have to bear. Varney reports: No one knows exactly how many people have poured across the southwest U.S. border. The official number of encounters by Customs and Border Patrol is 5.2 million people logged over the last two full federal fiscal years and fiscal 2023 to date. Yet that number is unreliable because it includes repeat encounters and omits many who slipped into the country unnoticed. Through midnight flights and buses to far-flung locales, the administration has made it difficult to verify where the migrants are now. Also unclear are the associated costs. But flares have been sent up – especially by sanctuary cities. Denver plans to spend $20 million in the first half of this year to provide housing -- an estimated $800 to $1,000 per week per migrant. Chicago has spent close to $120 million on its “asylum seeker emergency response” – or roughly $33,000 per migrant. New York City wants $500 million-plus in federal aid, while pegging its spending between $2 billion and $3 billion. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that, after accounting for taxes paid by illegals, they cost taxpayers over $150 billion per year – a 30% increase since 2017. In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten reports that a new faction in the Republican House majority is calling for defunding all “woke” programs “rooted in discrimination” in next year’s federal budget. The letters from Rep. Jim Banks and members of his Anti-Woke Caucus, obtained exclusively by RCI, call on congressional appropriators to: Delete items characterized as woke totaling over $900 million in 2023 budget legislation ‒ only a partial accounting of woke programs across the government under President Biden. Zero out more than $200 million for racially driven hiring and recruitment in STEM fields and $108 million for “environmental justice” activities. Remove from current legislative language the claim that “white supremacists and violent anti-government domestic extremists” are “infiltrating security and law-enforcement agencies.” Rescind a requirement that ICE detain transgender illegal aliens only at facilities with staff who have received “LGBTI Sensitivity and Awareness Training” and medical personnel with experience delivering hormone therapies. The GOP effort faces tough odds given Democratic control of the White House and Senate and the persistence of budgetary gridlock in Congress. But it could push Democrats in the 2024 election cycle to stake out unpopular positions. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books $8.2B for 82K More Federal Workers RCI
Billions for Unmonitored Animal Tests RCI
How Seattle Schools Flunk Budget Math RCI
When U.S. Built Defective Sewer Plants RCI
$42M Just to Track Ukraine Spending RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway An IRS whistleblower has reportedly told the Justice Department's top watchdog that federal prosecutors appointed by Joe Biden have engaged in "preferential treatment and politics" to block criminal tax charges against Biden’s son, Hunter. The whistleblower's attorney, Mark Lytle, gave details in a letter to Republicans and Democrats on oversight committees in Congress. It does not name anyone but Just the News has confirmed the references are to the Delaware probe of Hunter Biden led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump holdover. Lytle wrote: "The protected disclosures: (l) contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee, (2) involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case, and (3) detail examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected." Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Leaky Exploits of 'Donbass Girl,' Pro-Russia U.S. Navy Vet Wall Street Journal
Military's Burned in Recruiting Gen Z on Leaky App Washington Post
Leaked Discord Docs: Up to 4 More China Spy Balloons Washington Post
This Shadowy Group Ran Government's Censorshi, Federalist
Biden Boils the Religious-Liberty Frog Wall Street Journal
Transcript: Berenson v. Biden et al. on Vax Censorship Southern District of NY Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The Department of Justice’s new indictment of two Chinese citizens for using the unlawful Chinese police station in Manhattan to go after dissidents is just one outpost of the vast overseas operation Beijing uses to harass and silence critics, this article reports: Security agencies across Europe and the Americas are investigating more than 100 facilities that an advocacy organization exposed in September as overseas outposts of China’s security apparatus. In the U.S., that includes at least two others besides the one targeted this week. … The stations [reportedly established in at least 25 cities in 21 countries] appear to provide civilian cover for Chinese government operations deemed too risky for official Chinese diplomats to pull off. They provide toeholds in neighborhoods with large ethnic Chinese and Asian communities ‒ the Manhattan facility was in Chinatown ‒ that allow those operatives to function with relative anonymity. This article reports that investigations into other outposts are ongoing in Britain, Japan and the Netherlands, but there have been no arrests connected with those operations. Some of the outposts may be legal; Chinese law enforcement has negotiated deals with Italy, Croatia and Serbia that allow for “the stationing and deployment of Chinese police officers” in those countries. Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. A recent New Yrrk Times investigation found that thousands of these children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country ‒ working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories. All along, the Biden administration missed or ignored signs of these violations of child labor laws. In response to the report's findings, officials passed the buck: In interviews with The Times, officials expressed concern for migrant children but shifted blame for failing to protect them. H.H.S. officials said the department vetted sponsors sufficiently but could not control what happened to children after they were released. Monitoring workplaces, they said, was the job of the Department of Labor. Officials at the Labor Department said inspectors had increased their focus on child labor and shared details about workers with H.H.S., but said it was not a welfare agency. And White House officials said that while the two departments had passed along information about migrant child labor, the reports were not flagged as urgent and did not make clear the scope of the problem. Should the slogan be, "Save money, live woker"? Walmart is promoting controversial diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools in its home state of Arkansas. Documents obtained by the Free Beacon show that through grants, nonprofits it supports and corporate outreach the world’s largest retailer is providing training to teachers that asserts that "perfectionism" is "white supremacy" and that "all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built." The Fayetteville school district, for example ... ... embarked on a five-year "equity plan" funded and designed by Walmart-funded groups, including a DEI "research institute" at the University of Arkansas. School leaders attended trainings on the "six tenets of critical race theory," learned that "systemic inequality = trauma," were drilled on the harmful effects of "microaggressions," and sat through PowerPoints on "intersectionality." The district also implemented a "restorative justice" program ‒ designed to combat the allegedly "disproportionate" discipline of black students ‒ that discouraged teachers from breaking up fights and instructed them to sit on the floor with students to "dispel any sense of hierarchy." This article reports that this transformation has taken place largely out of public view, aided and abetted not just by Walmart but by the school districts’ lack of transparency. Fayetteville, for example, repeatedly assured parents that critical race theory was not being taught in schools even as it refused to comply with public records requests for DEI-related documents. Social media algorithms often operate on a simple principle: if you like something, you probably want more of it. This may not be a problem as it sends baseball enthusiasts more baseball videos or Grateful Dead fans more concert videos, but when someone is anxious or depressed an endless stream of suggested videos about depression, hopelessness and death can exacerbate those problem. This article, which focuses on TikTok, reports: As the political debate carries on, researchers and child psychologists are watching with increasing alarm. Surveys of teens have revealed a correlation between social media and depression, self-harm and suicide. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show nearly 1 in 4 teens said they’d seriously considered killing themselves in 2021, nearly double the level a decade earlier. The American Psychological Association and other authorities pin the blame partly on social media. It also reports that the family of a 16-year-old boy who killed himself has brought a wrongful death suit against TikTok. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that “executives at high-powered firms hired by TikTok for lobbying and strategic consulting visited the White House at least 40 times in the past year, as calls have increased to ban the app.” Coronavirus Investigations From the Annals of That Sure Sounds Like a Smoking Gun, a Senate report details evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology started working on a vaccine for the virus that causes COVID-19 before the rest of the world had even heard about the virus. The reports says: November 2019 also appears to be the timeframe that PLA researchers began development of at least two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. … [one month] before the known outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late December 2019. The research required both access to the sequence of and the live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Jim Geraghty writes that this is further evidence that the Chinese government knew it was dealing with a contagious virus and deliberately lied to the rest of world that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” up until January 20, 2020. In this light, he adds, “it is not surprising that most Americans agree with the FBI and Livermore Labs: The most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic was a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” | 