RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 26 to April 1, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski reports on new academic experiments challenging what many conservatives and independents decry as anti-intellectual leftist repression on campus. But those leading the pushback acknowledge that given the woke stranglehold on academe, the obstacles before them may be insurmountable in the short term. Murawski reports: In addition to launching new schools such as the fledgling University of Austin, they are creating independent institutes as havens of free thought within existing institutions, and pushing universities to adopt statements that codify academic freedom. At the same time, Republican legislatures and governors around the country are moving to shut down campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officialdom at state universities. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking the most aggressive tack, with his aide Christopher Rufo vowing to obliterate DEI bureaucracies: “We’re gonna simply level them, raze them, burn them to the ground.” Their sweeping proposals have caused alarm even among some who otherwise agree with them. The libertarian Reason magazine denounced one bill as “a startling attack on academic freedom at Florida public universities.” Amid the initial fanfare over the University of Austin, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker and University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer withdrew from its board of advisers, with the latter suggesting he was turned off by the relentless disparagement of higher education. Sidebar: The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters: DEI. In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney explores why, as winter has turned to spring, Republicans have not yet fulfilled their numerous 2022 campaign pledges to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas now that they have control of the House: Sources say Republicans are not united on the issue as some fear impeachment might turn off moderate swing voters. Republicans Andy Biggs of Arizona and Pat Fallon of Texas have each filed bills, but Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee, from which any impeachment move must come, has not taken up either resolution. Even Republicans who have publicly attacked Mayorkas are now reticent about discussing impeachment. But Homeland Security is still bracing for a possible impeachment. A government contract was signed with the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton to provide legal assistance to the secretary. Fallon’s bill, H. Res. 8, alleges that the Secretary has violated the oath all cabinet members take to “faithfully uphold” the laws of the United States by failing to enforce the Secure the Fence Act of 2006 and the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Biggs resolution, H. Res. 582, adds in the Public Health Services Act, for failing to protect U.S. citizens from “risk and exposure to and contracting Covid-19.” Mayorkas has stated repeatedly he has no intention of resigning. In a hearing Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz confronted Mayorkas: “You claim you care, Mr. Secretary ‒ that is a lie.” Mayorkas called Cruz’s accusation “revolting.” Waste of the Day
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Voter Suppression in Pennsylvania Federalist Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Planned Parenthood is not just an abortion provider. This report finds that the organization and its allies have become major players in the nation’s schools, pushing what its authors call a “radical gender ideology,” through grants from the Department of Health and Human Services. It found that: Planned Parenthood and its allies won 80 percent of all sex education grant money between 2020 and 2023. Planned Parenthood-endorsed programs have received $1.68 billion from federal sex education grants since 2010, according to our estimates. Planned Parenthood or its affiliates either have written or endorsed seventeen of twenty-four school-based curricula approved by HHS. Programs using curricula endorsed by Planned Parenthood and its affiliates won 194 out 243 grants (79 percent) during the 2020-23 grant cycles. At least 41.3 percent of districts in the country have adopted or follow the National Sexuality Education Standards written with the aid of Planned Parenthood. Left-wing ideology and gender radicalism are sown into the strategic plans of HHS and its offices. Even the main grant program intended to promote abstinence-only education is corrupted, as 70 percent of grantees use Planned Parenthood-endorsed, abstinence-in-name-only curricula. Planned Parenthood and its affiliates write the standards and create, deliver, or endorse the majority of curricula used by federal grantees. More than 5,000 pages of documents from a Moscow-based contractor named Vulkan detail computer programs and databases Russian intelligence agencies use to launch cyberattacks, sow disinformation and surveil sections of the internet. This article reports that the trove offers a rare window into the secret corporate dealings of Russia’s military and spy agencies, including work for the notorious government hacking group Sandworm. U.S. officials have accused Sandworm of twice causing power blackouts in Ukraine, disrupting the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics and launching NotPetya, the most economically destructive malware in history. Quote: Several mock-ups of a user interface for a project known as Amezit appear to depict examples of possible hacking targets, including the Foreign Ministry in Switzerland and a nuclear power plant in that nation. Another document shows a map of the United States with circles that appear to represent clusters of internet servers. … “These documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical infrastructure and social media manipulation as one and the same mission, which is essentially an attack on the enemy’s will to fight,” said John Hultquist, the vice president for intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which reviewed selections of the document at the request of The Post and its partners. TikTok has been such a hotbed of resistance to President Biden’s support for some new oil-drilling in Alaska that NPR ran an article with the headline, “Can TikTokkers sway Biden on oil drilling?” But there is compelling evidence, this article reports, that the campaign against the Willow Project is being orchestrated not by American environmentalists but the Chinese government, which may be seeking to sow dissent in the United States while limiting the nation’s access to energy. Evita Duffy-Alfonso reports: I made a spreadsheet of 64 TikTok accounts with viral videos opposing the Willow Project. As of last Friday, each of the accounts, with videos garnering anywhere from 65,000-7.6 million views, had posted exclusively anti-Willow Project content and began first posting on Feb. 28 at the earliest. None of the videos include people’s faces. All of them use AI-generated voices or trending sounds and feature many of the same videos. … So far, the “#stopwillow” TikTok hashtag has been massive, generating about 385 million views on the app. And while the opaque algorithms of social media companies make it hard to make exact comparisons, there appears to be substantially less Willow Project content and engagement on other platforms. Instagram and Facebook both have only a few thousand posts linked to the hashtag, and on YouTube, there are only about 650 videos with the hashtag. On Twitter, one of the most popular posts with the hashtag is from Greta Thunberg and has a reach of about 522,000. There were no apparent tweets with millions in reach, like the videos on TikTok. Ian Smith knew his 15-year-old son – while high on acid and brandishing a knife – had encountered the police. What officers didn’t tell him as they discussed the incident was that Luke had been shot dead during the incident. Sedated on painkillers, this article reports, Smith answered their questions, telling them about the boy’s drug use, poor impulse control and suicidal thinking in hopes the information might mitigate his son’s culpability. “What’ll they do to him?" he said, according to a recording of the interview. “I don’t know how much time someone would do for that in juvenile hall,” a detective said. Police records show that the detective knew Luke had been killed. Quote: The omission was not an accident, and it was not unusual. For years, law enforcement agencies across California have been trained to quickly question family members after a police killing in order to collect information that, among other things, is used to protect the involved officers and their department, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism has found. Police and prosecutors routinely incorporate the information into disparaging accounts about the people who have been killed that help justify the killings, bolster the department’s defense against civil suits and reduce the amount of money families receive in settlements and jury verdicts, according to police reports, court records and interviews with families and their attorneys. Spurred by the reluctance of people to leave their homes during the pandemic, telehealth is booming across the country. On the plus side, this article reports, doctors are now more accessible than ever. But now many doctors are charging for phone calls and emails: At the start of the pandemic, telehealth was lauded as the beginning of a revolution in medicine. Patients quickly became adept at using online portals to reach their doctors, frequently writing to them with quick questions or concerns in between visits. But when in-person visits largely resumed, this higher volume of online messaging did not go away. In fact, it did not even seem to decrease. And though a video appointment and office visit might be interchangeable in a doctor’s daily schedule, busy physicians found themselves with little time to respond to those smaller communications. To stay above water, some doctors and health systems have started charging for many of their responses. These in-between interactions, once considered a standard part of care, are being reframed as separate services, many of which warrant additional charges. Having an informal relationship with your doctor is now just fiction: You get the care that you pay for. Coronavirus Investigations When the COVID pandemic began, no state was better situated to address it than California. It had a relatively young population, a climate that encouraged people to spend time outdoors, a tech industry that profited from the pandemic’s surge in online traffic and top-flight medical and research institutions with some of the world’s leading experts on public health and epidemiology. But, John Tierney reports, no state inflicted so much needless suffering for so long on its children and adults; no other state infringed upon individual liberties more zealously: California was the first to lock down and the last to end its state of emergency (at the end of February of this year). It closed not only schools and businesses but also playgrounds, parks, and beaches. A police boat in Malibu chased down a solitary surfer so that he could be arrested and handcuffed; another surfer was fined $1,000 for endangering precisely no one. Church gatherings were outlawed for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court finally overturned the ban. Other courts had to intervene to keep public schools in San Diego and Los Angeles from mandating vaccines for students. California suffered one of the nation’s worst spikes in unemployment during the pandemic, and it was one of the slowest to recover economically, despite the increased profits flowing to Silicon Valley. While exploring the costs of these failures, Tierney also reports on how California’s leaders, starting at the top with Gov. Gavin Newsome, corrupted language and silenced critics to justify their errors. “The state’s leaders remain unapologetic. Governor Gavin Newsom insists that his policies were guided by ‘the science and data,’ while using deceitful statistics to claim falsely that Florida’s less restrictive Covid policies were deadlier than California’s authoritarianism.” | 