RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
May 19 to May 25, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Nancy Rommelmann digs deep into the life of Fred "Bubba" Copeland, an Alabama pastor and mayor who committed suicide last year after a local news outlet exposed his cross-dressing persona on social media as "Brittini Blaire Summerlin." Copeland’s story was seized upon by national media as symbolic of the perils that hateful conservatives pose to the trans community, but Rommelmann finds a more nuanced and textured story: -
The local community was and is not an intolerant monolith. -
"The people I met were not filled with white rural rage," Rommelmann writes, "and none were going to reject a man some of them had known their entire lives over some weird kink he and his wife had." -
Hundreds crowded into the chapel for a memorial slideshow of Copeland’s life, including a picture of Mayor Bubba with President Trump, taken after a deadly tornado. -
Bubba Copeland was remembered as the one who got up early before church to fix the town stoplight when it went on the blink, Rommelmann reports, and “who showed up at your house when your father hung himself in the back yard.” -
In a writerly quest for explanations that recalls the fictional journalistic conceit of "Citizen Kane," Rommelmann wonders: Why had that single small news outlet, 1819 News, thrown the grenade? And what political context supplied the ammunition? -
The result, she concludes, “was a man trapped in a hate gyre built by people who needed others to look bad so they could look good.”
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books New York's Tax Breaks for Journalists, RCI
Mass. Pays Haute Prices for Migrant Slop, RCI
Oklahoma's No-Bid Contracts, RCI
Chesapeake Trail Puts Us Underwater, RCI
Indiana U.'s $3M Sex Research Payroll, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Defense Memo Casts Doubt on Reason for Mar-a-Lago Raid, Fox
Docs Suggest CIA Blocked Probe of Hunter Biden’s Benefactor, Daily Caller
FBI Authorized to Use Deadly Force in Mar-a-Lago Raid, American Greatness
Secret Docs in Trump's Bedroom Long After Mar-a-Lago Raid, Politico
'He Doesn't Live Here': RFK Jr. Home Doubts, New York Post
Justice Alito Sold Bud Light Stock Amid Anti-Trans Boycott, Law Dork
FBI Shed Informants Linked to Russian 'Disinformation', New York Times
Rep. Tlaib Paid $435K to Firm Backing Terror-Tied Groups, Washington Examiner Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Despite their best efforts to hide the “smoking guns” showing their connection to the Chinese lab where the virus that causes COVID-19 might have been created, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his staff at the National Institutes of Health didn’t plug all the leaks. This article reports that a top adviser at the NIH, Dr. David Morens, deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 – and used a “secret back channel” to help Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which the Post obtained: “I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],” he emphasized again in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization was suspended this month from receiving federal funds for the next three years and who was himse proposed for debarment on Wednesday. In the most shocking exchange, on May 28, 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” read a June 16, 2020, email sent just two months after EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant was initially suspended. For more than two decades, through two wars and domestic upheaval, the idea that al-Qaeda acted alone on 9/11 has been the basis of U.S. policy. This article reports “that assessment now appears wrong,” as new evidence has emerged indicating that Saudi Arabia played a far more active role in the attack than previously understood: A new filing in a lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 victims against the government of Saudi Arabia alleges that al-Qaeda had significant, indeed decisive, state support for its attacks. Officials of the Saudi government, the plaintiffs’ attorneys contend, formed and operated a network inside the United States that provided crucial assistance to the first cohort of 9/11 hijackers to enter the country. … They allege that Saudi officials—most notably Fahad al-Thumairy, an imam at a Los Angeles mosque and an accredited diplomat at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in that city, and Omar al-Bayoumi, who masqueraded as a graduate student but was identified by the FBI as an intelligence operative—were not rogue operators but rather the front end of a conspiracy that included the Saudi embassy in Washington and senior government officials in Riyadh. The article reports that if Thumairy and Bayoumi were the front end of the support network for the hijackers, “their control officers in the U.S. would have been in Washington at the Saudi embassy.” In April 2023, a California judge threw out the life-without-parole sentences handed down to three gang members convicted of murder -- because of their race. The judge did not find specific flaws in the handling of their cases but ruled that their sentences should be invalidated because allegedly race-based sentencing disparities had occurred in the past in Contra Costa County. Heather Mac Donald reports that Golden State residents should brace for more such rulings: The Racial Justice Act, passed in 2020 without meaningful public review, turns long-standing academic tropes about implicit bias and white privilege into potent legal tools. And the floodgates are about to open. Starting this year, the RJA allows anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge retroactively his conviction and sentencing on the ground of systemic racial bias. The Racial Justice Act operationalizes the proposition that every aspect of the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. But according to the act’s legislative authors, it’s too hard to prove such bias in the case of individual arrests and prosecutions. Therefore, the act does away with the concept of individual fault and individual proof. From now on, statistics about past convictions are sufficient to invalidate a present trial or sentence. In a separate article, the Los Angeles Times reports that a California nonprofit recently secured $3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy “to purchase 650 acres of a former logging forest north of Lake Tahoe. It will be a haven for experienced Black outdoor lovers and novices alike. … The property will be a small-business incubator too. The nonprofit intends to help Black and brown entrepreneurs develop sustainable, outdoor-oriented ventures such as hiking excursions — fostering generational wealth in the process.” A recent survey of college students by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression echoes earlier findings linking self-identified liberals with poorer mental health. This article, reported by FIRE president George Lukianoff and Andrea Lan, found: 57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students. … Only 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students. There also appears to be a more rapid rise in students experiencing poor mental health as they move left. The percentage of non-binary students with poor self-reported mental health rises 18 points as they move from moderate to very liberal. The percentage point gap for moderate non-binary students to very conservative non-binary students is only 4%, suggesting that there is a more rapid decline in self-reported mental health as students move further to the left — a pattern that is not seen in students as they move further to the right. In a separate article, the Daily Signal reports that a study published last month which evaluated patient data from nearly 60 U.S. health care organizations, comprising millions of patients, concluded that “Individuals who underwent gender-affirming surgery had a 12.12-fold higher suicide attempt risk than those who did not.” The article reports: The findings are in line with the conclusions of numerous other studies. For example, research published in the journal BMJ Mental Health earlier this year found that gender-transition procedures such as hormone drugs and surgeries have “not been shown to reduce even suicidal ideation, and suicidal ideation is not equal to actual suicide risk.” Hundreds of thousands of miles of underwater fiber-optic cables carry almost all the world’s international internet traffic. Dozens of lines lace the Pacific Ocean floor, shuttling data between the Americas, Asia and many island chains. This article reports that U.S. officials are privately warning telecommunications companies that these undersea cables could be vulnerable to tampering by Chinese repair ships: The warnings highlight an overlooked security risk to undersea fiber-optic cables, according to these officials: Silicon Valley giants, such as Google and Meta Platforms, partially own many cables and are investing in more. But they rely on specialized construction and repair companies, including some with foreign ownership that U.S. officials fear could endanger the security of commercial and military data. … Underwater cables are vulnerable to tampering when they are brought to the surface for repairs, U.S. officials say. Tapping global data flows is still far easier on land, industry experts say. But at-sea repair could still offer an opportunity to install a device to remotely disable a cable or to study the technology in advanced signal repeaters installed by other companies. |
