RealClearInvestigations Articles

All told, seven people died in connection with the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. But only Ashli Babbitt’s death was directly caused by violence that day. She was a rioter killed by a Capitol Police officer, who fired the only shot by any person during the 4½-hour siege. Yet the story of who he is and why he opened fire remains shrouded in mystery. Video by rioters shows the Capitol officer, top photo, carefully advancing, aiming and shooting Babbitt, above, as she tried to climb through a smashed window, Trump flag on her back. YouTube/National File Top Credit:...

Like every wrestling coach, Mike Schyck’s a lifer, beginning on a basement mat at age five, getting mauled by big brother Doug, both of them coached and drilled by their dad—himself a wrestler, of course. Mike’s in his early fifties now, a five-foot-ten brick in a navy-blue track suit. He kept wrestling, and winning titles, into his forties, at international meets in Europe. “Budapest and Sarajevo—everybody over there had cauliflower ear,” he says. “The grocery clerk, the female bank teller—everybody’s got cauliflower ear. Everybody was...

The big networks are again running defense for corrupt New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But instead of helping to cover up his nursing home deaths, they were ignoring claims of sexual harassment from a former aide. They also didn’t care to report on a rally of family members whose loved ones were killed by Cuomo’s order to put Covid-positive patients in nursing homes. Read Full Article  

How will the latest campaign against "misinformation" backfire for the country? Let's count the ways. Incredibly, Fox News may soon be the last line of defense against an all-out assault on the heterogenous free press as an institution, and people like me, who’ve despised the channel their whole lives, now find themselves in the unenviable position of having to defend the “Fair and Balanced” channel as a matter of self-preservation. The local and alternative presses are already dying, and tech platforms have already successfully asserted their rights to censor....

In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer. After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA. U.S. intelligence official Susan Gordon, top...

Appearing at a friendly CNN town hall event, President Joe Biden dropped a string of untruths on issues both large and small. One of the president’s most egregious falsehoods was the claim that “we didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office.” The first shot was administered back on Dec. 14, 2020. Glenn Kessler, lead fact-checker for The Washington Post, quickly jumped into action on Twitter, explaining that this was merely a “verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe, as he had already mentioned 50 million doses being available when he took office. Former...

It appeared to be a moment of triumph in the long, tumultuous story of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. In November, a federal judge sided with the HFPA — the tiny, 87-member group of international journalists that doles out the annual Golden Globe Awards — in dismissing a potentially damaging antitrust lawsuit. The suit was filed three months earlier by a Norwegian entertainment journalist who had been denied membership in the group. It had drawn widespread attention in Hollywood, where the HFPA wields outsize power as the arbiter of one of the entertainment industry’s...

Jared and Leanne are both from New Jersey; they are not strangers to extreme weather. Jared, who is in his early thirties, survived Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and he knew how apocalyptic life could get in the aftermath of a devastating storm. The couple even had a generator at the ready when their Northwest Austin apartment complex, Colonial Village at Quarry Oaks, lost power early Monday morning, and extra water when that stopped flowing later that day. And on Tuesday afternoon, when alarms started going off in their building, the couple sprang into action, fearing there was a gas leak or a...

The Lancet last week released a sweeping and much vaunted report on "public health and policy in the Trump era." Its first key finding is that Donald Trump "politicised" science, which "posed a uniquely urgent threat to health." The report, "Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era," offers a host of "science-led" proposals it claims would mitigate that threat, from the implementation of the Green New Deal and a complete ban on coal mining to higher taxes, cuts to defense spending, and Medicare for All. The list goes on: Repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits...

Last Labor Day, candidate Joe Biden made an impassioned pitch to leaders and members of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labor federation. Stressing that “the great American middle class was built by unions,” he jabbed his finger in the air for emphasis as he promised, “I’m going to be the strongest labor president you have ever had,” drawing a smile from his longtime ally and friend, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Biden on Labor Day: “I’m going to be the strongest labor president you have ever had.”  YouTube/PBS But Biden has...

Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures. President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday. And the television networks aren’t waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort. CBS is in a full-court press for gun control on its evening entertainment television shows. The bad guys are always white supremacists who use machine guns — supposedly AR-15s — to commit mass public shootings. Criminals in Mexico supposedly get machine guns from the United...

Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news. Many experts, along with politicians and journalists, are afraid to talk about herd immunity. The term has political overtones because some suggested the U.S. simply let Covid rip to achieve herd immunity. That was a reckless idea. But herd immunity is the inevitable result of viral spread and vaccination. When the chain of virus transmission has been broken in multiple places, it’s harder for it to spread—and that includes the new strains. Herd immunity has been well-documented...

Limbaugh, who died Wednesday, was not fringe. His views fit in the conservative mainstream. He idolized William F. Buckley Jr.  Limbaugh is Buckley without the accent, without the Yale credentials, without the sailboat and harpsichord. Quote: Bold, brash, divisive, funny, and amped up, President Trump's style is similar to a shock jockey's. His presidency is another reminder of Limbaugh's staying power. The American right has been molded in his anti-elitist, grassroots, demotic, irreverent, patriotic, hard-charging image. Rush Limbaugh is not just a broadcaster. He defines an era. Read...

Disney made a political spectacle out of firing Gina Carano. It did it to satiate the lusts of a fringe segment of toxic fandom that thrives on destroying others. Disney could not have handled the situation worse. And it will come to haunt them, sooner than they may be prepared for. Read Full Article 

Without Brian Sicknick having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, there were no deaths that day that could be attributed to deliberate violence by pro-Trump protesters. Quote: After the media bombarded Americans with this story for a full month without pause, it took center stage at Trump’s impeachment process. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted, the article of impeachment itself stated that “Trump supporters ‘injured and killed law enforcement personnel.’” The House impeachment managers explicitly claimed on page 28 of their...

Two more straphangers met their gruesome end on Gotham’s subways over the weekend, bringing the transit-murder total in just over a year to eight. Before 2020 and 2021, it took five years for eight murders to occur on transit — and that was with much higher ridership.  “The events of the last 24 hours are horrifying,” says acting New York City Transit boss Sarah Feinberg. Yes, indeed. The latest victims are a 44-year-old woman and an adult man, stabbed to death by an apparent stranger on two separate A trains. Two others were assaulted in the same 24 hours,...

Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning’ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele. Quote: Americans look at statistics and disparities and many think “there’s another explanation for inequality other than racism,” Mr. Steele [above] says. “Inequality may be the result of blacks not standing up to the challenges that they face, not taking advantage of the equality that has been bestowed on them.” He points to affirmative action and diversity—“the whole...

The FBI last month arrested Gang Chen, a well-known MIT nanotechnologist, and charged the China-born naturalized American with concealing close and lucrative connections to China's scientific and technological establishment on his applications for federal research grants. Charles Lieber, Harvard University: Allegedly was paid $50,000 a month in a program to recruit top scientists to China. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File) Chen, who has pleaded not guilty and is supported by MIT, is not the only prominent academic figure to be arrested and charged with failing to disclose...

These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven’t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone—but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of “the system,” and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty. Of course, America is not Soviet Russia, or, for that matter, Xi’s China. Our new political commissars don’t use torture, prison cells, and executions. Today’s woke ideology can be...