RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog. When the petite single mom made it back to her Utah home, she decided she needed a firearm for protection. A few months later, while living in what she described as a “shady part of town,” a homeless man threatened her. After that encounter, she began regularly carrying a firearm under Utah’s Constitutional Carry law. Coote, who just graduated this spring from the University of Utah, says carrying the gun has...

There’s hardly a ruler in the world who would identify as fascist, but if you trust the mainstream media, you will assume fascism is on the march. Mentions of the term have skyrocketed ever since Donald Trump emerged from the land of chandeliers; fascist mentions on cable reached unprecedented levels in the run-up to the 2024 election. Now, almost anything Trump does – from cracking down on illegal immigration to proposing construction of a victory arch – is seen by the Washington Post and others as fascist. Tellingly, the term has not just been...

In what they hope will become a hot-button election issue in the November midterms, congressional Republicans unnerved by the spread of Islam are holding hearings and proposing legislation to prevent immigrants who adhere to “Sharia law” from entering or staying in the U.S.  The lawmakers, who have the backing of President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, warn that unless mass immigration from nations like Afghanistan and Somalia is curbed, America will soon look like Europe, where critics say waves of Muslim migrants have formed “parallel societies” that...

One of the areas where Sharia law appears to be making inroads into American society is through the U.S. financial system. Under Sharia, or Islamic, law, charging interest (“riba”) on loans or earning interest on deposits is forbidden for even observant Muslims living in America, a strange anachronism in a country where interest- and credit-based finance is a cornerstone of the economy. According to Sharia-compliant fatwas, or rulings, recently issued by the Fiqh Council of North America, Muslims are prohibited even from investing in the stocks of any companies whose...

Mary, a veteran Silicon Valley marketer who can’t find a job, considers herself a victim of an H-1B visa program run amok.  Her story, a U.S. native replaced by a foreign-born employee who is willing to work at a significantly lower wage, has become commonplace, particularly in the tech industry. Adding insult to injury, she says, her CEO, who hails from India, told her to train the man he selected to replace her before laying her off.  Despite stints at Google and Cisco and two years of job hunting, Mary can no longer compete in a job market saturated with foreign-born H-1B...

Update (May 22, 2026): Sociologist Melissa Wilde, the reform candidate for president of the American Sociological Association, lost her bid to lead the group.  Universities across the country are facing unprecedented government scrutiny of everything from the rise of antisemitism to the lack of viewpoint diversity in the left-leaning social sciences. Nowhere is the ideological battle over higher education more contentious and consequential than in Florida, home to the second-largest university system in the country. Florida’s crusade against progressivism has been more...

The Biden administration may have failed to convince Congress to double Medicaid spending on home healthcare in 2021, but the funding increase occurred anyway. An RCI analysis of federal data has found that spending on the program, which pays health aides and family members to act as caregivers for elderly and disabled adults, nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024, to $46.4 billion a year – an amount nearly identical to the $50 billion per year Biden wanted. As a result, American taxpayers paid more than $217 billion for home-based care under the program during that five-year...

BLUE MOUNDS, Wisc. – Ridglan Farms, a breeder of beagles for scientific experiments, has withstood attacks from the animal rights movement for years. Activists have broken into its buildings to document the conditions inside them, rescued some dogs, and pushed Wisconsin authorities to cite the company for animal abuse.  On April 30, Ridglan finally buckled to the public pressure, handing the movement against animal testing one of its biggest triumphs. Big Dog Rescue and the Center for a Humane Economy announced that the groups reached an agreement to purchase 1,500 beagles for...

The most familiar races between superpowers are those involving dreaded killer weapons, but today the U.S. and China are engaged in another one involving a centuries-old invention that also improves life: batteries. One year ago, the Chinese battery giant CATL announced that it had redefined the limits of electric cars by creating a battery that could power a vehicle for 320 miles on a 5-minute charge. And in March, the world’s largest EV maker, China’s BYD Auto, unveiled a car that could also be charged in less time than it takes to fill a traditional car with...

One of the beneficiaries of Virginia’s aggressive attempt to gerrymander the state for Democratic advantage could be a former federal prosecutor whose campaign for Congress hinges on his efforts to use the law to target President Trump and his supporters. When a slim majority of Virginia voters gave the legislature authority last month to create congressional districts that could give Democrats a 10-1 advantage, J.P. Cooney cheered the  outcome in a message on social media, boasting that the new district he was running in had been drawn “expressly for the...

In March 2020, a couple of months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, editors at the journal Nature Medicine appended a note to a coronavirus study it had published five years prior. “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered,” the journal editors wrote. “There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.” The...

Working at a 24/7 bodega in the heart of Brooklyn, Tajuken Deli employees are prepared for almost anything – except having guns pointed at their heads by cops. That’s what seemed to be happening one early April morning last year, when four armed men dressed in police uniforms flashed their badges, yelling “NYPD” as they stormed the neighborhood shop. Surveillance video shows one worker being quickly knocked to the ground and zip-tied into submission before being dragged to the back of the store. Another worker and customer were also subdued as the masked...

In the wee hours of Sunday, March 1, a Senegalese immigrant clad in a sweatshirt bearing the words “Property of Allah” opened fire outside an Austin, Texas beer garden, killing three and leaving 14 others wounded. On March 12, at Old Dominion University, a former Virginia National Guard member from Sierra Leone – released early from an 11-year prison sentence for attempting to provide material support to the ISIL – yelled “Allahu Akbar” before shooting and killing a beloved college professor and wounding two other people. The immigrant brother of a...

A former inspector general who fast-tracked a “whistleblower” complaint that led to the first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 knew the whistleblower was a registered Democrat and Joe Biden loyalist yet still determined his complaint was "a matter of urgent concern that appeared credible," according to newly declassified documents. The documents also reveal the anonymous whistleblower secretly met with the Democratic staff of former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff prior to submitting his complaint in August 2019. Yet under direct questioning, the...

Underneath the glaciers polar bears patrol along Alaska’s North Slope, the decayed bodies of their ancestors who trod there eons ago have left trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, an energy bonanza for the modern world. That jackpot reservoir has left present-day Alaskans puzzling over how to divide the booty: How much do we need to keep for ourselves, and how much can we export? The answers lie hundreds or even thousands of miles away, among lawmakers in Juneau, in oil and gas company executive suites in New York and Texas, and in capitals of potential buyers spread across the Asian...

The State of Texas has become as synonymous with crippling public school debt as it is with oil wells and tumbleweeds.  Its public schools have $148.3 billion in bond debt – the most of any state by far – that will eventually have to be repaid, along with an additional $88.3 billion in interest. For every dollar of borrowed money public schools use to improve education, they must give 59 cents to outside creditors, including large institutions such as Wells Fargo and State Farm, as well as hedge funds. This costly debt burden, which is lining the pockets of...

RealClearInvestigations (RCI) has announced a new grant program for investigative reporters. At a time when journalistic resources are contracting across the country, RealClear is encouraging reporters to apply for grants of $20,000 to fund deep-dive reporting projects. Grantees’ work will be published on RealClearInvestigations.com, the go-to hub for in-depth, longform reporting from across the web. RCI’s editor, J. Peder Zane, said the challenges journalism is facing now provide a great opportunity for news outlets that remain committed to fair, accurate, and consequential...

NEW ORLEANS, La.—Although they received millions of taxpayer dollars, it can be hard to find the offices of health service providers in the Big Easy.  Consider Faith and Hope of New Orleans, a home health agency that took in $11.6 million from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) between 2018 and 2024. The company’s website, as well as federal and state databases, lists its address at 3720 Gentilly Street.    But RealClearInvestigations only found an empty building at that location last week. Repeated phone calls during...

Carter Page wasn’t the only adviser from Trump’s first campaign wiretapped by the FBI. Walid Phares was electronically monitored for a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington-based FBI agent who was assigned to investigate him as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion probe. As in Page’s case, the bureau withheld evidence exonerating Phares from the court to secure surveillance authorization, according to newly declassified FBI documents. “I had no idea any of this was happening,” Phares told...