Americans are used to handouts for favored groups. Affirmative action in university admissions, corporate “diversity” initiatives, and minority-owned contracting requirements direct opportunities, resources, and contracts to supposedly “oppressed” groups, such as women, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics.

In California, state Democrats have embraced another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.

The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.

In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.

Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.

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In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”

By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.

This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.

Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay-certification letters from the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As NGLCC states on its website, “Certification is a journey, not a destination.”

Mary Ann Horton has experienced this “journey” firsthand. Horton, an early internet pioneer credited with helping develop the e-mail attachment, is a white male who “transitioned” and is now married to a woman. Horton’s company, Red Ace, is registered in California as a woman- and LGBT-owned business.

The application process, Horton told City Journal, required “a mess of documentation.” To prove that Red Ace was “lesbian-owned,” Horton sent Supplier Clearinghouse a domestic-partner affidavit. To establish that the business was woman-owned, Horton submitted a birth certificate, which had been reissued in Washington State post-“transition.” To prove transgender status, Horton filed a “therapist carry-letter,” a document from a medical professional certifying transgender identity.

These designations came with perks. After Red Ace secured these labels, Horton said, San Diego Gas & Electric brought the company on as a part-time cybersecurity contractor. During the hiring process, Horton told us, a company official said that being on the diversity list made the contract much easier to secure.

“If I was a straight, white male, I might be concerned I don’t have the same opportunity,” Horton said. “It worked out great for me.”

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LGBT-owned companies in California play other roles. In 2022, SDG&E spent $8.6 million, or 0.36 percent of procurement, on LGBT businesses, apparently including one that produced a training video on supplier diversity. “Never fear when your Ambassador for Excellence is here,” an animated character says in the video. “I can show you exactly how to source diverse vendors.” Other certified LGBT businesses in California include a sign-language interpreter, a kombucha maker, and a “coaching” firm whose services include a “series” to help people “manage” their feelings about “[t]he latest election cycle.”

In California, preferential public contracting is technically illegal. In 1996, voters approved Proposition 209, which banned the state from granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, education, and contracting. More than two decades later, in 2020, they rejected an effort to repeal the ban.

CPUC’s arm-twisting regulations violate the spirit of the law. The commission lists several specific “goals” for utilities’ contracting rates: 15 percent to minority-owned firms; 5 percent to women-owned firms; 1.5 percent to disabled-veteran-owned firms; and, most recently, 1.5 percent to LGBT-owned firms. It claims that these goals are not a “requirement” or “quota.” In practice, however, the agency cajoles utilities into compliance by requiring them to collect extensive demographic data, submit detailed annual reports, list their plans for increasing procurement from favored groups, and explain “any circumstances that may have resulted in not meeting” their procurement “goals.”

Despite the commission’s efforts, however, utilities and businesses don’t seem interested in LGBT certification. Large utilities’ procurement with LGBT-owned businesses decreased by 5 percent in 2024. Supplier Clearinghouse lists 3,750 Minority Business Enterprises, but only 451 LGBT-certified firms.

CPUC did not respond to our request for comment by deadline.

The state imposed these rules based on the view that government spending should not merely purchase goods and services, but should also engineer social outcomes. Under this framework, buying a hammer from a firm owned by a black transgender lesbian has more social value than buying the same hammer from a firm owned by a straight white man.

But Californians don’t need an energy system delivered by gay contractors; they need an energy system that works. Utility regulators should be in the business of regulating utilities, not verifying contractors’ sexual preferences. Companies should award contracts based on competence, quality, and cost—not the sexuality of the business owners.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Austen Hufford is a senior investigative reporter at City Journal.

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On Election Night, I was fairly certain that Spencer Pratt would make it into the runoff in the Los Angeles mayoral race, although I did add the caveat that while it appeared likely, it was not a foregone conclusion. There was always the possibility that the late votes would come in in a way that was unfavorable to Pratt—the only right-of-center candidate in the race. Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. Pratt has now been knocked out of the race, so incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a former communist revolutionary organizer, will advance to the general election against the socialist, anti-police city councilwoman Nitya Raman.

Calling the outcome disappointing doesn’t do it justice; many on the Right, myself included, expected Pratt to advance to the general election against Bass and spend the next several months laying out the stark choice facing Angelenos: chaos or order, drug-ridden homeless encampments or law enforcement, strong policing or rampant crime. So, when the result became clear, the narrative on the Right immediately went to election fraud. In particular, there were claims—backed up by some interviews with homeless people—that left-wing activists and nonprofits were harvesting votes from Skid Row.

Seeing all of this in the discourse, this week I sent one of our City Journal reporters out to Skid Row to ask people precisely that question: Have you seen activists come through? Have they offered you money? Have you seen any evidence of vote-buying or vote-harvesting schemes?

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Last year, in the aftermath of Los Angeles’s devastating wildfires, California Governor Gavin Newsom promised to speed up “critical” wildfire-prevention projects. Newsom issued an emergency proclamation to “cut bureaucratic red tape” and “fast-track critical projects,” including brush clearance, forest thinning, prescribed burning, and other forms of fuels reduction.

“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said last spring. “[W]e’re going to get them done.”

We filed a public records request to discover whether Newsom is keeping his word. As of last month, the Newsom administration had fast-tracked fuels-reduction work on roughly 87,000 acres of land. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres—less than 1 percent.

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These numbers are disastrous. The governor’s office insisted that these projects, which are part of the state’s larger wildfire-prevention efforts, were “critical” and would help “protect communities from catastrophic wildfire.” The documents we obtained, which concern the fast-tracked projects, reveal that the Newsom administration has failed to protect the state.

What has put so much of California at risk to burn? In part, the state’s environmental rules. In California, fuels-reduction projects typically require environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Under standard CEQA review, a vegetation-management project typically requires an initial study, an Environmental Impact Report, a public comment period, alternatives analysis, and agency certification. That process can take several months for simple projects and a year or more for complex ones.

Newsom’s emergency proclamation provided a way for certain projects to bypass this CEQA process but limited the exemption to small projects of no more than 3,000 acres. The application window expired last month. Now, despite the governor’s declaration of war against “red tape,” it seems that the red tape won.

The same story is unfolding around the state. In the San Ramon Valley, east of San Francisco, the local fire district recently sought to conduct wildfire mitigation work on California State Parks land in areas that the state itself classifies as “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.” The local district had developed a mitigation plan, secured local funding, and was ready to start working.

But according to the district, California State Parks imposed “regulatory and procedural barriers” that slowed and narrowed the project, including restrictions on treating protected manzanita species, mandatory cultural and habitat monitoring, and oversight fees. As a result, the district says that it was able to complete wildfire mitigation work on only 22 of the 300 acres planned—and wasted about 75 percent of the project budget on state-mandated compliance costs.

The Newsom administration suggested that the fast-track initiative would avoid such catastrophic failures. Earlier this year, the governor’s office announced that California had approved more than 300 expedited wildfire-safety projects in 300 days. This might sound impressive, but a closer examination reveals the ruse: approved projects include a 0.24-acre tree-pruning project near Camp Nelson; a 0.36-acre project that will fell trees near Thousand Oaks; and a six-acre effort to manage vegetation along a transmission line in Sonoma County.

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And as we have seen, approved projects are not the same as completed projects. Despite stacking the list with small projects, only about 13 percent had been completed as of last month.

We sent a comment request to the governor’s office, which directed us to the California Natural Resources Agency. Using updated data, an agency spokesperson told us that the state had “fast-tracked approval of over 400 projects, across nearly 100,000 acres,” and claimed that about half of those projects, “spanning over 35,000 acres,” were either “underway or completed.” When we pressed CNRA about the acreage total, another official admitted that only “798 footprint acres” had been completed, and that the agency couldn’t “anticipate how much progress” had been made on the rest. After we sent our first comment request, Newsom’s office published a press release about the emergency declaration and related actions, which didn’t mention how many fast-track acres had been completed.

The fundamental role of government is to ensure the physical safety of its people. In fire-prone California, that means allocating enough resources to reduce extreme fire risk and making sure approved mitigation work is completed. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, the state budget has increased by $106 billion. Yet funding for wildfire and forest programs—brush clearing, thinning, prescribed burning—has fallen, from a peak of $1.1 billion in 2022 to $620 million in 2026. Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year, a record $349 billion, would reduce wildfire and forest funding even further, to $457 million.

Newsom’s actions are reckless and ideological. The state has funded solar panels and sex-change procedures for illegal immigrants but cannot be bothered to protect its residents from recurring wildfires. As the summer heats up, California residents should remember: Newsom’s priorities have left them more vulnerable than ever.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

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This week was the California primary election, and it was a relatively good night for Republicans. In the governor’s race, Steve Hilton made it through to the runoff. Spencer Pratt, the reality television star-turned-political bomb thrower, looks likely to also make it through to compete against incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass in the general election.

I say “looks likely” because we don’t know for sure yet. California is still counting votes. As of this writing—three days after the election—only about 64 percent of votes in the L.A. mayor’s race and 60 percent of votes in the gubernatorial race have been counted.

Many Republicans, including President Trump, have voiced indignation and suspicion that, once again, California is counting votes and reporting results at a rate worse than a Third World country. They are justified in being suspicious. We’ve seen this phenomenon play out before, from Seattle to elections across the Golden State. We’ll have election-night returns in which the sensible candidate is leading by five or ten points, and then a few weeks or a month later, when all the ballots are counted, the far-Left candidate somehow comes out on top by a narrow margin.

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It’s 3 a.m. in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and an all-night, drug-fueled party has been raging for hours. The sidewalks are littered with trash and human feces. Addicts huddle in the alleys, inhaling fentanyl fumes through plastic straws; others are slumped over, barely conscious. Makeshift homeless encampments line block after block.

Dealers are everywhere. On the street corners, groups of men dressed in dark hoodies and face masks sell drugs. These are the “Hondos,” migrants from Honduras who have taken over the San Francisco drug trade. Night after night, they turn the Tenderloin into a lucrative, open-air drug market.

For this City Journal investigation, we spent three days and nights in the Tenderloin, talking to addicts, journalists, cops, and the dealers themselves. We discovered that the city’s progressive policies have allowed foreign drug gangs to take over an entire neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, poisoning the down-and-out and bringing Third World conditions to one of America’s wealthiest cities.

In the Tenderloin, the Hondos rule.

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If you’re looking to score hard drugs on the streets of San Francisco, the Hondos are your best bet. In 2022, former San Francisco mayor London Breed seemed to admit as much in a radio interview, saying that “a lot” of the city’s drug dealers were Honduran. Her comments sparked a wave of backlash from Latino activists, with one local group denouncing the remarks as “xenophobic and racist.” Soon after, Breed was pressured into issuing a public apology.

But Breed was right. Gangs of migrants, primarily from Honduras and supplied by Mexican cartels, run the fentanyl trade in San Francisco. In 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hondurans had “taken over the sale of [fentanyl]” in the city’s “[open-air markets].” Last year, an article in the Harvard Law Review stated that “nearly all” low-level fentanyl and meth dealers prosecuted as part of a federal sentencing program were “Honduran men without legal status in the United States.”

JJ Smith is a lifelong San Francisco resident and the owner of a café in the Tenderloin. A few years ago, his older brother died from a fentanyl overdose. Ever since, Smith has dedicated himself to documenting life in the Tenderloin and doing what he can to help get addicts into treatment. He says that, while the Tenderloin has always had problems, the situation is worse than ever. He also confirmed what we’d heard from more than a dozen drug users: the Hondos run the corners.

“I know they Hondos because I’ve been seeing them out here for a while,” Smith said. “I know what they tag on the wall. I know what they speak. And I know where they say they from and what they call themselves. They always dressed with the hoods on in the nighttime, with the masks on . . . . Hustling. Selling they drugs, selling fentanyl.”

In 2023, Smith said that he saw a group of Hondos selling drugs in front of a school. He approached them and told them they couldn’t sell there. In response, Smith said, he was jumped by three men. During the ensuing brawl, he was twice hit with a machete—once on the top of his head, and once on his right hand and wrist.

“After it was over, everybody stopped, and that’s when I start seeing the blood coming down my face,” Smith said. “I had a split head.”

That same year, Smith says he saw a “Hondo” hack another man to death with a machete. “I also seen the Hondurans hack another individual with a machete until they killed him,” Smith said. “And you know what? The same Honduran I seen hack him with that machete that killed the guy . . . he’s still, right now, probably going to be on the same corner tonight.”

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On our last night in the Tenderloin, we studied a Honduran crew peddling drugs at the corner of 6th Street and Market. Homeless addicts clustered around them as they processed a steady stream of hand-to-hand sales. As we learned, these crews are well-organized. This one had a shot caller, multiple dealers, two spotters stationed a half-a-block down the street, and a homeless drug mule who held onto the product.

As we approached the crew, one of the Hondos—a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties and, according to our translator, claimed to be from Puerto Rico but couldn’t answer basic questions about it and spoke with a Honduran accent—offered to sell us fentanyl. He stood on the sidewalk and nodded at us as we walked up, saying, “how much?” in between puffs on his cigar.

Further down the block, a second dealer offered to sell us “ISO,” or isotonitazene, a new drug up to nine times stronger than fentanyl. “How much you got?” he asked one of us. “I’ll give you a gram for $30.”

We also spoke with a dealer nicknamed “Cricket.” Cricket indicated that he was a Mexican national who had illegally crossed into the United States three years ago. “In five minutes, I was already on the other side,” he told our translator.

Now, Cricket claimed to work with the Hondos, selling small baggies of ISO on the sidewalk. He also suggested that Mexican cartels help relocate the Hondos to San Francisco, where they’re employed as foot soldiers in a multinational drug operation.

Soon after, a San Francisco police cruiser pulled up to the corner of 6th Street and Market. An officer parked the cruiser near a bus stop and flipped on its red and blue lights. Almost immediately, the dealers began to disperse, walking away down the sidewalk. After a few minutes, the officer turned off the lights and drove off, having never stepped out of the vehicle. Seconds later, the dealers turned around and set up shop at the corner again.

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Why is this happening? In short, because of San Francisco’s “progressive” policies. For years, the city has prioritized its “sanctuary” law that make deportations more difficult; relaxed drug enforcement, limiting arrests of dealers and users; and embraced “housing first” policies, which make cleaning up homeless encampments and coercing addicts into treatment nearly impossible. This crisis didn’t come from nowhere. It is the predictable result of deliberate choices.

In response to a public records request, the San Francisco Police Department provided City Journal with a copy of its policy on immigration enforcement. The document makes clear that officers are not allowed to “inquire into an individual’s immigration status” and cannot ask anyone to produce documents proving their status. Officers are barred, in many cases, from “assist[ing] in the enforcement of federal immigration laws” or honoring ICE detainer requests. In addition, illegal migrants prosecuted for drug dealing in California courts have been repeatedly released back onto San Francisco’s streets.

JJ Smith says he often speaks with city police officers who tell him these policies have demoralized the department: “That’s messing up the morale within the police department. They constantly arresting the same person over and over for the same thing . . . . They turn around and see that person right back out here doing the same thing . . . . It’s like there’s no accountability.”

Predictably, San Francisco’s permissive drug culture, and the tolerance it showed to illegal aliens peddling poison, helped drive an explosion of overdose deaths. In 2023, San Francisco’s overdose-death rate was more than double the national average. Between 2020 and 2025, an estimated total of 4,087 people died of overdoses in the city, with many of those deaths clustered in the Tenderloin.

By 2023, then-Mayor Breed had declared a state of emergency and reached out to the federal government for help. In August of that year, the All Hands on Deck initiative began, a new partnership between federal, state, and city officials to crack down on fentanyl dealing. The initiative saw the federal government step in to prosecute low-level street dealers in the Tenderloin. It also included fast-track sentencing, which can result in a “reduced sentence in return for a quick plea and waiver of procedural rights.” In theory, this arrangement would enable officials to bypass the city’s sanctuary law and deport undocumented criminals quickly.

This policy might sound like progress, but some evidence suggests that the Honduran criminal networks view the initiative more as a get-out-of-jail free card than a serious threat to their operations.

So far, there have been a handful of cases of Hondurans deported for drug offenses but who quickly return to San Francisco and allegedly resume criminal activity. In 2023, Jairo Mendoza Erazo, a Honduran, was deported after pleading guilty to a fentanyl charge. By early 2024, he was back in San Francisco, and was later arrested again, allegedly in possession of both cocaine and heroin. In another case, Anderson Medina was arrested and deported in 2023 after he and an accomplice were allegedly found with more than 350 grams of fentanyl. In 2025, he was reportedly arrested again—two blocks from the site of his arrest two years earlier in San Francisco.

“It is too soon to tell whether these are individual recidivists or reflect a larger trend,” wrote the Harvard Law Review. “Nevertheless, they lend credence to fears that a ‘free trip home with no prison time’ is inadequate deterrence.”

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When Daniel Lurie ran for mayor in 2024, he promised to restore order to a city that had become an international symbol of disorder and decline. Since taking office in January 2025, Lurie has embraced tougher enforcement, reduced the level of visible homeless encampments, and pursued increased cooperation between local and federal officials. But as our reporting makes clear, Lurie’s reforms do not go far enough.

San Francisco has devoted significant resources to homelessness, addiction, public health initiatives, and street outreach. Meantime, police, prosecutors, and federal agents have targeted low-level dealers, as well as the larger trafficking networks that supply them. But for these efforts to succeed, the city must remove the policies that created the crisis from the books.

Lurie cannot simultaneously wage war on the Tenderloin’s open-air drug markets and preserve the policies that make it difficult to detain and deport drug dealers. Nor can he claim victory when a handful of corners are temporarily cleared but the wider market remains undisturbed. As long as San Francisco remains a place where you can sell fentanyl with minimal consequences, the open-air drug markets in the Tenderloin—and all the human misery they bring—will endure.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesman for Lurie’s office said that “unsheltered homelessness is at its lowest level in 15 years and April had the lowest number of overdose deaths since the city started tracking in 2020.’”

The test for Lurie is whether he is willing to move beyond half-measures and confront the progressive political orthodoxies that have allowed this problem to fester for so long. That will require not only sustained policing and prosecutions but also rolling back the sanctuary city protections that have allowed foreign drug gangs to poison people in San Francisco with impunity.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. Jonathan Choe is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a journalist.

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Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Trump-endorsed and MAGA-aligned candidate, defeated moderate incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Republican U.S. Senate primary. Now, we’re preparing for the final round in November: Paxton against James Talarico, a progressive state representative who has become a left-wing icon.

In last week’s newsletter, I discussed how recent primaries are solidifying the thesis that Trump remains the big dog in Republican politics. He can singlehandedly knock out entrenched GOP incumbents. The president and his MAGA movement, contrary to the wishcasting of many pundits, retains their consolidated grip on the Republican Party.

What makes the president’s continued political dominance interesting is that, for any other presidency, this is very late in the game to still be exerting this type of control. We’re already halfway through Trump’s second term; George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not have this sort of sway in their second-term midterms. But I think Trump’s residual influence is a healthy development, because the reality is in safe Republican states—from Texas to Utah—the local political establishments produce these awful moderate Republicans that are weak on the Right’s core issues and don’t get anything important done.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom has allocated millions of dollars to a program that funds Native American “food sovereignty,” owl counting, and “cultural burns,” in which tribal groups use traditional fire techniques to clear brush from the landscape and preserve their “close kinship” with plants, animals, and “other natural relatives.”

Since 2023, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, has awarded $24 million to tribal groups and other nonprofits as part of its “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program. The man effectively overseeing the program, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, believes that California was founded on a “state-sanctioned policy of genocide” and that the state has pursued “decades of land dispossession, discrimination, and disconnection.” The Newsom administration, he said, was making progress in returning the land to the “leadership of California Native American tribes.”

As part of this commitment to “cultural burning,” California has created separate fire-certification processes for nontribal and tribal populations. White, black, Latino, and Asian fire bosses must receive technical certifications, including a 40-hour burn-boss course and, in some cases, a federal certificate. “Cultural fire practitioners,” by contrast, are certified through simple tribal recognition that a person has “substantial experience” burning for cultural purposes.

The “cultural burns” themselves follow various rituals. Some begin with drumming, sage burning, and a prayer. Attendees sometimes go around in a circle, introducing themselves to the land. In the words of Ron Goode, chief of the North Fork Mono Tribe, the land listens to the incantations, and the intention is “to make sure that everything on the landscape—Mother Earth, Creator, everybody—understands why we’re there and what we’re there for.”

Then the burning begins. One tribal member uses a traditional elderberry fire stick instead of a modern lighter. Some use dry branches and cottonwood bundles as kindling. In the words of one tribal chief, “Fire gives life to the land, and everyone benefits from this living spirit.”

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While some of the “resiliency” funding has gone toward what appear to be legitimate fire-management projects, a careful examination of the state grant information reveals that much of the program operates as a slush fund for the tribes.

In recent years, CalFire has awarded grants that have dubious fire-management benefits: $1 million for a grant that will help a tribe provide “forest-themed ingredients” to tribe-owned restaurants; $599,000 for another to help renovate land for use as a Native American summer camp; $166,000 to one that will pay for “[t]ribal staff and members” to observe spotted owl nests; $746,000 to one supporting a tribe’s “food sovereignty” and “Fire-Centered Climate Action Plan”; and $521,000 to one that will help a tribe maintain “close kinship” with plants, animals, and “other natural relatives such as water and fire.”

In 2022, California projected that tribes, “cultural fire practitioners,” and others would conduct 25,000 acres of prescribed burning annually by 2025. The state has not released any data on the tribes’ progress, and some tribal leaders apparently insist on keeping the fires small. As Ron Goode explained, “We never burn anything bigger than a big beaver hut.”

For Butte County’s Maidu Indians, the cultural burn initiative seems less about fire management and more about soliciting state funds for cultural programs. “Cultural fire has a lot of cultural aspects to it,” said tribal member Magan Herrera. “We’re burning deergrass for basketry, not necessarily for wildfire resilience, right? But it does have both of those worlds.”

In a video released by CalFire, it appeared that a white man started the process of burning a small lot of land and tribal members later joined in. “We actually learned a lot with this grant,” said one tribal member on the work crew. “When we first started, we really didn’t understand. We thought it was just cutting down trees and piling and burning, but really it was much more.”

While any group is entitled to preserve its heritage, taxpayers are not obligated to subsidize it. California Democrats have sought to mask their handouts to the tribes as a public good, but these are reckless expenditures for a fiscally strained state, with massive risks. The dry season is approaching—and California politicians are playing with fire.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Austen Hufford is a senior investigative reporter at City Journal.

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Governor Gavin Newsom has dismissed fossil fuels as “alternative energy,” and wants to power California with, among other things, the sun. Through extensive mandates and extra energy costs for non-solar consumers, the Newsom administration has directed billions to building solar energy capacity.

The centerpiece of this initiative is the Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing (SOMAH) program. SOMAH began under Governor Jerry Brown, who signed legislation requiring a state commission to apportion up to $100 million a year from California’s cap-and-trade program to pay for the installation of solar panels on apartment buildings in poor areas. Since then, California has devoted nearly $900 million to SOMAH, which the state hoped would create 300 megawatts of power by 2030 and advocates envisioned would create a million solar-using renters.

The results have been disastrous. Since 2015, the program has installed or reserved only 129 megawatts of solar power for approximately 65,600 residents—nowhere close to the target of 1 million “solar renters.”

What happened? First, incompetence. For a decade, businesses and utilities have been forced to buy emissions credits, and while the state has lavished nearly $900 million on SOMAH, administrators designed the program so poorly that they have paid out only $131 million for solar installation.

As the program’s largest contractor admitted in a draft audit, potential customers were turned off by the paperwork, bureaucracy, and red tape. “Initially, we found housing owners excited about the program,” the contractor said, “but after a long and laborious process, they are much less enthusiastic.”

That is an understatement. From the beginning, the SOMAH program has been plagued by delays and cancellations. More than 400 applications have wound up cancelled or withdrawn, or about a third of the total. On average, projects take three and a half years to make it through the program’s gauntlet of paperwork and inspections.

Some projects have been fully installed—only to sit idle for a year or more waiting for permission to begin operating. As a result, more than $700 million of the program’s budget remains unspent. In other words, California can’t even give away a heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, product.

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These failures do not mean, however, that no one is profiting. The managers of the SOMAH program have spent about $60 million on overhead, including salaries, conferences, website development, and more. And, as part of that budget, they have devoted at least $5.5 million to “community-based organizations” (CBOs), most of which are left-wing nonprofits that, in one case, labeled giving solar panels to low-income housing residents a way to fight “racial injustice.”

Under the guise of marketing and outreach, SOMAH paid more than $163,000 to the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). Vivian Yi Huang, the group’s co-director, extolled the need to “fight against the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism of the extractive economy.” The organization called for Richmond, California to “Defund the Police and Invest in Black Lives” and is a member of the Defund Police Coalition in Oakland, California.

California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) told supporters that it “led in the creation” of SOMAH. Officials awarded it $230,000. The nonprofit wants the “democratization” of “land, labor, and resources” to “reverse the long course of environmental racism, the climate crisis, and colonialism.”

CEJA uses aggressive language to support its apparent goal of banning oil. “What’s at stake is our very survival,” its then-executive director said in 2021. “We must make the transition to 100 percent clean energy and bring all communities along to avoid a devastating climate apartheid.”

The group’s political arm, CEJA Action, endorses candidates and publishes voter guides as it “builds the political power of communities of color to advance environmentally and socially just policies.”

While APEN and CEJA no longer partner with the state, one of the active CBOs, Communities for a Better Environment, is no less radical. Last year, the group demanded the immediate release of everyone who was detained in immigration raids in California. “[T]here is no environmental justice without migrant justice,” the group wrote. “[W]e stand in solidarity with migrant, low-income, queer and trans, and people of color.”

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Have these groups delivered results? No.

In 2023, a state-contracted auditor interviewed some CBOs. It found that they were only “responsible for a handful of submitted applications.” This year’s draft audit noted an “inverse relationship” between new applications and spending on these groups.

The other main beneficiary of the SOMAH program is a San Francisco-based corporation called Sunrun Inc., which bills itself as the country’s largest solar provider and has been the contractor for 78 percent of all SOMAH projects. The company has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates—including $50,000 to Gavin Newsom’s campaigns—and has employed an army of lobbyists in Sacramento.

Newsom, in turn, has packed his administration with former Sunrun employees. The governor appointed the company’s public policy manager to the California Energy Commission and appointed its former chief policy officer to a regional water quality control board. In recent years, Sunrun representatives have met with government regulators’ offices to discuss SOMAH, including last December, when the company supported efforts to expand the program.

SOMAH and Sunrun did not respond to requests for comment.

California’s infrastructure projects seem always to fall short. SOMAH shows why. Liberal nonprofits help pass sweeping climate laws and receive money from the programs those laws create. In turn, those groups use their expanded influence to push for still more mandates and spending. The laws finance the activists, the activists demand more laws, and the cycle feeds itself—and helps well-connected firms, like Sunrun, collect new contracts.

Meantime, Californians increasingly think solar isn’t worth the headache. As one property owner told auditors, it’s “hard to justify poking a whole bunch of holes in your roof all over the place, just for a small amount of benefit.”

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Austen Hufford is a senior investigative reporter at City Journal.

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California is spending millions of dollars on a program that provides free solar panels, refrigerators, and windows to “low-income” farmworkers, including illegal immigrants.

The initiative, called the Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program, is part of California’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” system, which taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes—all under the banner of fighting “climate change.”

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Since 2019, California’s government has earmarked $49 million for the farmworker program, which operates through an opaque web that includes a government agency, nonprofit providers, and private contractors. California’s Department of Community Services and Development selected La Cooperativa Campesina de California, a nonprofit that serves farmworkers, to administer the program. La Cooperativa, in turn, has partnered with a for-profit, “minority owned” company, MAROMA Energy Services, to help run the program. Contractors do the work of installing solar panels and other appliances.

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

“We only require an ID,” Velores said. “It doesn’t need to be from this state, or [the] United States.”

Beneficiaries work hard to loop laborers into the system. A contractor for John Harrison Contracting—a California-based “Minority Business Enterprise” and Farmworker Housing Component subcontractor—would drive “hundreds of miles a day” across Southern California, trying to persuade farmworkers to sign up for the program, Inside Climate News previously reported. One challenge was to convince workers that the program was not a scam. The other challenge, after the Trump administration increased ICE raids, was finding potential clients, many of whom “stopped showing up to job sites.”

We spoke with MAROMA customer service representative Ángel Quintanilla, who confirmed that the company had provided solar panels for illegal immigrants. “You don’t need to have documentation,” Quintanilla said. “They ask for their pay stub and a form of their income and, of course, the gas and the electricity bill.”

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Despite a $49 million budget and nearly seven years of operation, the farmworker “weatherization” program has only provided services to about 2,000 families. That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services—a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability.

One problem: the same man, Mauricio Blanco, seems to be connected to entities at multiple stages in the flow of funds. Blanco worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for “weatherization” services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work. He acknowledged but did not address our request for comment.

We sent the California Department of Community Services an extensive list of questions for this story. A spokesman told us that the Farmworker Housing Component helps “vulnerable and disadvantaged communities” keep their homes temperate year-round, has saved the equivalent of more than 20,000 metric tons of carbon, and “contributes to the state’s climate investment and priority population goals.” He did not deny that the program had funded services for illegal immigrants.

California’s political leaders initially pitched the cap-and-trade program, and initiatives like low-income farmworker weatherization, as a way to fight “climate change.” In reality, however, these programs seem designed to do something else: keep the cash flowing through the state’s web of government agencies, nonprofit providers, and private contractors. Installing solar panels on some 2,000 homes will do almost nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—but it will line the pockets of a few connected people who know to repeat the platitudes and pull the levers of power.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Austen Hufford is a senior investigative reporter at City Journal.

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The big news this past week was out of Kentucky. U.S. Representative Thomas Massie, the onetime libertarian gadfly and now podcast-style critic of Israel and the “Epstein class,” lost in a primary to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL endorsed by President Trump and AIPAC.

The big takeaway with Massie’s bruising defeat is that Trump is still the big dog. The president can still knock out members of his own party with relative ease—even people, like Massie, who have long held their own against tough challengers and who have developed national brands. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has not slipped.

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Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions in city and county spending, L.A.’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs, and feces. City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly,…

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In May 2023, I published an exclusive whistleblower report chronicling the secret child sex-change program at Texas Children’s Hospital. Despite having promised to cease performing such procedures—which involved puberty blockers and surgical procedures on children as young as eleven—TCH continued engaging in transgender therapies and operations on confu…

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This week there was an explosive story in the New York Times by longtime columnist Nick Kristof, who traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories and assembled a very long piece accusing the Israeli government of systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

As part of his allegations, Kristof writes that Israeli prison officials have been training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. These are very serious claims—both because of their horrific nature and because they are being made in the most important newspaper in the world. Kristof recounts the testimony of one of the Palestinian prisoners:

On one occasion, [the prisoner] said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”

Is this true? First, it’s worth noting that every sentence is hedged with “he said,” meaning that Kristof and his editors are very careful, knowing that this is going to be a highly explosive story and they are writing defensively. Kristof carefully distances himself from the allegations he’s making—he always characterizes them as claims made by this Palestinian journalist or prisoner, rather than stating them as proven facts.

Second, if you follow the hyperlinks in the story, which, when you click through them, all redirect to human-rights organizations and activist groups that are mostly anti-Israel. Kristof later claimed that he read medical literature indicating that rape dogs were possible, but the cases he cited were, in fact, instances of human-initiated zoophilia. So, the sourcing on this—when you really boil it down and you take the activists out—is firsthand testimony from a single person who we have to believe is telling the truth, and not incidentally, might have a strong motivation to lie.

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Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has sought to transform its massive prison system into a Nordic-style rehabilitation program. Newsom has placed a moratorium on all executions, transferred condemned prisoners to facilities across the state, dismantled San Quentin State Prison’s death row, and turned the notorious prison into a therapeutic center,…

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This week, there’s quite a bit of news out of California.

For one, the race for mayor of Los Angeles is becoming increasingly contentious and high-profile. In addition, we saw a volatile gubernatorial debate, in which the Republican and Democratic candidates sparred among themselves on the various issues plaguing the state. And, of course, two Californians—Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris—are at the top of bookmakers’ lists for becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2028.

So, California really is at the center of things politically right now—both in terms of driving online discourse and as a window into what the Democrat political landscape might look like going into the next presidential election.

First, what’s going on in Los Angeles? The mayor’s race has come down to three candidates: Karen Bass, the incumbent ex-communist mayor; Nithya Rahman, a far-Left city councilwoman; and Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star and insurgent candidate who has campaigned on a tough-on-crime approach to the city’s problems with homelessness, drug abuse, and social disorder.

With Spencer Pratt, the obvious analogy is to Donald Trump. The question that both faced was similar: Is it really possible to turn a reality television career into a media-savvy campaign and a successful outsider political movement? Can you actually bridge that gap and become president of the United States, or, in this case, mayor of Los Angeles?

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an innocuous Muslim civil rights group—a reputation it reinforces with litigation and claims of anti-Muslim bigotry. But the group finds itself under increasing scrutiny for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott …

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Another week has brought another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. Why is this still happening? How have we become so habituated to left-wing violence that such an incident only dominates the news cycle for two or three days?

A grim feature of assassination attempts against President Trump is that you have to measure them on a scale of proximity to success. So, the Butler assassination attempt—in which Trump was shot in the ear—is, in that sense, more serious than the other botched attempts, including the most recent at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But even these comparatively less serious attempts still carry grave implications and are symbolic of a real problem. And if you stack up enough of them, it’s only a matter of time before more people get hurt.

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California once built massive infrastructure projects—dams, highways, and aqueducts—that were the marvel of the world. During the Great Depression, engineers erected the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget. But those days are over. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has been unable to complete, and hardly able to be…

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Sometimes it feels as though week after week brings bad news, but this past week, something happened that’s worth celebrating: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the infamous left-wing, anti-conservative smear machine, has been indicted by a grand jury and is now facing federal criminal charges.

The SPLC is famous for its “Hatewatch,” a list they maintain of supposedly hateful figures and groups on the Right. Some of these groups are legitimately bad—the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and other white nationalist groups—but others are completely mainstream right-wing organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Here’s what happened: Over the course of ten years, essentially since the emergence of the “alt right” in 2015 up until the beginning of Donald Trump’s second administration in 2025, the SPLC was allegedly pumping millions of dollars in donor funds through various shell corporations and sham entities to the precise organizations that they were putting on their “Hatewatch” list, including the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and some of the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.

In short, the SPLC was astroturfing, enabling, and funding the white nationalist movement, putting the white nationalist movement on its “Hatewatch” list, and then using the white nationalist movement’s supposed threat, which they were propping up, to fearmonger and fundraise from donors across the country. According to some reports, the SPLC now has about $1 billion in its war chest—an enormous sum, raised, in part, through deception.

This is a very powerful technique of the organized Left. They create phantasms of the radical Right, and then raise money, engage in activism, seek publicity, and attempt to shape political narratives and policy decisions based on phantasms that they themselves created. They use their self-created monsters as vehicles to lump normal right-wing actors—like me—into ugly, smear-by-association campaigns.

The SPLC’s tactics worked in the past because establishment conservatives at, say, universities or think tanks, didn’t want to go out on a limb and protect the more radical groups from the SPLC machine. That’s understandable in the case of groups like the KKK or American Nazi Party, which deserve no defense. But the SPLC’s strategy began to crack because its definition of hate became so expansive that it conflated the most unsavory characters with normal conservative intellectuals and activists. When they began conflating classical liberals and mainstream social conservatives with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the Right was finally able to push back.

When I was in the thick of the fight against critical race theory earlier this decade, I remember having some fear of the SPLC, because I had seen what had happened to others they had targeted in the past. I remember having this sense that when they began publishing defamatory articles about me, I had better fight back hard, because these people were trying to knock me off the board altogether—ruin my reputation and take away my ability to support my family.

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Former President Joe Biden’s administration oversaw an unprecedented wave of migration across the southwestern border of the United States. Migrants convoyed in “caravans” in hopes of overwhelming border authorities. Cartels trafficked drugs and people in droves. At some points, American authorities estimated that more than 130,000 people were crossing …

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