This week, our investigative team at City Journal published an exclusive story about Gavin Newsom providing free sex-change procedures to homeless illegal aliens. The story is so absurd that, at first glance, it might seem fake. But it’s completely real.

Here’s an excerpt from a conversation our reporter, Jonathan Choe, had with one of the transgender migrants living at a publicly funded homeless shelter in San Francisco:

CHOE: Were you able to get hormones?

MIGRANT: Yeah, I did that with my doctor.

CHOE: So, Medi-Cal, you got the breast implants?

MIGRANT: Yes.

CHOE: Wow. Taxpayer funded. So here, in California, they give you the breast implants here?

MIGRANT: Yes.

CHOE: Free?

MIGRANT: Yeah.

Jonathan Choe is an amazing reporter. He has a knack for bumbling into extreme situations and getting people talking. He actually went to a number of homeless shelters in San Francisco, and at each homeless shelter he found transgender migrants who told him very directly that they were there to get hormones, breast implants, and, as Jacqueline says, “bottom surgery.”

Bottom surgery, of course, is a euphemism for a procedure called a vaginoplasty. A vaginoplasty is the procedure by which a surgeon will castrate an adult male, carving up his penile tissue and inverting it into what is called a “neo-vagina.” It’s an incredibly disturbing procedure that often has heavy psychosexual undertones for the person seeking it out.

One of my main takeaways from what we uncovered is that the median California voter has placed himself in a completely submissive moral position relative to “oppressed groups.” The California voter will accept any moral demand, any moral imposition, any moral cost—and still not change his vote, because he thinks that if he doesn’t go along with the zeitgeist it means that he’s a “bad person.”

Consequently, California voters have essentially given a blanket ‘yes’ to being morally blackmailed by the layer of activists, administrators, and ideological fanatics within the California state government. With the voters’ acquiescence, the fanatics will concoct whatever bureaucracy or process is necessary to ensure that, in the end, the trans illegals are getting gender surgeries in San Francisco.

The inability of the median voter to stand up and say ‘Enough!’ is why California ends up providing taxpayer-funded vaginoplasties for illegals. In a hyper-feminized, consensus-seeking, offense-avoiding progressive political culture, there is no other option but to provide this boutique medical procedure for what are essentially the perfect avatars of the oppressed: trans homeless illegal aliens.

Newsom’s response to our reporting exemplified the emasculated nature of California’s political class. As the story was gaining traction—going viral on X, picking up attention on Fox News, driving conversation across the country—Newsom’s communications team doubled down and admitted that they were providing trans surgeries to illegal aliens as part of compassionate “care.”

It’s the ultimate ideological endpoint. The only thing they know how to do is mindlessly repeat the mantras and say “yes” to every new ideological fad. For the Left, transgender illegal aliens are the closest you can get to intersectional light-bringers. Catering to their every whim constitutes the fulfillment of the Left’s moral conscience. All moral questions must be deferred to them; no benefit can be denied to them.

What the American Right Can Learn from Viktor Orbán’s Loss in Hungary

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If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that my mission is ultimately never about merely reacting or responding to narratives in the news—it’s to be driving and shaping them. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, and it’s what my team is doing now as we expose the torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse occurring in the once-great State of California.

Since we launched our initiative just a few short months ago, we have broken numerous headlines, driven action by the Trump administration, and placed Newsom on the defensive as he prepares to launch a widely anticipated presidential bid next year.

Our exclusive reporting so far has included:

• Uncovering racialist abuses in San Francisco’s “Dream Keeper Initiative,” which has doled out millions of dollars to fund explicitly race-based programming such as all-black drag shows, “Afri-centic” therapy, and free doulas exclusively for “Black women and birthing people.”

• Shining a light on Gavin Newsom’s decision to pour tens of millions of dollars into constructing a single overpass to assist monarch butterflies and mountain lions in crossing one Southern California freeway.

• Exposing the enormous and unprecedented scale of fraud, waste, scamming, and theft that Newsom has presided over as governor: a minimum of $180 billion since he took office in 2019.

• Revealing the eye-popping amount of fraud and theft that takes place under California’s $30 billion “In Home Supportive Services Program.”

• Disclosing that San Francisco’s homeless shelters are becoming havens for transgender-identifying illegal aliens, who can receive “gender-affirming care” on the taxpayers’ dime.

We’re generating concrete, hard-hitting results. Our reporting has drawn the attention of top administration officials, and it has been followed by criminal charges against California officials who either participated in fraud or were negligent in preventing it.

We want to continue our work exposing Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud. But the truth is that none of this happens without your support. That’s why I’m asking you to become a paid subscriber. I’ve had a longstanding goal of increasing our paid subscriber base to 5,000, but we remain a few hundred short of that mark.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, please consider a gift subscription to friends and family. If you have yet to become a paid subscriber, please sign up now.

Thank you for helping us keep up the good fight.

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Last month, we received a report from a whistleblower who claimed that illegal aliens were staying in San Francisco’s homeless shelters. Following up on the tip, we visited numerous publicly funded shelters in San Francisco, and spoke to employees and residents about their policies, sometimes through a translator.

We discovered not only that the shelters were housing illegal immigrants but also that they were apparently housing a population of male-to-female “transgender” illegal aliens, who had hoped to obtain “gender-affirming care.” And, to our shock, state and local governments apparently are providing it.

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St. Vincent De Paul’s MSC-South facility is San Francisco’s largest homeless shelter, and, in 2024, signed a $66 million service contract with the city. After we arrived at the front entrance, an employee wearing a do-rag and a light green polo shirt showed us around and confirmed that illegal aliens were living there.

“You got a few people here from El Salvador. . . . You got a few people here from Venezuela. You got a few people here from a little bit of everywhere,” he said.

As a rule, he suggested, management instructed employees to refuse cooperation with federal immigration authorities. “When the ICE thing was going around, we all had a meeting, and they told us, ‘We ain’t letting them in.’”

Among the shelter’s residents was a group of Hondurans who identified as transgender. During our visit to MSC-South, whose executive director did not respond to a request for comment, we spoke with two Honduran men, “Lyca” and “Alondra,” who identified as transgender women. Both indicated that the local government gave them shelter and food.

Lyca, who wore long hair and red lipstick, was candid about this arrangement. He confirmed that he was an illegal immigrant and that the shelter doesn’t ask questions about immigration status. “Tengo Medi-Cal,” he said, referring to the state health-care program, which, under Governor Gavin Newsom, began providing “full scope” coverage to illegal aliens, which includes transgender procedures, or “gender affirming care.” He said he was receiving cross-sex hormone therapy—and bore the physical signs of having done so.

Alondra, a muscular man in a camouflage shirt and dyed hair tied behind his head, said he had been in the United States after claiming asylum. According to the translator, the city government had offered to pay first and second month’s rent on private apartments for him and Lyca. But neither accepted the offer—in Lyca’s case, because he might not be able to pay for the apartment after the second month.

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At the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center, a city-funded shelter on the eastern waterfront that did not respond to our comment request, we heard similar stories. “Jacqueline”—a self-identified “trans woman” from Mexico living at the shelter who claimed to be a lawful U.S. resident—indicated that there were illegal aliens living in the shelter.

Wearing rouge on his cheeks and a low-cut red shirt, Jacqueline flaunted his large chest. He said that he had gotten transgender hormone treatments, and confirmed that he had received breast implants from the state Medi-Cal program. Though Jacqueline claimed to be a legal resident, he suggested that the state also provides implants to illegal immigrants. “Even though you’re undocumented,” he said, “you can get them.”

“You have to have a process, the hormones . . . go through therapy,” he said. “Es un proceso.”

We asked Jacqueline if he had also completed “bottom surgery,” a type of genital procedure that can involve castrating a male and turning his penile tissue into a “neo-vagina.” San Francisco has multiple clinics that offer bottom surgery, which the state reportedly provides to Medi-Cal recipients, under the theory that it can be a “medical necessity” for those whose gender identity does “not match their gender assigned at birth.”

“Did you do bottom, too? Bottom surgery?” we asked.

“I’m waiting for that one,” Jacqueline replied.

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When most Californians think about “homeless services,” they imagine that their tax dollars are going to support veterans, families, and those who have fallen on hard times. But in San Francisco, the reality is that some homeless shelters have apparently turned into havens for transgender-identifying illegal aliens, who can receive “gender-affirming care” on taxpayers’ dime. (The California Department of Health Care Services, which administers the Medi-Cal program, did not respond to our request for comment.)

Sometimes, these policies are hidden under euphemisms; other times, however, they are more explicit. At the end of our trip, we visited a third government-funded shelter, the Taimon Booton Navigation Center, which is focused on “transgender, gender non-conforming & intersex people.” (The center does not post its address publicly and displays a sign referring to what appears to be its former name, the “Bryant Street Navigation Center.”) Outside the facility, which did not respond to our request for comment, we met a group of male-to-female transgender illegal aliens, who told us that they wanted to receive transgender medical treatment.

Apparently, word has traveled down the continent to the transgender communities in Mexico, Honduras, and elsewhere: if you make it all the way to California, the government will pay for your shelter, hormones, and surgeries—no questions asked.

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Last week, the New York Times ran a piece diving into how President Trump took the U.S. to war with Iran. To be clear, all the usual caveats apply: it’s the New York Times and, as such, it has its biases and may not have all the details right. But it was still quite a stunning piece, which provides a play-by-play of how the decision to attack Iran unfolded.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom is embroiled in a national fraud scandal. Thus far, much of the coverage has focused on alleged schemes related to unemployment insurance, hospice care, and food stamps. In this exclusive investigation, we shine a light on one of California’s largest initiatives: the In-Home Supportive Services Program, or IHSS, which pays family members and other individuals to provide home-based care for the elderly and disabled—at a cost of nearly $30 billion per year.

On the surface, IHSS presents itself as an instrument of compassion, directing billions to caregivers who help with cooking, personal care, laundry, and other daily needs inside recipients’ homes. But a growing number of experts and critics argue that the program is rife with fraud, losing roughly an estimated $6 billion to $12 billion yearly to scammers. Meantime, the state’s powerful home-care unions collect more than $149 million in membership dues, funneling money into the political network supporting Newsom and California Democrats.

This is the story of a government that has allowed compassion to become a mask for fraud, creating a self-reinforcing system that keeps the Democratic establishment in power.

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In 1973, California created what became the IHSS program to provide in-home care to the elderly and disabled. The IHSS caseload exploded in the 1980s, prompting the state to impose hour caps on care providers. California offers the program through Medi-Cal, its version of Medicaid, and pays providers with a combination of federal, state, and county funds.

IHSS has long been considered a magnet for fraud. In 2009, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger estimated that up to 25 percent of IHSS claims were fraudulent. A Sacramento grand jury report that year found that providers had “no meaningful oversight, no assessment of skills to meet client needs, no monitoring of the validity of service hours, and no background checks.”

After growth of the program’s rolls exploded in the early 2000s, Schwarzenegger signed legislation aimed at curbing abuse, requiring IHSS providers to undergo criminal background checks and introducing random claim reviews.

But soon after the law’s passage, a state workgroup, teaming with representatives from “labor organizations,” introduced a key loophole. Citing concerns about disruptions for “vulnerable members of the IHSS community,” the task force barred regulators from conducting fully randomized, unannounced home visits, leaving the program more exposed to scammers.

Since then, the program has expanded dramatically again. “IHSS provider” has become the largest low-wage occupation statewide, with more than 800,000 taxpayer-funded caregivers offering everything from grocery shopping to personal care.

Applying for IHSS care is straightforward. First, a prospective beneficiary files a California Department of Social Services application. Second, a county social worker visits his home to determine his need for care. Third, the county or public authority reviews the application and, if it approves, designates the applicant as a beneficiary, who can then use taxpayer funds to hire the caregiver of his choice—in more than 70 percent of cases, a direct family member.

The system operates largely on trust. Providers self-report their timecards and check-in records. In roughly 60 percent of cases, providers and beneficiaries live together, delivering care in private homes—typically without the threat of random, unannounced visits.

County-level fraud controls appear to be lacking. State regulations prevent IHSS staff from making unannounced visits unless a whistleblower files a “specific” complaint or regulators identify clear red flags. Even when complaints are lodged, investigations apparently can be slow, and prosecutions slower still. According to the state’s Department of Social Services, for one 12-month period between 2023 and 2024, counties received nearly 7,000 fraud complaints; 28 counties recorded 964 fraud investigations, resulting in just 39 cases prosecuted.

County-level regulators face additional problems. A 2021 Riverside County audit claimed that the local IHSS program did “not adhere to review and approval procedures for program integrity referrals.” In addition, more than 60 percent of county staff at the Department of Public Social Services, which, according to the auditor, handles program oversight, were IHSS providers themselves—meaning they had an interest in maintaining the status quo.

California, in other words, is sending billions of dollars per year to a program that is easy to exploit, difficult to administer, and almost impossible to supervise.

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In 2024, the federal government began a series of enforcement actions. As part of a nationwide crackdown on health-care-related crimes, the United States Department of Justice announced prosecutions for alleged IHSS fraud in California.

In one case, the DOJ alleged that San Dimas resident Giacomo Lorenzo Garbarino billed the state for more than $170,000 in fraudulent IHSS and Medi-Cal services over a five-year period. The patient in his care was reportedly hospitalized or living in a facility at the time and thus ineligible for IHSS reimbursement. In another case, Joseph Depiazza allegedly billed the state for more than $50,000 in fraudulent IHSS services. According to prosecutors, he kept submitting claims after the patient entered the hospital—and even after she had died.

Last year, federal officials announced another round of IHSS fraud prosecutions. In one case, prosecutors alleged that Maryam Erambakhsh falsely claimed payments for caring for her parents while they were outside the United States. In another, Cindy Lynn Fromm allegedly billed the program for more than a year of services while the recipient was incarcerated.

These cases may be the tip of the iceberg. Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government and a nationally recognized fraud expert, estimates that annual IHSS fraud could amount to 20 percent to 40 percent of total program spending. Applied to projected IHSS outlays for fiscal year 2025–26, that suggests roughly $6 billion to $12 billion in losses. Multiple senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have described a similar pattern, estimating that about 25 percent of the Medi-Cal budget is lost to fraud. The share is likely higher for IHSS, given the program’s structure and its susceptibility to abuse.

Earlier this year, Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, set off a firestorm of controversy with the claim that criminal networks, including the “Russian Armenian mafia,” were running massive hospice and home care scams in Los Angeles. He suggested that Armenians in Los Angeles were disproportionately represented among the leaders of hospice fraud rings.

One red flag for social-services fraud, Talcove suggested, is high community usage rates, and Armenian speakers in Los Angeles do appear to be significantly overrepresented among the county’s IHSS providers and recipients. Armenian speakers represent 14.6 percent of IHSS recipients and 6.5 percent of IHSS caregivers, per state data. People who speak Armenian fluently and English less than “very well,” however, make up just 0.8 percent of L.A. County’s population, according to Census data. Assuming that these Armenian speakers are identical to self-reported Armenian speakers in IHSS data, Armenian speakers who speak English less than “very well” are 18 times more likely to be IHSS recipients and eight times likelier to be IHSS caregivers than their share of the county population would suggest.

These high utilization rates do not, on their own, prove fraud. But analysts such as Talcove argue that “organized criminal groups” are “taking advantage of the program at scale.” Using a conservative 25 percent fraud estimate—within Talcove’s range and consistent with HHS officials’ broader Medi-Cal assessments—scammers may have siphoned at least $35 billion from IHSS during Gavin Newsom’s administration. “There’s virtually no incentive for them to stop,” Talcove said. “California has limited to no controls in place.”

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Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of California’s IHSS program are labor unions, which have enrolled more than 600,000 IHSS providers. Two leading unions for the state’s in-home care workforce, SEIU Local 2015 and United Domestic Workers (UDW), collectively raked in more than $149 million in dues in 2024. Both have a direct stake in the program’s expansion, since every new IHSS worker is a potential dues-paying member.

These unions are some of the most powerful institutions in California politics and collectively send millions of dollars to the state’s Democratic establishment. SEIU Local 2015 contributed $2 million to Newsom’s anti-recall campaign; spent another $2 million in favor of Proposition 50, a measure to redraw the state’s congressional districts in favor of Democrats; and donated over $90,000 to Newsom across his two campaign years. UDW donated $20,000 to Newsom’s 2022 reelection campaign. Both unions have contributed heavily to Democrats.

SEIU Local 2015 and United Domestic Workers of America have also allegedly used coercive tactics to expand their membership. Nathan Vu, a caregiver in San Diego, says that UDW pressured him to join during his IHSS orientation in February 2024. Though he says he declined, the union allegedly began deducting dues from his paycheck anyway.

“I vividly remember not wanting to enroll in the union,” Vu said. “I specifically said no.” Vu says he told UDW to stop deducting dues and demanded that they provide a copy of his membership agreement and proof of authorization. UDW, he claims, provided neither, and kept deducting dues for a full year before terminating his membership.

UDW did not respond to our request for comment.

SEIU 2015, which claims to represent “thousands of long-term care workers,” has allegedly one-upped UDW. According to one former member, the group locked IHSS workers in a room and “coerced” at least one to become a member.

In a sworn statement, filed as part of a lawsuit against the union, Chaquan May alleges that, in September 2023, the union “coerced” her into signing up for a membership at an IHSS orientation. May claimed that union employees locked the doors and told her and the other new IHSS providers, “we’re waiting for everyone to sign . . . no one is leaving until everyone signs.”

May claimed to have signed under duress. On September 3, 2024, she alleged, the union began deducting dues. She claimed to have sent a certified-mail opt-out letter the following day, which the union allegedly ignored. SEIU Local 2015, which did not respond to our request for comment, allegedly continued deducting dues from her paycheck until at least April 2025.

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Unfortunately for May and other allegedly mistreated IHSS workers, these disputes between public employees and their unions are handled by the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). Each of the board’s five members are appointed by the governor, and three of the current members have former union ties.

“The Public Employment Relations Board is run by former union officials,” said Shella Alcabes, a lawyer representing May and other plaintiffs. “You think I’m going to get a fair hearing there? Absolutely not.”

The system itself seems designed to prevent accountability. Governor Newsom is responsible for all the main components of the IHSS operation: he oversees the program, the enforcement, and, effectively, the Public Employment Relations Board. He has no incentive to crack down on a program that is enriching his most powerful allies, and, according to coauthor Schrupp’s reporting, is responsible for more than 40 percent of the net jobs created during his administration. And so, the system expands.

Despite making some initial noise about reforming the program last year, for this upcoming budget season, Governor Newsom has sought to increase IHSS funding by an additional $1.1 billion, to a total of $33.4 billion, boasting that his administration has invested billions of state taxpayer dollars into the program. (When we reached out to Newsom’s office for this story, a California Department of Social Services spokesman said that “[f]raud in the IHSS program is not widespread.”)

Given these political realities, the only plausible check on IHSS may come from Washington. The Trump administration could condition federal funding on rigorous audits and structural reforms. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could require California to mandate re-registration of all caregivers and recipients using third-party identity verification and expand random, unannounced visits.

Absent such intervention, the corruption in California is unlikely to abate. It will take a countervailing authority—willing to confront not only fraudsters but also the political system that sustains them—to force meaningful change.

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Gavin Newsom’s California is like a Third World country—a one-party state run by cartoonish, incompetent leaders, rife with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of waste, fraud, and abuse. Can anything be done to fix the catastrophic mess that Democrats, after 16 years of wielding unchecked power, have made in the Golden State? Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate for governor of California, joins us to discuss the immense scale of damage Democrat governance has wrought on California, and whether a Republican really has a shot to win.

The following is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. Sign up now for premium access:

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Rufo: I’m very excited to talk with the man of the hour in California, Steve Hilton. Some of you might recognize Steve from his Fox News days. He had a great show on Fox, and now he’s going into the lion’s den as he runs for governor of California.

He’s currently leading in the polls—at least among Republicans—but it’s a wide field. So, Steve, why don’t you just start out by telling us what exactly is happening in California? What on earth is going on?

Hilton: What’s happening in California is a complete disaster. We’ve had 16 years of Democrat one-party rule. That’s what’s going on. And that’s why you have me, a Republican, leading in the polls ahead of all the Republicans—and all the Democrats as well.

The basic story is that California today is what you get when Democrats get everything they want. It’s a very important lesson for the whole country, because for sixteen years now they’ve controlled everything. They’ve had all the statewide elected offices, from governor and attorney general on down. They’ve controlled both chambers of the legislature with a supermajority, and that means that they can pass anything that they want without any kind of Republican input. They’ve controlled all the big counties and the big cities.

What have the results of one-party Democrat rule been? Today, we have in California the highest poverty rate in the country—tied with Louisiana. We have the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states. We have the highest cost of living—gas, electricity, groceries, and housing are all more expensive here than anywhere else in the country.

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California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.

Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud.

We conducted interviews with public officials, fraud experts, and political figures, and reviewed hundreds of pages of government reports, state audits, criminal indictments, and other public records on California fraud. From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.

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Fourteen months after Newsom began his first term as governor of California, the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world. Roughly 2.7 million Californians eventually lost their jobs. The state’s economy went into freefall as its leaders imposed some of the country’s most restrictive public-health measures. In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

One way to inject money was through California’s massive unemployment insurance program (UI). Unemployment insurance is administered by the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD), which can process billions of dollars in payments monthly. Before the state turned on the cash machine, however, experts had warned that the system was ripe for fraud.

Haywood Talcove, one of America’s leading fraud specialists and CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, was one such expert. “I was begging [federal officials] not to let the money go out like that, because it was going to be the biggest fraud in the history of our country,” he said. “Obviously, I wasn’t successful.”

For many reasons, California was particularly susceptible to the large-scale fraud schemes Haywood Talcove saw on the horizon. Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

“They literally suspended all of the rules for the [unemployment insurance] program,” Talcove said. “[That made] it possible for anyone to get that benefit even if they weren’t entitled to it. It was very intentional. They knew what they were doing. But it caught up to them because it just got so out of control.”

The scams began almost immediately, with criminals from around the world reportedly siphoning cash from the program. In one case, a Romanian-led fraud ring orchestrated a $5 million unemployment-insurance scheme. Members allegedly “recruited potential [EDD-benefit] applicants through Facebook” and met them at “parks throughout Southern California to complete the application process,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California. “Applicants paid . . . a partial fee up front for assisting with fraudulent applications and another fee after applicants received EDD payments,” the office said. Many of the fraudsters wired the stolen funds to Romania.

Around September 2020, Fontrell Antonio Baines, a rapper from Memphis known as Nuke Bizzle, released a music video on YouTube entitled “EDD.” In the song, Baines bragged about ripping off California’s UI program. “Go to the bank with a stack of these,” Baines rapped, holding up EDD envelopes. Another rapper can be heard saying: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.” All told, Baines obtained more than $700,000 in stolen funds using preloaded EDD debit cards. He pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Nor were these isolated incidents. A member of the SFV Peckerwoods, a California-based neo-Nazi gang, allegedly ran an unemployment scam during the pandemic. So did Michael Thompson, a one-time leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, who was eventually convicted. California’s prison population apparently got in on the action, too: the EDD allegedly paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims in prisoners’ names, including those of at least 133 inmates on death row.

Remarkably, EDD not only failed regularly to cross-reference its unemployment payouts with a list of state prisoners, but it also had just two bureaucrats assigned manually to inspect reports of suspected fraud. State officials eventually admitted to having paid out approximately $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic, and to making an estimated $55 billion in improper payments. Talcove claims those figures don’t even tell the full story. “The state lost $32.6 billion dollars of taxpayer money to fraudulent applications,” he said. “In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”

While Newsom has conceded that “bad actors” took advantage of the UI program, he has also defended his government’s record, saying they took swift action as soon as the alleged prison scheme surfaced. The EDD, for its part, has a webpage documenting its anti-fraud efforts. But any suggestion that California has fraud under wraps is contradicted by findings from its non-partisan state auditor.

Last December, the auditor reported that EDD’s UI program—which remains on the auditor’s “High Risk” list—had a fraud rate of 7.6 percent in 2023 and 7.9 percent in 2024. Applied to the state’s UI spending, those figures suggest more than $1 billion in stolen taxpayer funds since the pandemic. “EDD continues to have high rates of improper UI payments, including fraudulent payments,” the auditor wrote. “These inadequacies have resulted in a substantial risk of serious detriment to the State and its residents.”

While many states dealt with UI scams during the pandemic, California stands in a class of its own. At best, the EDD’s performance amounted to mass government incompetence; at worst, it reflects total indifference to fraud.

“This happens in every single state,” Talcove concluded, “but it happens a lot more in California.”

Newsom came to power vowing to pursue “guaranteed health care” for Californians. Under his leadership, the state extended Medi-Cal coverage to illegal aliens, covered sex-change surgeries for Medi-Cal enrollees, and offered “gender-affirming care services” to enrollees of “all ages.”

Total budgeted Medi-Cal spending—which includes federal, state, and local contributions—has more than doubled on the governor’s watch, rising from $93.5 billion the year before he took office to $196.7 billion in the current annual budget. During the same period, California’s resident population declined by 0.2 percent.

Experts have long warned of Medi-Cal’s vulnerabilities to fraud. The state auditor first designated “Medi-Cal Eligibility” as a “high-risk” issue in 2007 and has applied that label to it ever since. But the state government has made little progress in addressing what the auditor calls “eligibility discrepancies” that present a “substantial risk of serious financial detriment to the State.” California’s attorney general has conceded that “Medi-Cal fraud could reach billions of dollars annually.”

Newsom may have inherited a bad situation, but his actions have made it worse. During the Biden administration, California received federal approval to “increase, and eventually eliminate, asset limits” for some Medi-Cal recipients, a change that, according to Talcove, resulted in flood of improper payments. In addition, Medi-Cal suspended prior authorization requirements for certain health-care services and medications, creating yet another vulnerability for fraudsters to exploit.

In some cases, prosecutors say, that is precisely what happened. In one instance, Paul Richard Randall, Kyrollos Mekail, and Patricia Anderson allegedly “took advantage” of Medi-Cal’s loosened restrictions as part of a scheme that defrauded taxpayers of more than $178 million. The conspirators allegedly used a business called Monte Vista Pharmacy to process fraudulent prescriptions; Randall and others allegedly laundered the proceeds through third parties to fund kickbacks to Anderson and obscure the operation from law enforcement, according to a 2025 Department of Justice press release. Mekail had pleaded guilty to criminal charges in August 2024, and Randall is reportedly expected to do the same this year.

In another case, Terry Patton was charged with accepting more than $2.3 million in kickbacks and bribes from addiction-treatment facilities in exchange for patient referrals. Prosecutors say the patients were paid to attend the treatment facilities to which Patton had referred them.

In-Home Supportive Services, a Medi-Cal sub-program, has also presented major fraud concerns. In 2009, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger estimated that IHSS fraud could be as high as 25 percent. That same year, a Sacramento grand jury report on the county’s IHSS program claimed IHSS fraud was “reported to be rampant and out-of-control.”

Yet, even in light of these worries, Newsom has dramatically increased funding for IHSS. Between Newsom’s first budget and his most recent proposal, the state legislative analyst estimates that total IHSS costs will have swollen by around 170 percent, with $33.4 billion proposed for the next fiscal year, including $12.5 billion from the state. According to recent estimates, taxpayers are funding nearly 800,000 IHSS providers, who offer caregiving, cooking, shopping, cleaning, and laundry services to elderly and disabled people. In about 70 percent of cases, providers and recipients are family members. According to co-author Schrupp’s reporting, the IHSS program is responsible for 41 percent of all “job gains” during the Newsom administration.

The IHSS program almost seems designed to facilitate scams. According to sworn testimony summarized in the Sacramento report, IHSS participants have falsely represented recipients’ needs; misrepresented hours worked timecards; and even secured payment after a recipient has died. The system operates largely on trust, with providers “working” in the privacy of the recipient’s home. The state’s IHSS protocols explicitly prohibit random unannounced home visits, which would be the best tool to uncover any potential rackets.

Oversight of the IHSS program is woefully inadequate. A 2021 Riverside County audit of the local IHSS program, for example, found county social workers had failed to process and report “integrity referrals” in a “timely” fashion. When complaints did reach county regulators, many, apparently, were reviewed by people with financial ties to IHSS. The report found that 41 of the 68 county staff at the Department of Public Social Services, which the auditor claimed is responsible for program oversight, were also IHSS providers—that is, they had a vested interest in protecting the system.

Beginning in 2024, federal officials announced multiple prosecutions for IHSS fraud. In one case, prosecutors alleged that Cindy Lynn Fromm claimed to have provided services for more than a year while the recipient was incarcerated. In others, prosecutors said that IHSS caregivers falsified timesheets and claimed to have provided services while beneficiaries were in hospitals, care homes, other facilities—or dead.

Experts who have studied the Medicaid system say that it has long been rife with fraud. Malcolm Sparrow, a Harvard professor who has advised the federal government on health-care fraud, suggested to Congress that “fraud and abuse” might represent somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of Medicaid spending. (Sparrow noted difficulties in attempting to calculate accurate “loss rates,” due to the fact that government studies “have been sadly lacking in rigor” and have “produced comfortingly low and quite misleading estimates.”) Brian Blase, president of the nonpartisan Paragon Health Institute, estimates a current Medicaid fraud rate of “15 to 20 percent of the entire program.”

Talcove estimates that the Medicaid fraud rate in California is 20 percent, which he calls a “very conservative” figure. Federal officials, however, believe that the current Medi-Cal fraud rate is even higher—and, given the state’s oversight failures and massive Medi-Cal expansion under Newsom, they are almost certainly right. Multiple high-ranking sources at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is currently probing fraud in California, told City Journal on the condition of anonymity that their initial estimate for Medi-Cal’s fraud rate since 2019 is 25 percent.

Based on state experts’ best guesses of annual Medi-Cal expenditures and applying a conservative, 15 percent fraud rate to each fiscal year since 2019, Medi-Cal has lost some $146 billion in taxpayer funds to fraud on Gavin Newsom’s watch.

Meantime, in Sacramento, state legislators have begun sounding the alarm. In February, Leticia Castillo, a Republican in the California State Assembly, proposed a bill that would create a Medi-Cal “fraud assessment task force” to “review current fraud prevention tools” and “evaluate how best practices from the federal government and other states could be applied in California.”

To date, Newsom has not supported the bill publicly.

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The other major target for fraudsters is California’s expansive welfare state. As governor, Newsom has sought to project an image of a compassionate California that cares for its most vulnerable residents. The state is famously home to enormous wealth, but also to millions living in poverty, and, as of 2024, to more than 180,000 homeless people.

Responding to these realities, Newsom has unleashed a wave of spending on welfare initiatives. He has overseen much of a $24 billion state spend on homelessness projects, roughly doubled food-stamp benefits during the pandemic, and has maintained high levels of cash assistance. Just like unemployment insurance and Medi-Cal, though, these welfare programs proved easy targets for swindlers. The homelessness spending, for example, was a massive transfer of funds into a complicated web of non-profits and other contractors, with apparently little oversight. Unsurprisingly, fraud cases followed.

Cody Holmes served as chief financial officer of Shangri-La Industries, a Los Angeles–based affordable-housing developer. His company reportedly received nearly $26 million from the state to develop properties under a program aimed at housing the homeless. Prosecutors reportedly allege that Holmes, who pleaded not guilty, embezzled roughly $2.2 million to pay for “exotic cars” and monthly rent for a “6,500-square-foot mansion.” A City Journal review of political donations revealed Holmes was a frequent contributor to Democratic politicians and causes in California.

In a separate case, Steven Taylor was charged for having allegedly used “fake bank statements and false cash representations” to secure loans to fund his real-estate business. Taylor then allegedly used those illegitimately obtained loans to purchase an $11.2 million home, which he sold for $27.3 million to a publicly funded homeless-housing developer.

Earlier this year, Alexander Soofer, who served as the CEO of Abundant Blessings, a Los Angeles-based homelessness charity, was charged for having allegedly pocketed at least $10 million in homelessness funding to bankroll a “luxury lifestyle that included lavish vacations and designer clothes.”

None of these cases should come as a surprise. A 2024 report from the Inspector General Office for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development found that California’s housing agency was not “adequately prepared to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud due to the lack of focus it placed on fraud risks and establishing a robust fraud risk management framework.” In addition, a 2024 report from California’s state auditor highlighted the government’s limited data on homelessness programs. For three of the five initiatives the auditor examined, it was “unable to fully assess” their success because of a lack of outcome data.

For many California watchers, the 2024 audit came years too late. In 2020, Representative Kevin Kiley, then serving in the California State Assembly, requested a similar report, he told City Journal, but state legislative Democrats rejected the proposal after Newsom intervened. “I brought the proposal to the state’s joint legislative audit committee, and it fell one vote short of approval after the administration came and testified against doing the audit,” Kiley said. “They likely knew what the audit would show and didn’t want taxpayers to get that window into how their money is, quite frankly, being squandered.”

Officials have also raised concerns about fraud in California’s SNAP benefits, officially known as CalFresh and more commonly called food stamps. As of last year, the state auditor had designated CalFresh as a “high risk” program. Annual state spending on food stamps has risen from roughly $8 billion in 2015 to nearly $16 billion under Newsom.

That expansion coincided with several fraud cases. In 2023, 15 people associated with a Romanian criminal ring were arrested for allegedly stealing CalFresh and other welfare funding, at least one of whom later pleaded guilty. The following year, seven people were charged for allegedly making “fraudulent cash withdrawals” as part of a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar theft of welfare benefits. In March, more than 50 people were charged as part of “a yearslong crackdown on organized theft rings” that included “many with ties to Romania.” The defendants allegedly stole millions in public funds by exploiting California’s Electronic Benefit Transfer system, which distributes benefits for programs like CalFresh.

Notwithstanding this steady drumbeat of fraud cases, at least one California Democratic lawmaker is pushing to lower penalties for those who steal from state welfare programs. In April 2025, State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas sponsored a bill that would raise the threshold for felony welfare fraud from $950 to $25,000. The measure would also make it more difficult to charge perjury based on misstatements to county welfare departments. Republican State Assemblyman Carl DeMaio has said that if the bill becomes law, it will effectively “legalize welfare fraud” in California.

Federal prosecutors, however, are stepping up enforcement. Last year, Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, announced the creation of a federal task force to combat fraud and corruption in the state’s homelessness programs. The task force has already brought charges in several multimillion-dollar homelessness-fraud cases—and Essayli has vowed that more are coming. “California has spent $24 billion in the last five years on homelessness, and no one can account for where that money has really gone,” Essayli said in January. Gavin Newsom, he added, is the “king of fraud.”

We reached out to Newsom’s office for comment on this story. A spokesperson, whose signature featured “she/her” pronouns, called Kiley’s claims “ridiculous,” accused the Trump administration of “mak[ing] up numbers,” and suggested, remarkably, that California had “no missing homelessness funds.”

The culture of fraud in California is so pervasive that it has allegedly reached the governor’s own office. Between 2022 and December 2024, Newsom’s chief of staff was Dana Williamson. In November 2025, she was charged with fraud for allegedly “siphoning campaign and COVID-19 recovery funds into her and an associate’s pockets.” Two other “well-connected aides in state politics were also charged” and struck plea deals that reportedly confirmed the scheme’s existence.

Newsom’s office said they were made aware of an investigation into Williamson in late 2024 and immediately moved to place her on leave. When she officially left the governor’s office a month later, though, Newsom’s send-off message applauded her “insight, tenacity, and big heart,” while making no mention of the investigation against her. And even with the charges against her, Williamson walked away from government with a $50,000 payout for unused vacation time.

Williamson, who has pleaded not guilty, is not the only state official to be charged with fraud during the Newsom administration. In January, Phyllis Hope Stitt, a former EDD employee responsible for determining UI claimant eligibility during the pandemic, pleaded guilty to defrauding the program of more than $750,000. That same month, former Madera County benefits eligibility worker Leticia Mariscal was charged for allegedly embezzling $40,000 in food stamp benefits.

The pattern that emerges in California is not one of isolated breakdowns in oversight but of a vast system that almost seems to invite fraud. From widespread failures in unemployment insurance to alleged schemes targeting Medi-Cal to mounting concerns over homelessness spending, each case points to significant lapses by state officials charged with stewarding public funds. According to California Assemblyman David Tangipa, “Sacramento is pervaded by a culture of corruption.” And he points the finger right to the top: Newsom, he says, has helped “create[] an environment where corruption thrives.”

Still, California’s fraud crisis is not a lost cause, nor is it beyond correction. On March 16, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. The effort, led by Vice President J.D. Vance, will “coordinate government-wide efforts to combat widespread fraud, waste, and abuse in Federal benefit programs.” A fact sheet released by the White House highlighted California as a state where “insufficient safeguards and weak oversight increase the risk of large-scale fraud.”

The Minnesota fraud scandal, brought to national attention by City Journal, offers a revealing case study of what can happen when a seemingly hidden problem—one long in plain sight—finally comes into view. The extent of fraud in Minnesota had been an open secret for years. But once the scandal drew national attention, investigations snowballed, ultimately derailing the political career of Tim Walz. It may seem unlikely today, but a similar outcome is possible for Newsom in California.

Newsom is not untouchable, and the scale of fraud in California appears far larger than in Minnesota. Despite his claim to have taken “decisive action” against one form of fraud, the broader problem is real and ongoing, and taxpayers, in California and across the country, have reason to be furious. Newsom will no doubt rely on charisma and partisan appeal to downplay the extent of these abuses. But listen closely, and you can still hear the California cash machine, steadily dispensing untold billions to criminals, scammers, and organized crime rings—funds taken from taxpayers and diverted from those most in need.

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Americans are not having enough babies. For decades, the nation’s fertility rate has steadily declined from a mid-20th-century peak; the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the drop. Now, America’s fertility rate—the metric that indicates the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime—stands at 1.6, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, joins us to discuss what’s going on and what can be done to secure America’s demographic future.

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Rufo: Lyman Stone is a demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, and he really is an expert on everything to do with family, fertility, demographics, and the future. Lyman, perhaps we could open up the conversation with a more general take. What’s happening in the United States as far as demographics and fertility go? Are things going well? Poorly? Or are things somewhere in between?

Stone: Well, that’s the first time I’ve been called an expert in the future. That’s a good one.

The reality is that fertility is declining all around the world, in both rich countries and poor countries alike. The U.S. is not a categorical exception to that. Over the last couple years, really since Covid, we’ve experienced a little bit of stability. Our fertility rate is hovering around 1.6.

Stability, though, is quite bad news. For people who aren’t glued into this subject, a stagnant fertility rate of 1.6 means that if a girl who is fifteen years old today were to have babies at the statistically average rate for the rest of her life, she would end up with 1.6 children.

Now, this period indicator can be biased. So, for a long time, people thought that even though we had this big crash in fertility, it was going to come up in the future. Many observers thought that the decline was just people postponing births.

But the fact that the fertility rate is just hanging flat at 1.6—the lowest level in our history—is quite bad news. It means that the decline can’t simply be attributed to postponement. The births aren’t coming back; the rate is just staying low. So even though it can feel nice that the decline seems to have paused, it’s bad news from a long-run demographic perspective—it means that overall family size is falling in a permanent way.

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Since the rise of Black Lives Matter a decade ago, the biggest phenomenon on the American Left was woke. But that’s beginning to change. Now, we seem to be entering a new era, one in which wokeism is morphing into something else: Third Worldism.

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The war in Iran continues. Iran is threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, while U.S. and Israeli have increased the number of strikes against Iranian infrastructure.

This week, we spoke with Army Ranger veteran Claremont Institute scholar and Will to discuss the military situation in Iran—what happens next, whether a ground invasion is a real possibility, and when the administration might be satisfied that America has accomplished its objectives.

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Rufo: We’re now in the third week of our coverage of the Iran War, and I’m very excited to talk to someone who is highly recommended by almost everyone on all sides of this debate. Will Thibeau is a veteran of the Ranger Regiment, one of the most highly skilled and highly trained divisions of the U.S. military. He’s now a scholar at the Claremont Institute. Will, please give us a sense of the reality on the ground. Where does the conflict in Iran stand right now?

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We’re entering a new phase of the Iran War. It appears that targeted military attacks have slightly declined in frequency. But now we seem to be caught in escalating exchanges against energy infrastructure: both sides in the conflict are targeting natural gas facilities and fighting for control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The administration’s calculus seems to be that we can take out some infrastructure without anything more than a manageable, short-term spike in oil prices. But the reality is that if oil exports remain disrupted for long enough—if the exchanges destroy significant production capacity or if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed—there will be serious consequences at home. When it comes down to it, American voters are simple: If fuel is six dollars per gallon, if the price of groceries rises, and if there is anything resembling gas lines in the future, it’s game over for the Republican Party in the midterms.

The best hawk case for intervening in Iran was that our intervention would be wrapped up quickly with few economic or geopolitical consequences. But I think that view too heavily downplayed the serious geopolitical and economic risks of such a strategy—risks that, with every day that the war drags on, are beginning to seem more and more possible. That doesn’t mean we should panic. But it’s important for us to honestly assess America’s position in this fraught moment and figure out how to drive this war to a conclusion.

I don’t believe the correct response is to level a hysterical critique, make a scene, or burn a MAGA hat, as some podcasters have done. That’s not productive. Still, it’s clear that the administration is highly sensitive to public opinion. If the administration senses that public opinion is slipping to dangerous levels, it will change course and figure out how to declare victory and move on. The president has a track record of being responsive; he’ll turn on a dime if he believes that it’s necessary, with no hint of hesitation or embarrassment. And as the war’s geopolitical and economic downsides become ever more real, I think that we’ll see growing pressure from the Right and increasing public backlash to such an extent that the administration feels the need to adjust.

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In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California. At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seemi…

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We’re wrapping up our two-part debate series on the Iran War. Yesterday, the Edmund Burke Foundation’s Will Chamberlain laid out the argument in favor of intervention. Today, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, makes the case against the war. Readers, please let me know which argument was most persuasive and if either debater changed your mind.

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Rufo: Curt, could you tell us where the war stands right now and your view of things?

Mills: Well, I can only share what I know. And frankly, I don’t think our government is being fully transparent, and the Iranian government, needless to say, is also not very transparent.

We have a full-scale war in the Middle East. The “Gulf War” is the term often used to describe Operation Desert Storm, but in many ways, this is a far better use of the name. U.S. citizens have been evacuated from more than 15 countries in the region. Businesses across the Gulf have shut down. Anybody who’s ever flown either into the Middle East or through the region on the way to India or China has probably stopped at the Dubai or Doha airports—those are not really functional right now.

Doha, Dubai, Muscat, and Riyadh—glittering, nouveau riche cities, particularly post-2008 and post-Covid—are getting slammed by Iran with ballistic missiles and its Shahed drones, the latter of which are an effective military technology that was first deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine.

There is almost no communication between the U.S. and Iran. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating Ali Khamenei, the longtime supreme leader who was pushing 90 and who many thought was the only guy keeping the original clerical rule system around. The administration has replaced Khamenei with his son, who appears to be something of a figurehead as Iran moves into what looks more and more likely to be a full military dictatorship.

The Iranians are resisting in a way that the Venezuelans and Nicolás Maduro did not—a lack of resistance, I should note, that constituted a major precedent for the administration making its move against Iran in late February. Iran is also resisting at a level of intensity that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was incapable of doing. Even in Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein didn’t put up much of a fight; by the time we finally got him in 2003, his regime was a defanged organization.

So, the administration is in something of a quagmire. If the U.S. goal was to just “mow the grass”—an Israeli term—they are eroding some military capabilities, exhausting some of Iran’s missile supply, and assassinating its top leaders. If that was the goal, the administration, at this point, could just declare victory and go home.

But the question is, what are the goals here? The administration has been all over the map. And then of course, the Israelis have different goals as well. To be clear, my view is that this is a joint Israeli operation and that, by all appearances, we are doing this for Israel.

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The Iran War is causing dissension on the Right, with conflicting stories, narratives, and, sometimes, facts. To sort through these, we’re hosting a two-part debate series, stress-testing the best lines of argument from both sides of the debate. Today, we have Will Chamberlain of the Edmund Burke Foundation to make the case for President Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran. Tomorrow, we will have Curt Mills of The American Conservative, who argued against American intervention in Iran.

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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has revived a benefit program once lauded as a step toward “reparations” for black San Franciscans. Known as the Dream Keeper Initiative, the relaunched program will grant $36 million to “community-serving organizations,” including some that have offered “Afri-centric” mental-health services, African ancestry DNA testing…

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As the joint American-Israeli military campaign in Iran continues, President Trump’s coalition is starting to exhibit some cracks. The war in Iran has emerged as a proxy battle over a broader, long-simmering conflict within the Right about Israel. And the fight over Israel is, in some important ways, a proxy battle about Jews in general.

Big picture, what we’re seeing now is that the traditional divisions on the Right between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, between hawks and doves, are being reshaped into a battle over Israel specifically. It’s a very difficult subject; this issue has become highly emotional and personal for those on both sides, and even in my world, it’s set friends against one another. How far do the emerging divisions go, and how should we respond?

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This week’s big news is the massive and ongoing U.S.-Israel airstrikes on Iran, which have so far wiped out the country’s top leadership and placed the remnants of the regime under immense strain. But America’s action here raises the question: Is this a regime change war? Or is this something else? Where do things go from here?

We are not at the level of a regime-change war, at least at this stage. I say that for a simple reason: President Trump has shown a pattern of projecting tactical force against America’s enemies in a precise manner that doesn’t involve long-term entanglements. We saw this with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in Trump’s first term, and more recently with the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela this term.

To be sure, the theory of these strikes is that this is something that is bigger in scale than, say, Venezuela. There are legitimate concerns that when one wipes out a country’s entire leadership without an explicit plan for moving forward, such a situation might quickly spiral out of control. Will Iran respond in a way that baits the United States into further action? Do we get a Gulf of Tonkin-style incident that eventually results in boots on the ground? I’m worried about these possibilities because like many Americans, I do not want a serious, long-term ground war between the U.S. and Iran.

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Last month, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations descended into chaos as Democratic senators leveled accusations of racism against Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s nominee for a senior post in the State Department. In this exclusive interview, we spoke with Carl about his book on “anti-white discrimination” and whether Senate Republicans will approve his nomination—or capitulate to bad faith accusations from the Left.

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Rufo: Every legislative session, there are hundreds of hearings in Congress, most of which are insanely boring—the minutiae of government are debated, witnesses appear to testify, and cameras catch people in the back row falling asleep. A rare exception to this pattern of thumb-twiddling occurred with the explosive confirmation hearing of Jeremy Carl, a friend of ours and President Trump’s nominee for a high-ranking position in the State Department. Jeremy, what happened? What were you expecting? And where does your nomination stand now?

Carl: I was nominated by President Trump to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, which means, if confirmed, my role would be to oversee what the United States does at the United Nations and other international organizations to which we belong—and there are a lot of them.

As you indicated, there were a lot of fireworks at my hearing. I’m a person who has not been reticent about putting things out there—comments, writings, etc. The Democrats were well aware of my public profile, and their senators came willing to pounce on my choiciest tweets and the writings of mine that they didn’t like. They came prepared with posters about how horrible I was; it really was a made-for-TV event.

Lomez: Jeremy, let’s get into the meat of it. There was a special target on your back during your confirmation process; it was understood from the beginning that the Democrats were going to single you out in a way they didn’t with many other Trump nominees. What’s the deal? Why are they coming after you specifically?

Carl: I wrote a book called The Unprotected Class, which was about the rise of anti-white racism in the United States. Chris, you were very kind to offer a blurb for it, and Lomez, you were obviously very supportive as well. In fact, I had a lot of very mainstream conservative guys who supported it—from Victor Davis Hanson to Charlie Kirk, who was a big booster not just of my nomination but of the book as well. I even had the longest-ever serving Republican member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, an African American, endorse the book.

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You might have missed the headline, but there’s been another assassination attempt against President Trump. This time, a deranged 21-year-old man named Austin Martin tried to break into Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas canister. The Secret Service killed him.

The story would have dominated the headlines during any other period in American history, but in this instance, it seems to have passed through the discourse without much of a blip. Are we becoming desensitized to assassination culture, and if so, where does that leave us? What does the gradual normalization of conspiracy-driven violence mean for the future?

The evidence suggests that online radicalization was a major part of the alleged assassin’s spiral into violence. The would-be shooter seems to have been radicalized by Epstein conspiracy theories. According to messages obtained by TMZ, he had texted a friend saying, “I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable,” and “[t]he best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have.”

Martin’s backstory reminded me of what we know about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly succeeded in killing Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. In both cases, these were bookish young white men who had trouble fitting into the high school social order and who, if reporting is to be believed, graduated from high school as supporters of Trump. Then, for whatever reason, they had a psychological breakdown and ended up trying to assassinate the president.

The Cycle of Paranoia in American History

Paranoia and assassination have been a recurring, if unfortunate, feature of American politics. Conspiracy and counter-conspiracy are baked into our history, from the founding era to the Civil War to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of figures like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. While any one incident can be blamed on a particular lunatic, the waves of violent paranoia that we have seen in specific periods of our history—and that we appear to be seeing now—are indicators of broader social distress, public anxiety, and latent political frustration.

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For 60 years, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division was a racialist, hard-Left institution, whether the president happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is the first person to change that dynamic and champion a new theory of civil rights law based on the principle of colorblind equality. In the following interview, Dhillon outlines the work that the Trump administration is undertaking to reverse the Left’s decades-long weaponization of civil rights law, explains how the administration is handling captured left-wing institutions, and responds to emerging arguments on the Right that colorblind equality does not go far enough to confront the Left.

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The following is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. Sign up now for premium access.

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