Dr. Paul Gottfried has been following the development of American politics for longer than many readers have been alive. A political philosopher and godfather of the paleoconservative movement, Gottfried was a student of the Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse and has closely monitored the radical Left’s transformation from classically Marxist to woke to the internal tensions it is experiencing now. In this interview, Gottfried discusses the intersection between wokeism and Marxism, where the Left is heading, and what the Right should do about it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Rufo: We’re excited to talk to the man himself, Paul Gottfried, who has observed so many political cycles, from the New Left as a student of Herbert Marcuse to the second Trump administration now. Paul, I just wanted to get a sense of things from you. Having seen so much radical political development, and having been one of the key thinkers in paleoconservative thought—which was out of fashion for a number of years but has really come roaring back during the Trump years—what do you make of it as you look back at all these changes?

Gottfried: I think that it’s very hard to process them, although I’ve lived through them for sixty years. The country has become much more socially and culturally radical than it was even when I was a graduate student—something that I hear Christopher Rufo has discussed quite well in his books. And what I’ve seen is a changing of the leftist guard. In my youth, we were dealing with a New Left that was to a much larger extent influenced by classical Marxism than the Left is now.

What I think has happened, and what I’ve argued in books, is that we’re living through a post-Marxist Left, one which is only very vestigially influenced by traditional Marxism and much more heavily influenced by what you have written on extensively, which is wokeness—which I think has become the major characteristic of the Left in our times.

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For much of his political career, California Governor Gavin Newsom has presented himself as a champion of open government. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom declared the city’s commitment to transparency and signed major open-data legislation into law. As lieutenant governor, Newsom condemned the state government for enabling secrecy. “We are one of the least transparent states in this country,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do as it relates to transparency.”

But when he ascended to the governorship, Newsom took a different tack. Despite his rhetoric, Newsom has not sought to dismantle California’s secrecy regime. Instead, he has reinforced it, and seemingly the entire state has followed suit.

This City Journal investigation—based on access-to-information requests and a review of public-records legislation and litigation—reveals that the Newsom administration and other government agencies in California have systematically attempted to conceal records and deny the public access to information.

For months, we have requested documents on crime, the prison system, private communications, and more from a variety of public agencies in California. In response, those agencies—some controlled by the governor, others by localities—have often denied, delayed, or redacted information.

In public, Newsom proclaims that transparency is a “legal and moral requirement,” but when we have asked for records, his administration has repeatedly closed the vaults, mobilizing an army of public employees to delay or deny. Which, in turn, raises an important question: What is Gavin Newsom hiding?

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As part of our reporting about California corruption, we have filed dozens of public records requests with various government agencies. Many of those requests have been denied, or, in one case, the records released to us were so heavily redacted as to be all but worthless.

Local agencies have repeatedly stonewalled us. In June, our team reported on the Honduran migrants who have taken over the San Francisco drug trade. As part of our investigation, we requested records from the San Francisco Police Department that would allow us to count the number of Honduran nationals arrested for drug dealing in the city. The SFPD sent us a trove of documents, but many had been almost entirely blacked out.

Last month, our team published a report on violent crime in the L.A. Metro system. As part of that investigation, we filed a public records request seeking all recordings of the murder of Mirna Soza Arauz, who was stabbed to death on the train by a previously convicted violent offender in 2024. After a delay, Metro told us that it wouldn’t release the footage, citing privacy concerns. We then contacted Soza’s family, who provided a consent letter arguing that the footage should be released. Eventually, Metro caved, and sent us a single, low-resolution video taken from a far corner of the train car. But Soza’s family, which sued Metro last year, told us that multiple, higher-resolution videos of the incident were shown in court—meaning Metro may have withheld responsive documents from us.

When we requested documents from bodies that Newsom controls, including his office, we encountered similar tactics.

In May, our team published a story on the Newsom administration’s efforts to provide state prisoners with new digital tablets. Our investigation, based on interviews with death-row inmates and a review of criminal cases, concluded that state prisoners had used facility-issued tablets to watch pornography, have explicit sexual conversations, and—in at least one case—allegedly exploit a minor on the outside.

We also filed a public records request with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation seeking reports related to real and suspected violations on condemned inmates’ tablets, including the use of pornography, sexual communications, communications with minors, and harassment, among other infractions. CDCR confirmed that it found records that were responsive to our request, but after multiple delays, the department cited statutory and regulatory exemptions to block their release.

Earlier this year, as part of a separate investigation, our team filed three requests seeking records of communications related to Governor Newsom and his former deputy chief of staff, Lindsey Cobia. In 2023, Capitol Weekly reported that Cobia had been “described as Gov. Newsom’s ‘Swiss army knife,’ involved in basically all manner of political decisions the governor makes,” and ranked her among California’s most influential political figures. She left the administration that year and now serves as treasurer of Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy PAC.

In response to our requests, Newsom’s office confirmed that it had found communications involving outside parties, Newsom, and Cobia, but refused to release them. “While we have identified responsive records,” Newsom’s office wrote, “those records are exempt as records of correspondence of or to the Governor or his staff . . . or records that reveal the deliberative process of the Governor or his staff.”

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How is this possible? The California Public Records Act (CPRA), enacted in 1968 by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, declares access to information about “the conduct of the people’s business a fundamental and necessary right.” But California’s system gives the governor a remarkable escape hatch.

The CPRA states that, with limited exceptions, the law “does not require the disclosure of correspondence of and to the Governor or employees of the Governor’s office.” It also provides that, when a governor leaves office, he may impose restrictions on access to those records that can last as long as 50 years, or to the death of the governor—whichever is later.

In addition, Newsom’s office has an aggressive email-deletion policy, which further limits the scope of records that ever see the light of day. “Under our approved records retention schedule,” Newsom’s legal affairs secretary wrote to us, “emails are automatically deleted after 90 days unless they are manually preserved by the individual account holder or subject to a litigation hold.”

Compare California’s approach with that of some other states. Texas requires the governor to retain certain high-level communications for four years. Connecticut requires the “permanent” retention of constituent correspondence with the governor’s office.

And at the federal level, presidential records become subject to FOIA beginning five years after a president leaves office, and a former president may invoke specified restrictions for at most 12 years.

Five years ago, Newsom had the chance to reverse the controversial exemption that shields his office’s records from public scrutiny. Instead, he signed A.B. 473, the CPRA Recodification Act, which substantially preserved the law’s terms. California lawmakers and Newsom could have done the right thing and scrapped the secrecy exemptions; they instead chose to preserve them.

The governor’s secrecy has prompted California courts to push back. In one case, KXTV reporter Brandon Rittiman sued after Newsom’s office withheld calendar entries showing then–cabinet secretary Analea Patterson’s meetings with PG&E representatives. In March 2024, a Sacramento Superior Court judge ordered the records disclosed, rejecting the administration’s “generalized” claims that disclosure would impair deliberations. In a separate case decided the following month, a California appellate court rejected the administration’s attempt to withhold selected calendar entries for former senior energy adviser Alice Reynolds, ruling that public interest in disclosure outweighed the governor’s interest in secrecy.

These are just two examples that showcase the conflict between Newsom’s rhetoric and record on transparency. Time and time again, Newsom has proclaimed one message to the public while enforcing another in private with the journalists looking to scrutinize his actions.

In September 2025, CalMatters reported that Newsom’s office had failed to release the governor’s official calendars for that year in response to its public records requests. David Loy, a transparency advocate, told the outlet that releasing such records should be a simple task that can be processed quickly. In addition, CalMatters reported that Newsom’s office had previously released what appeared to be copies of his calendars, as opposed to the original electronic documents that Loy noted are mandated by law. This matters because the original documents would potentially include metadata, such as indications of altered or deleted entries, while the copies would not.

In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bipartisan bill that had been unanimously passed (with two non-votes), which would have created a California Public Records Act ombudsperson. This new office would have been responsible for adjudicating disputes between those requesting records and the agencies responding to the requests, in an effort to ensure the state was complying with transparency laws. As a result of Newsom’s veto, Californians have no administrative process for appealing the denial of a public records request. This gives state agencies broad discretion over which records are released and leaves requesters with little recourse aside from hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit—an escalation both time-consuming and costly.

We reached out to the San Francisco Police Department, L.A. Metro, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and members of the governor’s staff for comment on this story. SFPD told us that it “intends to be as transparent as the law allows” and is “mandated to disclose releasable records.” CDCR, Metro, and the governor’s staff did not respond by deadline.

A transparency regime that routinely forces members of the public into the legal system undermines the very purpose of the CPRA. If the government remains the principal arbiter of what records the public may inspect, then the public’s right to scrutinize its government becomes largely illusory.

That is not how government is supposed to work. The entire purpose of transparency laws is that the public does not need to take a politician’s rhetoric at face value, and that everyone—journalists, citizens, organizations—has a right to inspect most documents related to the operations of their government. Until the governor chooses to do the right thing, live up to his commitments to transparency, and release records to the public, it is entirely legitimate to ask: What is Gavin Newsom hiding?

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. Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Ryan Thorpe is a senior investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

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The latest debate dividing the Right centered on a rather unlikely subject: burritos. Specifically, online discourse over the price of burritos morphed into an enormous and bitter controversy, with some right-wing commentators alleging $20 burritos are a sign of terminal American decline and other pundits claiming that young right-wingers upset by food costs are lazy and entitled.

It’s true that burritos’ prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Inflation’s effects on grocery prices have caused the cost of a Chipotle beef burrito to climb 50 percent since 2020, and people are feeling that. The burrito is a useful stand-in for all the other ways in which prices for basic items have risen dramatically in recent years, far outpacing wage growth in many cases.

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Rats have been with us since the beginning. For thousands of years, wherever humans settled land, built cities, or crossed oceans, rats were never far behind, constructing a civilization of their own beneath our feet.

In Los Angeles County (L.A.), rats abound. You may see only an occasional rat dart across an alley or root through a restaurant dumpster, but make no mistake: they are everywhere, from Skid Row to Koreatown, from Boyle Heights to Santa Monica. They are always nearby, even if sometimes out of sight: scurrying in storm drains, walls, crawl spaces, and alleyways.

Rats, and the fleas that live on them, can be carriers of deadly diseases—including, most notably, the plague, which, in bubonic form, killed tens of millions of people and laid waste to cities in the Middle Ages. In L.A., however, the main concern is a different medieval disease: typhus.

Since 2009, the number of flea-borne typhus cases in L.A. has increased by a staggering 2,300 percent. Last year, the county recorded more cases than at any point in its history. Some patients have died. Behind the scenes, the authorities responsible for protecting the public admit that they lack the resources they need to get the situation under control.

The rats, meantime, spread disease in predictable ways. They feed on trash, fleas feed on those rats, and the infected fleas bite people, who in turn suffer anything from a mild illness treatable with antibiotics to a sickness that ends in death.

This City Journal investigation—based on interviews with leading rodent experts, on-the-ground reporting, and a review of hundreds of pages of documents obtained via public-records requests—reveals that Los Angeles County has allowed a disease once associated with the Middle Ages to terrorize a major metropolis.

In L.A., crumbling infrastructure, a homelessness crisis, garbage-ridden streets, ineffective rodent control, and state restrictions on popular rodenticides have combined to enable the spread of a medieval disease. Whether you see them or merely pass by as they furrow in the dark, one thing is clear: in Los Angeles, the rats are everywhere.

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In 2018, it was clear that L.A. had a serious problem. For much of the early 2000s, the county recorded just a handful of flea-borne typhus cases each year; in 2009, for example, it saw just nine. But in 2018, L.A. battled multiple localized typhus outbreaks, marking a watershed moment for public health officials in the county.

The outbreaks started in the summer. Between July and September, the county identified nine typhus cases linked to downtown. All of them required hospitalization, and six of the nine sufferers had either been homeless or lived in transitional housing. In October, public health officials noted an additional outbreak in the Willowbrook neighborhood, near Compton. By year’s end, L.A. had seen 109 cases of typhus countywide—a record high.

The concern wasn’t just that cases were on the rise, but also where they were being discovered. In the past, the county might have seen occasional, geographically dispersed infections. Now, it was dealing with multiple clusters in dense, urban environments. A document we obtained via public-records requests shows that officials believed “rats and rat fleas” were “contributing to infection” in the county’s cities.

The situation that year was so bad that the city government couldn’t even keep its own employees safe. At the time, Elizabeth Greenwood was a deputy city attorney. One day at work, Greenwood said her shin began to hurt. When she inspected her leg, she noticed some small insect bites but thought nothing of it. Within weeks, Greenwood was reportedly “gravely ill” and suffering from a severe headache, dizziness so bad she couldn’t walk to the restroom unattended, and a 102-degree fever. “It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck,” Greenwood said.

Eventually, Greenwood would be diagnosed with typhus. She blamed the city for her contracting the disease, claiming that its failure to clean up garbage and human feces outside City Hall East had “recklessly endanger[ed] the public.” After Greenwood went public with her story, Los Angeles officials admitted that City Hall was infested with vermin. “The rotting trash and the raw sewage is the soup that grows typhus,” Greenwood said.

Documents we obtained via a public-records request show that Greenwood wasn’t the only municipal employee complaining about rats around that time. In 2020, Raul Cabrera, the LAFD captain for Station 6, wrote an email to a city employee complaining that his fire station was being overrun by rats from a homeless encampment.

“This encampment , which I believe you are aware of, is located on both the City and County side,” Cabrera wrote. “The Fire Station is being overrun by rats coming from the encampment directly across the street. We were hoping not only for regularly scheduled clean up but also a more permanent solution . . . . I would like to be proactive in this situation before the rats make a permanent home in the Fire Station or one of our City family members gets sick.”

The records we obtained make clear that by 2019, local officials had a good idea of what steps needed to be taken to get the rat population under control: more garbage cans, cleaner streets, and flea control. But in the years that followed, the situation apparently went from bad to worse. L.A.’s battle with typhus—a disease often associated with cramped and unsanitary living conditions—continued to spiral out of control.

In 2022, L.A. suffered more typhus outbreaks, marking another turning point in the county’s fight against the disease. That year, L.A. saw 171 cases of flea-borne typhus and noted that its five-year average for typhus cases had doubled. The county also battled multiple simultaneous outbreaks in neighborhoods including Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, and Glassell Park, and suffered three typhus deaths—the first documented fatalities in decades.

By 2024, L.A. would see another record high for flea-borne typhus cases: 187. In 2025, that record was broken again, with 220 cases; the county also investigated three localized outbreaks. Local public-health officials noted that some 90 percent of typhus patients required hospitalization last year.

The city’s rat problem has worsened. In 2025, the pest control company Orkin released its annual list of the most rat-infested major cities in America. That year marked the first time since the list’s inception, more than a decade earlier, that any city other than Chicago had taken the top spot. This time, Orkin named a new location as America’s rattiest city: Los Angeles.

Shannon Sked, national technical director at Orkin, believes not only that Los Angeles’s rat population has increased in the aftermath of the pandemic but also that its rats have become more aggressive.

“The most aggressive were surviving through that time,” Sked said. “Restaurants were closed, the food availability was changing. So those that were most willing to go out and search, they were the ones that survived. And that actually created a trend where we’re now seeing more presence, not just in total numbers, but observations where [the rats are] actually more willing to come out and interact in ways that 10 years ago we didn’t see that much.”

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Today, Los Angeles has all the necessary conditions that allow a rat population to thrive. On a recent reporting trip to the city, we saw those conditions up close. In Skid Row, for example, we spoke with several homeless people who told us that seeing large and aggressive rats in the area is a common occurrence.

“Some of them are gangster, too,” one man said.

Another told us that he’d seen a rat eating through the bandage of an injured man while he was asleep. “The rat chewed off the bandage he had, and literally the flesh off him, eating the dead flesh off his arm,” he said.

In Koreatown, we found a large rat burrow under a sidewalk near a homeless encampment. At dusk, a horde of rats could be seen scurrying among the trash littered on the sidewalk, feasting on leftover food.

A few blocks away, during an interview with Niamh Quinn, the human-wildlife interactions advisor for the University of California’s agriculture and natural resources division, we came across an entire city block where the sidewalk was covered in open, unbagged trash. “What this is, is a lot of harborage,” Quinn said. “This is a lot of places for rats to hide, so this is not good.”

Shortly after, a municipal bus driver stopped in the road and opened the door to her vehicle. The driver told us that she has submitted several complaints to the city to have that sidewalk cleaned up—to no avail. Quinn said that in situations like Los Angeles’s, where the city fails to provide basic services effectively, it becomes almost impossible for citizens to keep themselves and their homes protected via private pest control.

“If you look where we are right now, [all these buildings] might have private pest control,” Quinn said. “But then there is literally no management here. There is no management of the landscaping, there is no management of the rodents, and there is no management of the trash. Municipal management would help fill in these holes. You wouldn’t have all of these gaps that are potential reservoirs of rodents that are invading into all of these other spaces that are managed.”

In other words, in Los Angeles, in 2026, thinking that private pest control can keep you safe from rats is a bit like thinking you can bail water out of a sinking ship faster than it pours in through multiple holes.

This year, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health provided an update—obtained via public-records request—on its typhus-surveillance efforts. In the presentation, public health officials admit that the “increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond,” and note that the department receives “no funding specifically for flea-borne typhus related activities.”

To make matters worse, more and more tools are being removed from the pest-control toolbox. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 1788 into law, sharply restricting the use of potent anticoagulant rat poisons in hopes of protecting “mountain lions and other wildlife.” Four years later, Newsom signed A.B. 2552, further expanding those restrictions.

Sked argues that those changes have made urban rat control significantly more difficult—including in L.A., where the problem may be worse than ever.

“The problem isn’t that there’s regulation,” Sked said. “The problem is that, in my opinion, the regulation is a bit knee-jerk, and instead of regulating it in a way that we can actually mitigate risks, we’re actually regulating out of existence and losing the tool altogether.”

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The rats, meantime, appear to be proliferating.

In March, Walker King, deputy district director for Los Angeles Councilwoman Nithya Raman, wrote to city officials to complain about “a large amount of rats at an abandoned building in the hills,” according to internal correspondence obtained through a public-records request. King’s email says Raman’s office had already spoken to a public inspector about the issue, but that the inspector was “noncommittal.”

Then, in June, a fire tore through a massive warehouse in Boyle Heights, destroying refrigeration for roughly 85 million pounds of frozen food. In the days that followed, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency. Residents complained of the overwhelming stench of rotting meat and an army of “giant rats” descending on the warehouse.

Last week, L.A. announced yet another flea-borne typhus outbreak, this time in the Pico-Union neighborhood, where five people have been hospitalized so far this year.

We reached out to Governor Newsom’s office, Mayor Bass’s office, and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health for comment. Newsom’s office did not offer a responsive comment. The mayor’s office asked if we had reached out to the county, and the county public-health department pointed us to their July press release.

Individually, each of these incidents might be dismissed as an isolated failure. But taken together, they paint a different picture. A county struggles to keep its streets clean, to keep garbage from piling up, to bring homelessness under control, to contain its growing rat problem, and to prevent medieval diseases from infecting its citizens—all in a state more interested in “mountain lions and other wildlife” than the health of its own people. At a certain point, like the rats that torment Angelenos, the pattern becomes too overwhelming to ignore.

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 a senior investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

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Over the past few months, we have been attempting to sort through all of the geopolitical complexities of the second Trump Administration.

On that subject, there’s hardly a better person to talk to than Sarah Adams, a former CIA analyst and one of the sharpest investigators in the business. On this week’s podcast, Adams explains the logic behind America’s campaign against Iran, and separates myth from reality as it relates to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Editor’s Note: This interview took place on July 31, 2026, before news reports emerged about a potential deal to open the Strait of Hormuz.

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Rufo: As you’re using the skillset that you honed over many years to evaluate the Iran war, what are you looking at to try to make sense of what’s happening now? What explains our recent conduct in the war?

Adams: Part of what’s happening right now, of course, is that we had sixty days to put this ceasefire deal into place. That has obviously gone haywire—the deal is pretty much up in smoke. There have also been escalations by Iran, including an attack on Jordan, where we had casualties, and attacks on Egypt.

The unfortunate thing is that everybody thought that during these sixty days, we were going to de-escalate. The thinking was that everybody was going to sit down, come to some sort of a deal, and move on from it. Now, with these recent escalations, it’s very unclear how long this is going to be prolonged. The key things that we’re looking for as we move forward are also unclear, since we don’t seem to be at the negotiating table.

Lomez: Sarah, could we take a little bit of a step back and look at this whole situation from the perspective of why we’re in Iran in the first place? This is a question that Chris and I have tried to get to the bottom of. We understand in the abstract that Iran is an enemy. They don’t like us; we don’t like them. But I think there’s quite a bit of skepticism out there from, say, MAGA conservatives toward the idea that this is a military engagement worth pursuing for us.

I hope that, perhaps from an intelligence perspective, you can give us a bit more clarity on what exactly Iran is up to. Why are they a threat right now? What are they up to that makes them such a thorn in our side and justifies this kind of action?

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I recently convened focus groups with Democratic and independent voters in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There were a total of four groups, all assembled with the aim of answering an essential question: How can the Right craft narratives that better appeal to independents and soft Democrats? How do we persuade them to be more receptive to our arguments, on issues ranging from the culture war to economics?

The path to winning them over is not a simple one.

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As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the like­li­hood of people enter­ing sub­stance use treat­ment.”

But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high—no questions asked.

We arrived at Skid Row in the morning. The campus, bounded by pastel-colored buildings and a metal gate, looked like an apocalyptic wasteland. Homeless people and addicts were splayed across the common areas, with some smoking what seemed to be hard drugs with impunity.

We stepped onto the courtyard connected to the street. No one stopped us, asked for identification, or searched us for weapons or drugs. This is apparently by design, judging by the Skid Row Action Plan and its implementation outline, which, singly or together, inspired the creation of the campus, denounced the “racist and classist war on drugs,” and called on local officials to create hubs “free from monitoring by law enforcement” and staffed by people with histories of “substance use and sex work.”

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We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.

“What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”

Across several visits, we obtained drug-testing strips, syringes, and crack pipes. One worker told us that while drug use isn’t allowed on-site, we “wouldn’t be bothered” if we got high just outside—unless we overdosed.

The entire campus takes a “low-touch” approach. In addition to staple items that many homeless shelters offer—food, laundry, some medical care—the site offers services like doggie daycare, meditation on the lawn, and “valet” cart parking. Around midday, we saw homeless people lining up in the cafeteria for Doritos and instant ramen, while around two-dozen sat in reclining chairs to watch the movie 127 Hours.

The Skid Row site launched in 2025. The campus and its services are run by a group of nonprofits committed to harm reduction, including one that laments the “long-standing criminalization of substance use.”

For these left-wing groups, the site has become a massive cash cow. The campus is listed as a federally funded health center and reportedly pulls in around $26 million a year in local, state, and federal dollars. One of its service providers, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, has seen its revenue more than double since 2020, jumping to $27 million last year. Another, Wesley Health Centers (JWCH Institute), has seen revenues more than double to $200 million in five years.

Estela Lopez, executive director of the L.A. Downtown Industrial District, thinks the campus has been a disaster.

“You want a meth pipe? Here you go. You want needles? Here you go,” she said, describing the campus’ “harm reduction” approach. “Everything that you need in order to get high, stay high, is provided, no questions asked.”

Lopez said the site has caused chaos on the nearby street. An LAPD source told us they’ve totaled 1,200 “radio calls for service” and four murders in the area so far this year. One of the site nonprofits’ employees told us that drug dealers were “fighting over the guests.”

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All of this raises questions about federal funding. Last year, President Trump signed an executive order ordering reviews of federally funded drug paraphernalia distribution sites. The order took a negative view of “so-called ‘harm reduction’ or ‘safe consumption’ efforts that only facilitate illegal drug use.”

The named nonprofits and the mayor’s office did not respond to our requests for comment, and the governor’s office did not offer a responsive comment. L.A. County claimed that they adhere “to all local, state, and federal laws,” and said the campus “is funded by L.A. Care Health Plan,” a public health plan, “and Health Net,” an LLC. (In a 2024 press release, Health Net claimed that the two entities’ investment in the campus’s launch “was the result of California’s Housing and Homelessness Incentive Program, which the state launched with the help of matching funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.”)

Our trip to Skid Row made one thing unmistakably clear: in California, harm reduction facilitates drug abuse. The state’s leaders may think that it’s compassionate to let people waste away, smoking hard drugs and prodding themselves with needles. But these behaviors lead only to ruin, and, finally, death.

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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Everyone is talking about Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. In one sense, the intense conversation surrounding the movie—its hidden subtexts, choice of actors, and fidelity to the ancient Homeric epic—is great, because it has felt like the first time in quite a while that society has been united around a particular cultural moment. It’s been several years since one film has generated such far-reaching national discussion.

But on this week’s Rufo & Lomez podcast, University of Austin political philosopher Alex Priou makes the case against Nolan’s Odyssey, arguing that the movie altered key aspects of Homer’s original work in a deliberate effort to promote a tendentious moral message. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Rufo: Alex, let’s get your cards on the table from the get-go. You watched the film this week. What was your immediate takeaway? And, as you have had a little time to think about it, has your opinion on the film changed?

Priou: I’ll put my cards on the table. People have joked that the film’s a bit of a Trojan horse, and I walked away feeling very much like it was. The film took one of the primary texts of the Western tradition and shoehorned the core of it into modern secular morality.

People have come away with very different takes; some have seen Christian elements in the film. But I think it’s fundamentally a progressive movie. It’s starting from the beginning of the Greeks; it has nods to Christianity but then to the secularization of Christianity.

I think the clearest sign of this is that the movie tells us that Odysseus sails off into the unknown West. And I think he’s giving a commentary that misappropriates the West’s roots in favor of contemporary progressive morality.

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In 2018, two women filed a class-action suit against Riot Games, the video-game colossus responsible for League of Legends, Valorant, and other popular titles. They claimed that the company had denied them and other female employees “equal pay,” favored men for promotions, and created a “hostile work environment.” The women wanted Riot Games to pay out and to “cause social change.”

One year later, the parties agreed to a $10 million settlement. It was a massive sum, but not enough for California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which intervened to block the agreement and claim that Riot Games could be on the hook for a staggering $400 million. Facing a court battle against a deep-pocketed state agency, Riot Games later agreed to a $100 million settlement, about ten times the original amount.

California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, now called the Civil Rights Department, has turned the Riot Games strategy into an entire playbook. For years, the state’s civil rights apparatus has enabled nonprofits and lawyers to shake down major companies, spinning small-dollar claims into massive, multimillion-dollar settlements.

The system operates like a mafia. Its “don,” Governor Gavin Newsom, sits at the top. His capo, CRD director Kevin Kish, runs the shakedown campaigns. And the state advances the interests of the entire Democratic apparatus: the Civil Rights Department secures settlement cash for radical NGOs, labor leaders can use the cases to create pressure for unionization, and left-wing lawyers “cause social change” at scale. For the first time, we are revealing the inner workings of California’s civil rights mafia—and exposing the corruption of state government.

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California’s Civil Rights Department was created in 1980 as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The department was initially tasked with enforcing nondiscrimination law, but in the wake of the #MeToo and George Floyd social movements, the state’s power structure saw an opportunity to turn the agency into a powerhouse. They rebranded the organization as the Civil Rights Department in 2022, in keeping with the agency’s focus on shaking down companies for “civil rights violations.”

The shakedown campaigns have been remarkably successful. In the last four years alone, the CRD has coerced corporations like Microsoft ($14 million), Snap Inc. ($15 million), and Riot Games ($100 million) to shell out eight- and nine-figure payments. These settlements have variously included provisions for class members, interest groups, and the CRD itself, which is allowed by state law to recoup fees associated with its prosecutions.

The CRD’s enforcement actions often include one or more predictable features. First, the CRD finds a handful of women or minorities who claim that a large corporation has mistreated them. Then the agency initiates or intervenes in an action against that corporation. Finally, to spin small-dollar claims into massive payouts, the CRD generates outrageous liability estimates, which goad the company to the negotiating table.

The point man on this scheme is Kevin Kish, a Yale Law School graduate and the CRD’s director. On its website, the agency notes Kish’s reputation for taking “a creative approach to advocacy,” which involves “collaborations” with nonprofits and “organizing campaigns”—in other words, using the department to advance the interests of unions, nonprofits, and other left-wing groups.

Kish mastered this approach during his time in the progressive legal movement. Before starting in state government, he worked as director of the Employment Rights Project for Bet Tzedek Legal Service, where, in one instance, he helped turn a small-time wage-and-hour case into a multimillion settlement against Walmart and one of its contractors.

Apparently pleased with Kish’s efforts, then-Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to lead the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in late 2014. Gay activists celebrated his appointment, with one LGBT group calling Kish a “strong and passionate legal champion.”

In his first few years at the DFEH, Kish oversaw several small-time suits: in 2015, he got a Mexican restaurant chain to cough up $130,000; in 2017, he induced a rural welfare nonprofit to shell out $152,000. Then, in 2019, he intervened in the Riot Games case, which later delivered a nine-figure payout and apparently encouraged him to expand his ambitions. For Kish, who has argued that “there is almost no [adult] transgender person who has not experienced . . . some form of discrimination,” the role represented an opportunity to enforce his broad understanding of “hate.”

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By 2021, Kish had perfected the shakedown model and picked a new target: Activision Blizzard, the video-game giant that owns titles like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The CRD sued the company, alleging, among other things, that it had discriminated against female employees and cultivated a “frat boy” culture. According to a criminal referral that we obtained, which was filed by a group tied to former Activision CEO Robert Kotick, the pretext for the department’s action was an earlier federal complaint, which concluded that charging Activision would “send a message to the industry as a whole.”

The original class-action suit included just ten of Activision’s more than 9,000 employees. The complaint claimed, among other things, that “only about 20 percent” of the company’s employees were female, that some of its employees riffed “about their sexual encounters,” and that a female employee had committed suicide, potentially in connection with an alleged relationship with a supervisor.

Activision initially tried to placate the CRD. Kotick reportedly “pledged to add resources to ensure that Activision Blizzard’s hiring practices are more diverse.” The company’s then-president, J. Allen Brack, said that he “disdain[ed] ‘bro culture’” and had spent his “career fighting against it.” Activision apparently even offered paid time off to workers who wanted to participate in a staged “walk-out.”

It didn’t work. In fact, things got worse: later that year, sensing the company’s vulnerability, a labor union called the Communication Workers of America (CWA) filed a suit with the National Labor Relations Board. The union accused the company of trying to prevent workers from demanding a “more equitable, sustainable, and diverse workplace.”

The CRD and the CWA apparently had shared ambitions—to punish and to unionize Activision—and even hired the same law firm. Kish’s CRD hired the same firm (Outten & Golden) that represented the CWA in another suit. The firm’s lawyer said that he believed it was the “first time the State of California has retained a private firm to prosecute employment law claims in trial court.” (In response to a question about Outten & Golden, CRD pointed us to a ruling in California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment v. California State Personnel Board.)

In September, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought its own misconduct suit against Activision. The agency claimed, among other things, that Activision had exposed “female employees to sexual harassment.” The two sides agreed to an $18 million settlement, but the CRD wasn’t satisfied.

Kish saw an opportunity for a billion-dollar shakedown. Under his direction, the CRD moved to block the eight-figure settlement with the federal government, reportedly arguing that it “was monetarily inadequate and contrary to public policy.” Their bid proved unsuccessful: a federal court denied the CRD’s requested intervention, and the settlement took effect the following March.

By this point, Activision had already agreed to pay nearly $20 million and declared its intention to change its policies and performance-review system. But Kish apparently wanted to inflict more damage on the company. The Wall Street Journal reported that sometime in 2021, the CRD estimated that Activision was responsible for nearly $1 billion in damages—an outrageous sum.

Despite the federal settlement, the CRD continued its lawsuit, and other elements of the shakedown campaign came to life. In November, then-Journal reporter Kirsten Grind and others alleged that Kotick failed to disclose alleged sexual misconduct committed against female employees. The company’s stock price fell 8 percent within a month.

Some Activision executives and other allies suspected that the state colluded with the press. The same legal filing we obtained claimed that Grind is a “CWA-affiliated union member” and had contacted Janette Wipper, the CRD attorney overseeing the Activision case under Kish, in hopes of having an “important” conversation “off the record.” Grind and a coauthor gloated that, after her report, “some employees and investors called for Kotick’s ouster, and Microsoft saw an opening to make a deal” to buy Activision.

When we asked Grind, now with the New York Times, for comment on this story, she suggested that we reach out to the Wall Street Journal.

Activision executives wanted to fight back. Under pressure from the state, the unions, and the media, the company hired three lobbyists: Greg Campbell, Dana Williamson, and, according to a source familiar with the case, Alexis Podesta.

In early 2022, the tide began to turn. In March, Newsom’s office fired Wipper. Notably, she was fired on the same day that a federal court approved the EEOC settlement, which our source interpreted as a sign that the governor’s office was feeling pressure and wanted the case to go away.

Less than a month later, Wipper’s subordinate, Melanie Proctor, resigned in protest, claiming that Newsom’s office had “repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation.”

Eventually, Kish scaled back his demands. In December 2023, Activision settled for $55 million. In the settlement agreement, the state conceded that “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated” allegations of systemic harassment, but the company likely signed the deal to make the lawsuit go away. The government had not proved its case but still managed to shake down its mark for tens of millions of dollars.

The Civil Rights Department made sure to spread the winnings around. In the settlement, Activision agreed to deliver a handsome reward to the CRD’s NGO foot soldiers. The court required the company to send up to about $9 million to the CRD and Outten & Golden, the CWA’s former counsel. The rest of the $55 million was supposedly reserved for affected workers, but any leftover funds not claimed by those workers would support future shakedowns—specifically, CRD-selected organizations that “promote employment rights for workers in California and/or . . . advance the interests of women workers in technology industries.”

The unions had their victory, too. In October 2023, Microsoft acquired Activision for $75.4 billion after agreeing to a host of labor provisions. The CWA considered the merger a massive success, boasting that it provided “a clear path to collective bargaining for almost 10,000 workers.”

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With the final settlement agreement, the Activision story appeared to be over. But there another storyline was brewing beneath the surface, raising serious questions about the Newsom administration. That story involves Dana Williamson, the one-time Activision lobbyist, who, in January 2023, while the Activision litigation was ongoing, became Governor Newsom’s chief of staff.

During her time in the governor’s office, Williamson kept tabs on the Activision case. According to a source with detailed knowledge of the case, the governor sent a text message to Kotick, which we reviewed, one week after the December 2023 settlement, sharing gratitude that the saga was finally over. In January 2024, according to the source and government records obtained by the whistleblower Melanie Proctor, Kotick met with Williamson and former Activision lobbyist Alexis Podesta in the governor’s office.

According to the source, Kotick, by then retired as Activision CEO, sat down with Williamson to discuss clearing Activision’s name—after all, the state had admitted that it had found no evidence of systematic harassment. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, claims that midway through the meeting, Newsom stepped into the room, engaged in conversation, and, unprovoked, said that he would fire Kish.

Newsom’s office did not respond to our request for comment about these allegations.

Williamson apparently believed him. In November 2025, Williamson was indicted on a suite of federal corruption charges, including bank and wire fraud. According to court documents, Williamson conspired with Greg Campbell, another former Activision lobbyist, to siphon money from a dormant campaign account to pay a third party. She and Campbell were both later convicted, with Williamson pleading guilty to multiple fraud counts and lying to federal agents.

The alleged corruption was not related to Activision, but the indictment contained a transcript of a conversation between Williamson and Podesta, the former Activision lobbyist and un-indicted co-conspirator, that sheds light on Newsom’s potential involvement in the civil rights mafia. In a conversation that occurred “[i]n or about June 2024,” prosecutors said Williamson discussed a public records request related to a corporation’s “litigation with the state.” When Podesta asked Williamson if a state employee connected to that litigation would be fired, she said: “He sure [will]!”

According to multiple outlets and our own review of the evidence, the corporation in question was almost certainly Activision. And we can report, for the first time, that the official in question was likely the head of the Civil Rights Department. In other words, Williamson appears to have told her alleged co-conspirator that, as late as June 2024, Governor Newsom was planning to fire Kevin Kish.

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The Kish firing, however, never materialized. Kish remains the director of the Civil Rights Department. And more shakedown campaigns are in the pipeline.

This all raises a question: Why is Newsom enabling this racket?

One theory is that Newsom sympathizes with Kish and wants to punish corporations like Activision, which, in his mind, are stand-ins for his political enemies. Another theory is that Newsom has always allowed bad behavior to fester around him at arm’s length. Throughout Newsom’s career, people in his orbit have been arrested for corruption, including, most recently, his chief of staff.

Perhaps Newsom tolerates Kish’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach because he simply lacks the will to stop it.

The most likely explanation, however, is that Newsom will do whatever is politically expedient. Under this theory, Newsom might have promised to fire Kish to placate Williamson or corporate interests, then reneged on that promise to placate the unions and the activist groups. Throughout his career, Newsom has been willing to reverse his position if he believes that it is in his immediate interest.

Newsom’s office did not respond to our request for comment on this story. The Civil Rights Department told us that they “take every complaint we receive seriously and evaluate them individually for further action based on the specific facts and circumstances.”

If anything, Kish operated under even less restraint. The CRD has now set its sight on the largest target of all: Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In 2022, the department sued Tesla, alleging racial discrimination and harassment. Kish apparently hopes to go much further than in his campaigns against Riot Games, Snap, and Activision. According to a source familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Kish is hoping to shake down Tesla for up to $6 billion.

Unlike those other firms, however, Tesla hasn’t settled and is taking its chances in court. If Tesla succeeds in fighting these allegations, its resistance could provide a model for future targets of the state’s racket. If it fails, it will show that no company—no matter how powerful—can outrun the coordinated campaigns of California’s civil rights mafia.

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. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

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Lindsey Graham, the longtime Republican senator, died last week. Graham was perhaps the last institutionalist in the U.S. Senate; he loved the game of politics, and he was willing to play it wherever it led. Graham strongly opposed Donald Trump at first, but after Trump entered the White House, he adapted to him and figured out how to flatter the president to advance his policy priorities.

Graham had authentic convictions. He was an interventionist. He had a passion for the U.S.-Israel relationship, he hated America’s Cold War enemies (especially Russia), and he was a war hawk.

In their reactions to Graham’s death, what I’ve seen from the Left and some on the Right is an inability to accept that the late senator was simply a very good institutional operator; they can’t grasp his game, so they need to construct a fantasy to attempt to understand him. From the Left, there is the usual sick celebratory attitude along with twisted psychosexual fantasies. From some on the Right, it’s a conspiratorial fantasy that Graham was operating on behalf of a foreign power. The truth, however, is much simpler.

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As many readers are no doubt aware, last week saw a thundering victory for candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America in New York City’s Democratic congressional primaries. Three candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani—Brad Lander, Clare Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—beat establishment-endorsed but still highly progressive Democrats, including sitting congressmen in the cases of Lander and Chevalier.

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What does this election result tell us? First, that organization rules. The DSA won because they outorganized their opponents with their full-time activists, full-time messaging apparatus, and full-time get-out-the-vote operation. They harvested the energy such that the momentum was on their side, and they secured the votes.

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Gavin Newsom is reportedly under federal investigation. Last week, the California governor released a recorded statement claiming that federal agents are combing through records as part of an inquiry targeting him and his wife. “In recent days,” Newsom said, “federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former employees—not because they found…

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Some on the Right have expressed the view that, if culture is downstream of politics, right-wing dominance in the political sphere will gradually lead to the adoption of conservative norms, values, and sensibilities. Michael Anton, one of the Right’s most influential writers, and, until recently, an official in the State Department, argues that for conservatives to truly regain influence in popular culture, it will require more than just brute political force.

In the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Anton makes the case for the Right’s activists, donors, and institutions to change their mindset when it comes to influencing culture—and to manage their expectations.

Rufo: Michael Anton is one of the smartest thinkers and writers on the Right, according to both friends and detractors. He recently finished a stint in the Trump administration as the director of policy planning at the State Department. But today, Mike, I wanted to talk to you about the culture. This is something that behind the scenes you care about tremendously. You’re working on a new book. You have a fiction novel in the works. What are you thinking about when you think about culture, and what are you working on right now?

Anton: Even before I was formally out of government last year, I sort of just switched over to doing a couple of books. One of them is Dispatches from the Late Republic. It’s a collection of previously published essays. Not one-hundred percent non-political, but mostly non-political. Then, I had all this Machiavelli stuff—some of which had been previously published, some of which were just papers given at conferences and not previously published, and some of it that was just thoughts on the hard drive that I had to put together—and I thought, ‘It’ll take a month or two,’ and it turns out it took much longer than that.

So, I’ve just been living in the political philosophy world for several months getting that book done. When the election and presidential transition happened [in 2024], I was on the transition. As you noted, I was in the State Department, but then I came back to Texas, and I just worked basically on Machiavelli until the spring of this year. And then I started writing based on the notes that I have. I’ve done a couple of other research trips for that. So, it’s been very pleasant.

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I am just living in a kind of little bubble. It’s a pleasant little bubble.

Rufo: What have you learned about Machiavelli? What’s the general thrust of the piece, and what are the big ideas that you’re grappling with?

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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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