Richard Ebright is a scientist at Rutgers University and was one of the earliest critics of the government’s false narratives around COVID. In this interview, Ebright discusses Anthony Fauci’s backdated pardon, the effort to suppress the laboratory-origin hypothesis, and the professional costs of dissent. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Rufo: So take us back and tell us exactly what’s happening here, and what’s the significance of this backdated pardon all the way to 2014?

Ebright: I, of course, do not know the motivation of the Biden administration—or of the autopen operator—in setting the pardon’s start date. I can say that Anthony Fauci approved a research grant that supported high-risk virus-discovery research and very high-risk virus gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, starting in 2014. I can also say that Anthony Fauci, in his role as NIAID director, repeatedly and flagrantly—misfeasantly—violated U.S. government policies that were put in effect in 2014 to protect the public from laboratory-generated pandemics: specifically, a pause that was put in place in October 2014 that precluded federal funding of gain-of-function research on influenza viruses, MERS viruses, and SARS viruses—a pause that most definitely covered the research in that grant proposal, but which, nevertheless, Anthony Fauci and his office continued funding in flagrant, open violation of the pause.

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Nick Freitas is an all-American man. A former Green Beret who enlisted following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Freitas served in the Virginia House of Delegates for ten years and came close to unseating then-Democrat Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger in 2020. This month, Freitas announced that his podcast, Making the Argument, was joining the Blaze Media network, which is rapidly expanding its lineup.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Freitas discusses the the splintering of the Right, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s millennial feminism, and the challenges facing young men.

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Rufo: I’m very excited this week to talk with our newest colleague at Blaze Media, Nick Freitas, who’s a military and a political veteran. He’s got a great new podcast on the Blaze network.

Nick, I wanted to talk to you and get your take right off the bat. The Right is reorganizing right now. What do you see from your perspective? You’ve been a longtime observer, but where do you think things stand at this moment?

Freitas: What a polite way to put it—the Right is reorganizing… with a sledgehammer.

I think a couple of things are going on. I think there’s one side of the Right that has just become completely demoralized, and I think some of that’s an intentional op. Look, if the Left can’t convince you to vote the way they want, they’ll settle for your apathy or your demoralization. And so, I think they’re feeding into some of that. These are the people that have just totally blackpilled at this point, and that’s sad, and I want to get them back in the fight.

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California will not stop taxing its citizens. The state slaps a 63-cent fee on every gallon of gas. Sales taxes exceed 10 percent in some cities. The state’s highest earners pay a double-digit marginal rate to Sacramento on top of what they owe the feds.

One group, more than any other, has cashed in on this arrangement: California’s public-sector unions. For them, higher taxes are good business. More taxes means more state workers, which means more union members, more dues, and more power for union bosses. The union bosses, in turn, keep the dollars flowing, agitating for more tax hikes, more spending, and more state workers.

How powerful are California’s public-sector unions? We pored over disclosure forms and crunched the numbers. It turns out that, in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024, ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members collected more than $1 billion in dues and fees.

Many of these unions spend at least some of their revenues on lobbying. State politicians, playing their part in the scheme, devote more taxpayer resources to the public sector, inching California toward the kind of soft socialism that its leaders have long desired—no armed revolution necessary.

This is California’s billion-dollar union machine.

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Unions exist to represent their members’ interests. In the private sector, unions negotiate against a corporation, whose executives have skin in the game. In the public sector, by contrast, unions negotiate against the state, which is spending other people’s money. In California, public-sector unions have exploited this dynamic to create a feedback loop that has made them the most powerful machine in state politics.

We focused on ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members. Our list features key players in the state’s labor movement: the California Teachers Association (CTA); the California Nurses Association (CNA); the California School Employees Association (CSEA); and various International Union of Operating Engineers, SEIU, and AFSCME chapters. These groups raked in more than $1 billion in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024—and show little sign of slowing down.

Their size is astounding. The ten unions have more than 1 million members. They list more than 1,500 employees and officers who administer the unions, organize the workers, and more. The unions’ combined membership equates to at least 6 percent of the state’s 2024 presidential-election voters and at least 29 percent of the state’s 2024 Democratic primary voters—more than enough to sway a statewide contest.

Those members pay annual dues. Some of the unions, in turn, send money to Democrats. The successful campaign of the current assembly Speaker, Democrat Robert Rivas, received funds from the political-action arms of CNA and CSEA. California’s eight statewide officials—all Democrats—received a campaign donation from at least one of the ten unions’ PACs at some point in their careers.

Lobbying is another way that these unions can throw their weight around. The ten unions reported at least $29 million in political and lobbying expenditures in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024. Several unions employed an army of in-house “political organizers” who served the unions’ political interests, day in and day out.

The unions don’t have to spend much money to see a return on investment. In 2024, the California Teachers Association spent $2.1 million to lobby for a $10 billion school construction bond. It passed, and while the CTA doesn’t pocket the money, new schools mean more education funding for teacher and staff salaries and hiring—a win for the unions, at an estimated cost of $18 billion, after bond interest, to taxpayers.

State programs give unions a chance to expand their power. California’s $33 billion In-Home Supportive Services program, for example, pays caregivers—most of whom are family members—to aid the elderly and disabled. The state requires caregivers to attend an introductory training and, in at least one case, has allegedly permitted a union representative to join them. One of these unions allegedly locked IHSS workers in a room during orientation and “coerced” one of them to become a member.

Predictably, the two primary IHSS unions—SEIU 2015 and UDW—have seen massive windfalls as the program has expanded. Between them, the two unions collected $168 million in dues and fees in 2024.

The final leg of the unions’ feedback loop is agitating for new taxes. SEIU’s United Health Care Workers–West (UHW) sponsored Proposition 40, the so-called “billionaires tax,” which would levy a 5 percent tax on the assets of all California billionaires. Most proceeds from the tax would flow to health care services, including Medi-Cal—a program that funds hospitals and other settings where UHW can harvest workers.

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These unions are not content to run California politics. Their ideology impels them to colonize new territory; some believe that public workers are oppressed, while one, apparently, is focused on securing abortion rights. And some of California’s public-sector unions have bolstered progressive campaigns across the country, both directly and through their parent unions.

Take UHW. In 2024, the union sent $2.2 million to “Arizonans Fed Up With Failing Healthcare,” a left-wing group, which apparently shoveled the money to support Arizona’s successful 2024 ballot measure establishing a state constitutional right to abortion.

In 2024, California’s public-sector unions transferred millions of dollars to their parent labor organizations. Once that money enters the national accounts, the parent unions can deploy California money in whatever state they wish—potentially intervening in elections or lobbying for new legislation.

The unions’ national arms intervene in elections across the country. SEIU shuffled $75,000 to support New York Representative and current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and $85,000 to support South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn. AFSCME’s contributions during the 2024 election cycle reportedly exceeded $17 million.

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These unions present themselves as defenders of the working class. City Journal’s investigation of their expenses, however, reveals that some have spent their revenues on tony hotels and consultants.

Take the California Nurses Association, which holes up at luxury resorts. The union reported spending some $446,000 across four luxury properties in 2024: $180,000 at the Hotel del Coronado; $70,000 at the Claremont in Berkeley; $131,000 at Toronto’s Four Seasons; and $65,000 at the oceanfront Seascape Beach Resort in Aptos. CNA classified these charges as “administration,” representation, or “overhead.”

SEIU 2015, which represents IHSS workers, is another example. IHSS workers earned an average of $17.95 an hour as of January 2024. The union’s leaders, by contrast, apparently enjoyed $618,719 spent at the oceanfront, four-diamond Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa in Dana Point: $344,668 for executive-board meetings, $239,130 for managers’ retreats, and $34,921 for a growth-staff retreat—while many of its workers earn around minimum wage.

UNAC spent nearly $200,000 in “overhead” on three boutique coaching firms. One of those firms, Canyon Bridge Consulting, addresses, among other things, “reactive, abrasive, or alienating behaviors.” Another, UniqueSpeak, offers, among other services, personal branding advice, crisis communications, and presentation tips for “ESL speakers.” The third, PULP Coaching, markets leadership exercises such as snowshoeing, sailing, surfing, and cave exploration.

The line items are vague, and we don’t know what exactly UNAC spent these dollars on. But the spending raises an obvious question: What are UNAC’s members getting for their money?

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The bill for the union machine’s activities is coming due in Sacramento. California’s near-term budget balance depends on $20 billion in reserve withdrawals and suspended deposits and another $4 billion in borrowing. The Newsom administration projected a $14 billion structural deficit in 2026–27. The unions’ answer to every sign of fiscal limits is the same: find more revenue.

Consider the schools. California’s K–12 enrollment hit 6.3 million students in 2004–05. The 2025-26 count was 5,731,260—a 9 percent decline, even after adding some pupils through a new grade level, “transitional-kindergarten.” Rather than allow the system to contract with its student population, the CTA backed a measure that would make permanent a “temporary” tax hike, which would send billions to schools—even as enrollments decline.

The same ratchet operates in local government. Los Angeles County’s 2025 SEIU agreement added several bonuses and carried a potential cost approaching $2 billion, much of it expected from state and federal reimbursements. Even though a local union reached the agreement, taxpayers across the country are paying the cost.

Pensions carry these obligations decades into the future. California’s state and local retirement systems have more than $265 billion in estimated unfunded pension liabilities, according to the Reason Foundation. After the Great Recession, the City of Stockton maintained its pension-system obligations even after a federal judge ruled that it could reduce them. San Bernardino, which had gone bankrupt, agreed to repay missed contributions, plus interest and penalties while protecting earned pensions—even as the city went under. Pension promises survived even when everything else gave way.

Medi-Cal brings the doom loop into a single, massive statewide program. It covers nearly 15 million people, pays workers represented by UHW and other health-care unions, and costs local, state, and federal taxpayers nearly $220 billion. Now, facing the limits of existing taxpayer resources, UHW is advancing the Prop. 40 wealth tax to keep Medi-Cal—and the union machine—growing.

We contacted all ten of the unions included in our review. Only one, SEIU 1021, responded, and did so to defend high-dollar expenditures on its 2024 convention. “We book union hotels, hire union caterers, and produce the convention with union stagehands and technicians . . . and performers who support working people,” a spokesman said. “Paying union wages to union workers is not a scandal. It’s the job.”

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California is approaching a tipping point. The population benefiting directly from government spending is poised to grow faster than the private economy expected to finance it. Medi-Cal alone covers more than one-third of Californians. Add government and nonprofit employees, workers in taxpayer-supported industries, and recipients of other benefits, and California’s state-dependent constituency approaches majority scale.

A voter asked to choose between fiscal restraint and a program supporting his job, health coverage, or pension is not deciding an abstract policy question. He is deciding whether to cut his own income. The unions exist to organize that self-interest, discipline it, and turn it out at election time. The politicians impose higher taxes, which drive away many residents and businesses that pay more than they consume, leaving a larger burden for those who remain—and another argument for a federal bailout, “alimony” from ex-California residents, or a new tax hike.

California’s unions built this power one payroll deduction, contract, training session, regulation, and ballot measure at a time. Private enterprise has no comparable permanent organization. The union machine needs to win only periodically to lock in for good another program, tax, employment category, or spending commitment, with each victory unlocking more power and resources. On the other side, the machine’s opponents must mobilize and win every time just to keep what they already have.

The technology sector is California’s last private power center with the wealth and independence to resist the union machine. As the state’s own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has reminded the public, California’s budget partly hinges on fortunes generated by Silicon Valley.

That’s why the wealth tax is the final wake-up call for California’s technology sector—the final power base the unions have not captured. Unless private-sector workers begin to vote, spend, and organize with the same discipline, California’s socialist revolution by other means will continue doing what it was designed to do: turn public money into political power, political power into still more public money, and replicate the model across the nation—with no end in sight.

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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Jason Arday was a Cambridge University professor and serial plagiarist who was found dead after he was exposed as a fraud.

To me, the Jason Arday story represents a kind of racial fairy tale. Arday, a black man with dreadlocks and strong eyeliner, said that he was diagnosed with autism at age three, that he couldn’t speak his first words until age eleven, and that he didn’t learn how to read and write until age 18. He claimed heroic feats of athletic prowess, like running 30 marathons in 35 days. He faced death threats at his office in Cambridge after he bravely stood up to racists. And he was simultaneously a prodigy in the field of sociology; he was the youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge.

Arday was a would-be academic demigod who fulfilled a racial fairy tale that elite liberals desperately wanted to believe. There’s a now-viral clip of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, fawning over him, holding his hands, and telling Arday that he’s the “best in the world” in his field. The irony is that he actually was the very best at what he did, but what he was doing was plagiarism, fabrication, and deceit, not sociology of education. What he was the best at was creating a racial myth that flattered the sensibilities of liberal academics.

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As we have been observing over the past two years, the Left is undergoing an ideological transformation—away from the woke excesses of the late 2010s and early 2020s and toward a complex blend of socialist economics, embrace of mass migration, and dogmatic opposition to Israel. Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, has risen to prominence with her work identifying this ideology as a form of“Third Worldism.” In this interview, Riboua explains what precisely Third Worldism is, why the Left has chosen to embrace it now, and how it differs from left-wing causes ranging from socialism to Islamism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Rufo: New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently declared that Woke 1.0 is over and the Left is going to be moving on from what she characterized as the “crazy” excesses of its past. But moving on to where? It’s long been my thesis that what’s next on the Left’s agenda is the ideology of Third Worldism.

Zineb, you recently published a great piece about the origins and ideological contours of Third Worldism. To start out, I just want to keep it very simple: What is Third Worldism?

Riboua: I would say that Third Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens: one where you show who is the colonizer and the colonized, who is the oppressor and the oppressed, and you frame things on a geopolitical scale through the lens of the Global North versus the Global South. It’s a very binary way through which one can see the world—and, ultimately, the thesis is that the people of the South should triumph against the people of the North. So, it’s very absorbed in that type of revolutionary quest that I think we can see now. It takes different forms, obviously, but I think right now it’s really being driven by anti-Zionism.

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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, …

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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 dis…

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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 …

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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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It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial eco…

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This week’s big news is that Graham Platner, Democrats’ far-Left candidate for Senate in Maine, has dropped out of the race after rape allegations surfaced. This accusation came from a woman named Jenny Racicot, but it wasn’t the first accusation of sexual misconduct against Platner. The New York Times reported in early June that Lyndsey Fifield, a Republican political operative and ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, also claimed he had abused her. At the time, national Democrats downplayed Fifield’s allegations as politically motivated—but now, with a highly explicit rape accusation from a progressive Democrat, they’ve finally abandoned their candidate in Maine.

My take on this saga is going to diverge from what you’ve likely seen in conservative media, which is contempt for Platner and a generally celebratory attitude regarding his destruction. When the Fifield allegation emerged last month, I watched the entire conservative intelligentsia adopt what was essentially the MeToo framework: immediately accepting every accusation of sexual assault and condemning the accused without any kind of scrutiny.

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It’s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on South Figueroa Street in residential Los Angeles. As children inside prepare for their futures, a young female struts by in high heels, wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket.

“We’ll see some police officers roll by and some young …

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The big event for me this week was my appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast. Because we’re in the era of Trump 2.0 and “woke” has waned, it was especially interesting because much of the podcast revolved around renegotiating the terms of debates in which the Left simply refused to engage for many years: on immigration, race, demographics, and other emotionally fraught and previously off-the-table issues.

Klein tried to trap me with claims about Tucker Carlson’s supposed “white nationalism,” but I made the argument that this language is meant to obfuscate the real issues, and that it’s totally legitimate to be concerned about rapid, large-scale demographic change caused by mass migration. Once we shifted the ground from personality to principle, Klein was much more thoughtful, and he even made what are major concessions for a New York Times personality, such as admitting that anti-white racism occurred during the woke era, that the Left engaged in unjust campaigns of social annihilation, and acknowledging that it is totally legitimate to be concerned about “large-scale, rapid demographic change.”

This is a major turn. Anti-white racism was dismissed as a far-Right talking point for many years. And any talk of the relationship between mass migration and demographic change incurred left-wing attacks that you were trafficking in the “Great Replacement Theory,” that you were a purveyor of white nationalism, and that you were engaged in KKK-style white supremacy.

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Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station to…

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