In 1970, a 17-year-old black militant pulled a gun from beneath his coat at the Marin County Hall of Justice. He took control of Courtroom 3, distributing weapons bought by Angela Davis to three inmates, including one on trial for assaulting a prison guard. They took the judge, prosecutor, and three jurors hostage. An hour later, the judge and three of the perpetrators were dead.

The vigilantes failed to break the legal system. But today, a new crop of radicals in California is pursuing that goal by other means. These activists hope to infiltrate the judiciary and use the levers of power to upend American justice.

Los Angeles County is the seat of the revolution. Across two recent election cycles, hard-left activists spent nearly $1 million on a slate of judicial candidates, electing three judges committed to remaking the county’s criminal-justice system. For the ideologues behind the campaign, this the opening move in what they hope will be a national takeover of the judiciary.

One architect of the takeover is La Defensa, a “femme-led” advocacy organization whose founders want to end incarceration in Los Angeles County. The group says that it “belong[s] to” several “communities,” namely “Chicanx, queer, immigrant, undocumented, working class people with incarcerated loved ones.”

La Defensa was founded in 2020 by current L.A. council member Eunisses Hernandez and Ivette Alé-Ferlito, both of whom want to abolish prisons.

“Electing progressive judges serves as a harm-reduction measure that disrupts power, it can only be effective as part of a broader abolitionist strategy,” Alé-Ferlito wrote in 2023. “It will take collective action to end incarceration in all its forms.”

The group is becoming a powerhouse. Its political arm, Justice PAC, has received high-dollar donations from Liz Simons, heiress to Renaissance Technology founder Jim Simons’s fortune, and Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. La Defensa is linked to the Soros-funded Tides Advocacy network.

Many judges are former prosecutors who believe in punishing criminals. La Defensa wants to change that. As part of its “Defenders of Justice” slate, the group funded the judicial campaigns of six former defense attorneys and one civil rights lawyer across the 2022 and 2024 election cycles. Multiple candidates on the slate seemed to sympathize more with criminals than with their victims.

La Defensa’s PAC spent at least $910,000 on judicial candidates from 2022 through 2024. Their donations helped elect three former public defenders: George Turner Jr., Ericka Wiley, and Holly Hancock. The new judges’ backgrounds and ideologies open a window onto La Defensa’s vision for the future of L.A. County’s justice system and beyond.

Turner is a committed radical. He studied race, class, and gender as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, before attending UCLA’s law school, where he studied under some of the founders of critical race theory, including Kimberlé Crenshaw. After graduating, he served as a public defender in Los Angeles County. He named his three sons after his “favorite revolutionaries,” including slave-rebellion leader Nat Turner, black nationalist Malcolm X, and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Turner’s educational background and years defending accused criminals have apparently convinced him that America’s criminal-justice system is racist. He’s even come up with a novel analogy for a courtroom.

“It’s kind of like a slave ship,” Turner said on a podcast in 2020. “I see black men brought in in chains every day in a big wooden box and someone decides whether or not they’re going to be free or not. And it’s my job to do what I can to try to get them out.”

He and other candidates on the “Defenders” slate believe that crime is often caused by factors like poverty. If you provide housing, jobs, and other services, on this view, crime will plummet.

“Circumstances are the reason why [most people] come before the court,” Turner said. “Putting folks in cages, it just doesn’t work.”

In keeping with that view, Turner centered his campaign on the fight against “mass incarceration.” He pledged to focus on applying laws “aimed at decreasing the number of those incarcerated” to “help create a more just and equitable society.”

Turner appealed to a broad coalition of left-wing voters. He was endorsed by supposedly mainstream groups like the L.A. County Democratic Party, the Public Defenders Union Local 148, California Progressive Alliance, and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. He also won support from the Los Angeles County chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which said it backed Turner over “ghouls who built their careers throwing people in jail.”

Another “Defenders” judge is Ericka Wiley. She spent more than two decades as a Los Angeles County deputy public defender, handling cases ranging from traffic infractions to capital murder. Wiley ran for judge after attending La Defensa’s judicial leadership academy, which taught candidates how to campaign, raise money, and reach voters.

She is aligned with La Defensa’s anti-carceral agenda. She has suggested that the violent crime problem in Los Angeles is “exaggerat[ed]” and called for the dismantling of “systems that . . . support mass incarceration.”

Holly Hancock, a former flight attendant turned public defender, won her judicial election in 2022. She thinks “diversity” will fix supposed problems with the criminal-justice system.

“Los Angeles County deserves diversity . . . diversity of race, diversity of ethnicity, diversity of gender, gender fluidity,” she said at a campaign event. “Background determines behavior.”

On a podcast in 2022, Hancock outlined her vision to “deconstruct” the justice system. She endorsed “sound healing” and healing circles that bring criminals and victims together to discuss crime. “I just want to get on the bench so . . . I can try all these crazy things,” she said.

We reached out to La Defensa, Eunisses Hernandez, and the three judges named in this story. La Defensa and Hernandez did not respond, and the judges declined to comment.

The three judges are variously assigned to children, family, small claims, and unlawful detainer matters, and likely aren’t dealing much with hardened criminals. But for La Defensa, this is only a start.

Alé-Ferlito believes Los Angeles is laying the groundwork for a national takeover. La Defensa endorsed a candidate for L.A. City Attorney. Eventually, it seeks to overturn America’s entire 237-year-old judicial system.

“We’re actually clearing the path for judicial transformation,” she said, “all the way up to the Supreme Court.”

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After Mirna Arauz Soza clocked out of her overnight shift at Original Tommy’s Hamburgers, she boarded the L.A. Metro red line as part of her usual commute. The 66-year-old mother of three didn’t make it one stop before Elliot Tramel Nowden crept from behind and stabbed her in the neck.

Nowden, a homeless offender banned from Metro after stabbing a college student on a train in 2019, grabbed her bag and fled. Mirna’s family told us that she hobbled onto the platform and bled out for at least an hour before succumbing to her injuries. According to the family, Metro did not have officials patrolling the station that morning.

Five months ago, we filed a public records request for information about Mirna’s murder. Metro refused, citing family privacy concerns. Later, it claimed that releasing footage of this high-profile murder on board was not in the “public interest.” We countered with a letter from Mirna’s three surviving children authorizing the release of all footage related to their mother’s death, but Metro still refused to release all the material.

Anyone who uses public transportation in the United States knows that evidence of an innocent bystander’s unprovoked, violent murder on a train is of undeniable public interest. Angelenos should know what they’re up against every time they step on public transit. But Metro has refused to give them the full and uncensored truth.

So we’re suing them to get it.

Angelenos have seen enough to know that Metro is a hellscape. Riders told us they see knives, guns, violence, or even dead bodies all the time. One even told us that you could get away with killing someone on Metro.

None of this is by accident. Metro began giving up on effective policing about ten years ago. Since then, fare enforcement has collapsed. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. About half of all riders reportedly don’t pay, and more than 90 percent of violent criminals on Metro (including Nowden, according to Mirna’s family) evade fares. Metro could catch criminals like Mirna’s murderer at the gates, if only it tried.

We reported these shocking statistics months ago. Since we blew the whistle on its lawless system, Metro has doubled down. Earlier this year, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass became Chair of the Metro Board, where she’s responsible for overseeing the entire transit agency. Bass has said that she wants to develop a plan to make Metro officially “fare-free.”

Over our months-long battle with local bureaucrats in L.A., we’ve engaged with Metro lawyers, leadership, and riders. Everyone knows Metro has a safety problem. Too few seem willing to admit that policing could help.

Metro has committed itself to social justice instead of law and order at the expense of the low-income commuters and law-abiding Angelenos who rely on the system. Even worse, Metro is trying to conceal the violence and mayhem that happens on board.

That’s why we’re suing Metro. Mirna’s family deserves to know what happened to their mother. And Californians deserve to know what kind of monsters await them on the county’s public trains.

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In 2019, I volunteered on a campaign to stop Washington State’s Initiative 1000, which would have legalized racial discrimination in employment, college admissions, and government contracting. On one side: the state’s Democratic machine, left-wing NGOs, progressive media, and major corporations. On the other: a small band of conservatives and mostly non-ideological Asian Americans who opposed the measure as discrimination operating under the guise of “diversity.”

Despite being vastly outspent, our campaign won. Washington State voters upheld the standard of colorblind equality by a margin of 21,000 votes. It was a grassroots campaign that relied on earned media, word-of-mouth, and behind-the-scenes organizing.

At the victory gala, one Chinese-American man approached me and showed me his worn hands. He explained that he had worked in commercial freezers for 15 years to give his child a chance at the American Dream. The freezers were so cold that they had burned off his fingerprints.

I’ve been thinking about that campaign this week as a fierce debate about Indian immigration has raged through the discourse. The inciting incident was an X post last month by Bo French, a Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, who wrote that a group of Indian-American students cheering on the University of Texas football team represented a “problem.”

The post was a gift to two groups: the racialist Left and the racialist Right. The racialist Left has long tried to convince Indian Americans that they are an oppressed group that must unite with the intersectional coalition to overthrow “whiteness.” The racialist Right insists that people of Indian descent are an eternal Other who will never become Americans.

These two lies are mirror images of each other. Both factions have sought to reduce the discussion to rounds of mutual recrimination. That might serve their short-term interests, but it will do nothing to help the broad swath of Americans—of all racial and ethnic groups—caught in the middle.

I see three great questions in this conversation: assimilation, immigration, and culture. The first is the easiest. As the young men cheering on the Longhorns show, Indian Americans have demonstrated a strong capacity for assimilation. As a group, they have high levels of education, income, family stability, and entrepreneurialism. Many would-be Indian immigrants also have a fluency with Anglo-American culture and a strong ability for integrating into professional-managerial institutions.

The second question is immigration. The key point to recognize is that immigration is a nonlinear phenomenon. There is an enormous advantage to bringing in the most talented people from around the world. But as more and more people come, the cost-benefit ratio necessarily shifts. Whatever the skill level or country of origin, mass immigration always carries a risk of increasing cultural tensions, balkanization, nepotism, and dislocation. The greater the scale and speed, the greater the challenge of assimilation.

In recent years, many Americans have felt anxious about mass immigration because of its unprecedented scale, speed, and cultural difference. There are cities in Michigan that are run by Islamic migrants and where anti-Semitism is rife. There are cities in Texas that are now 20, 30, or 40 percent foreign-born, where ethnic enclaves are making assimilation harder. And economically, Americans increasingly compete for jobs with immigrants, many of whom have come here illegally or through legal but broken systems. These are policy choices, and it is perfectly legitimate for Americans to demand different ones.

The third question is about culture. Every immigrant group brings a particular constellation of values, habits, and norms that must be absorbed and negotiated over time. While something like the sharia culture of the Islamic world provides an acute contrast, the high-stakes testing cultures of countries like India and China entail more subtle tradeoffs. The upside is obvious: rewards for competition, hard work, and technical accomplishment. But there is also a hidden downside: brutal “grind” routines, universal zero-sum competition, immense pressure to conform, widespread cheating rings, distortions to family formation, depression, and suicide—problems increasingly being recognized in Asia itself.

The American approach is different. We should use tests to identify natural talent, reward those who work hard, and judge individuals without regard to race. But this does not mean that we should accept a Chinese-style regime of educational formation, high-stakes testing culture, and state-managed life trajectories as a superior form of “meritocracy.” America is an expansive country, and we should not collapse our system to a single dimension. We need both the valedictorian and the football captain; the math nerd and the prom queen; the software engineers and the artists, soldiers, statesmen, pioneers, farmers, and poets, all representing deep American archetypes.

The pervasive question is how we integrate new groups into the collective American ethos. Historically, America has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for assimilation. Today, however, we have the highest foreign-born population share in our history, so this project requires special prudence. I believe the best path forward is to slow down the flow of immigration to match our capacity to assimilate newcomers, to focus on building a shared national identity, and to initiate an honest debate about what kinds of institutions we want in America.

It won’t be easy. The racialist factions on both sides would prefer to keep us locked in a cycle of outrages. We should resist this temptation. As I learned in the successful campaign to stop left-wing racialism in Washington State, it’s possible to build a winning coalition of people who set aside ethnic factionalism and work together for the common good of America.

San Francisco, California – It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.

Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.

According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.

The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.

The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.

Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.

You can’t just walk into the Taylor Street complex. The facility has at least one guard and multiple security doors. But residents seem to be able to come and go with relative ease.

We spoke with one man, Paul, as he walked to an appointment in the neighborhood. Paul told us that he served time for a sex-related offense, had to register as a sex offender, and now lives at the Taylor Street house. In his opinion, there’s overblown “hysteria” around sex offenders’ proximity to children.

“For me, seeing a minor is like walking in the Tenderloin late at night,” he said. “Like, ‘stay away from that person.’”

Some of Paul’s neighbors seem less scrupulous. Multiple residents at 111 Taylor Street are “in violation” of their sex-offender-registration requirements, according to the state’s public database. At least one has been accused of sexually deviant behavior during his time at the Taylor house: Kevin Adams, a 37-year-old convicted in 2014 of transmitting more than 600 images of child pornography, including some that were sadistic or masochistic in nature.

Adams was released from prison on supervised release after his conviction. While on supervised release, he conducted multiple lewd internet searches, like “Asian Teens; Teen Cum Shot; and Teen Pussy.” He also searched online for pornographic content of gymnastic videos with young girls. Despite his conduct, Adams was relocated to Taylor Street, where he continued to exhibit “increased sexual deviance related to minors”—including viewing material on social media that depicted minors in various postures, from stretching to kneeling without pants.

As of 2026, Adams was a threat to the community and had a “clear sexual preoccupation with minors,” his probation officer determined. A court revoked his release in September after he admitted to possessing pornography. Adams’s listed address on the sex-offender registry is still 111 Taylor Street.

One of Adams’s neighbors at the Taylor Street center is Michael Eugene Kincade. One night in 2008, after his family had gone to sleep, Kincade went downstairs and molested a 13-year-old girl sleeping on his couch. She cried and told him to stop. He didn’t, according to court documents. Kincade has a history of alleged sexual misconduct; in 2000, he allegedly fondled an 18-year-old in her sleep before grabbing her, forcing her face into a cushion, choking her, and raping her. He did not respond to a comment request.

Neighbors have no idea that the apartment complex on the corner of Taylor Street is crawling with sex offenders. “I would assume the city pushes them over here because it’s a lower income living area [with] subsidized housing,” Steven, a San Francisco resident for 23 years, told us. “People can come over here, get free housing, use drugs, and get food stamps, and not have any repercussions in life.”

But the pedophile houses are not restricted to low-income areas like the Tenderloin. Offenders live in subsidized housing across San Francisco. An extensive review of the public registry found that more than 25 percent of sex offenders with addresses on the Megan’s Law website live in taxpayer-funded buildings.

As of September 25, 779 registered sex offenders live in San Francisco and are listed in the state’s Megan’s Law database. Of the 628 such offenders with an address, 158 live in 65 taxpayer-funded buildings throughout the city.

The buildings operate on various models. 111 Taylor, for example, is run by a private contractor. Others, like the Mission Hotel, are permanent supportive housing hotels run by a nonprofit, and funded by the city of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (DHSH). At least five sex offenders live at the Mission Hotel—a property less than two blocks away from the Petite Explorer Preschool.

Still others, like Hope House, are nonprofit-operated and city-funded interim housing facilities. Hope House, formerly the Sharon Hotel, houses three sex offenders. One, Zayquan Howard, was arrested in 2014 and charged with sex trafficking and pimping out a 14-year-old girl from a motel room not unlike the one in which he currently resides.

The residencies aren’t cheap for taxpayers. San Francisco’s DHSH, which did not respond to our comment request, operates on a more than $800 million budget; between 2025 and 2026, a majority of the budget was earmarked for housing. It can cost the city $30,000 to $40,000 per resident annually to house people in permanent supportive housing.

California didn’t always let sex offenders live so close to children. In 2006, California voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative that banned them from living within 2,000 feet of schools and parks where children congregate. But a group of San Diego sex offenders sued the state, claiming that the blanket restrictions made it hard for them to find a place to live.

In 2015, the California State Supreme Court agreed, declaring that the blanket enforcement “restricted [parolees’] ability to find housing.” With some exceptions, California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation may now only impose residency restrictions on a case-by-case basis. Sex offenders in urban areas are virtually free to live around schools.

At least one California jurisdiction has since recognized that placing groups of sex offenders in residential neighborhoods is a mistake. Fresno County enacted new restrictions earlier this year to limit the number who can live in one residential property to six. The county pushed for stricter regulations after residents with children raised concerns about the sex offenders. A Fresno mother who lived near a house with multiple offenders said that she couldn’t even “get my kids buckled into the car” without predators leering at her family from across the street.

“I’m concerned not about, frankly, the rights of the pedophile, but the rights of law-abiding citizens to live in safe communities and not worry about their children,” Fresno County Supervisor Garry Bredefeld said in January.

In San Francisco, officials seem to have reached an opposite conclusion.

For community members like Wendy, giving housing options to sex offenders isn’t as important as ensuring children’s safety.

“I care firstly about my students’ safety, because we are very close to this building,” she said, referring to the Taylor Street house. “If this building is housing these people, our taxpayer dollars are being wasted. We shouldn’t be using our money to financially support them.”

California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden.

In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.

We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.

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Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.

State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”

The governor’s office did not respond to our comment request by deadline.

How is all this possible?

Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.

Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.

California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.

This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.

California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.

The state also has no citizenship requirements for various programs. California’s state-sponsored Low Cost Auto Insurance Program tells illegal-immigrant drivers that they may qualify for subsidized coverage “regardless of immigration status.” In 2025, Newsom signed legislation banning California LifeLine—a program that provides free phones and cell service—from requiring applicants to produce a Social Security number.

As we walked around several Los Angeles welfare offices, we saw cellphone providers pitching California LifeLine plans. When we approached one provider, a representative told us that applicants can use a Mexican consular identification card to enroll. The program’s website confirms as much.

Between health insurance, cash transfers, and other programs, California’s shadow welfare system doles out generous benefits to illegal immigrants at taxpayers’ expense. Ordinary Californians, meantime, are depleting their savings, working long hours, and taking on tons of debt simply to pay the bills.

Under Gavin Newsom’s social contract, working Americans must not only contend with rising taxes and ballooning living costs but also bear the burden of financing benefits for illegal immigrants and their families. In other states, citizenship establishes who qualifies for taxpayer-funded benefits. In California, citizenship merely determines who pays.

In May of 2018, then New York Times journalist Bari Weiss introduced the world to the Intellectual Dark Web: Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, and a collection of heterodox thinkers challenging progressive cultural domination. Their appeal was obvious. These were serious, credentialed intellectuals willing to ask the forbidden questions and challenge prevailing opinion. They exposed the hypocrisy of the institutions, defended the principle of free speech, and gave people permission to think.

But now, almost ten years later, the IDW has vanished. Jordan Peterson suffered a series of health crises. The Weinstein brothers have gone down the rabbit hole of various conspiracy theories. The others have mostly disappeared from the public debate.

In today’s conversation, we’re going to look back at the original New York Times article and examine the collapse of the IDW. We’d like to answer a number of questions. Was this outcome inevitable? Was there some flaw with the individual personalities? Was the IDW’s intellectual project doomed by its own contradictions? And most importantly, where do things go from here?

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RUFO: Lomez, it’s been almost ten years. What are your thoughts reading “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web” all these years later?

LOMEZ: My first impression going through this again was that Bari Weiss is remarkably prescient in ways that I did not anticipate. I had a certain view of what I thought the article would be and what I thought she was trying to accomplish with it, which still holds. But what I left out of my memory of this moment, in which the Intellectual Dark Web became a matter of public importance and these figures were being mainstreamed, is that Bari, to her credit, understood at the very start what some of the dangers were here.

She understood what might be some of the failure modes of this particular set of people taking an outsized place in the discourse and, in some way, displacing institutional authorities that tell us what is true about the world.

RUFO: To put a little meat on that, she’s identified this cohort that has what were at the time, and in some cases have continued to be, marquee names: Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein brothers, Sam Harris. She uses the phrase later, when she’s contemplating whether she too is part of this movement, that these are “classical liberals.”

The argument of the piece is that people who could be defined as classical liberals—Bernie voters, Hillary voters, Democrats in good standing—have been cast out of the discourse in favor of the censorious rise of woke culture, and they should be welcomed back in. But someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, Kanye West, or Candace Owens might take it too far and might not be contributing to the intellectual discourse, and therefore should, in some ways, be excluded.

You’re saying that now, eight years later, she was right to identify the complexities here?

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Yreka, California—Siskiyou County is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It sits against the towering backdrop of Mount Shasta and is surrounded by more than a million acres of farmland and forest. But in recent years, Chinese nationals have invaded this serene Northern California paradise to build an illegal cannabis empire.

Chinese nationals, in…

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Last December, Chief Nathan Ogbatue arrived in a motorcade outside the grand entrance of a newly built palace in Abatete, Nigeria. A videographer shouted praises in Igbo, calling him “half man, half god” and commending him for building the palace “free of charge” for the Abatete community.

Ogbatue is hailed on social media as a philanthropist who has bui…

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Curtis Kurkova lives in a $28 million mansion. The estate is nestled within a gated and guarded neighborhood in Hidden Hills, California. Its modern exterior, massive windows, and backyard pool are fit for a magazine feature.

Kurkova, a licensed respiratory practitioner, signed a document for the property as a member of an LLC. In January, he signed another document for the estate confirming that a bank had loaned him nearly $19 million. Three months later, he uploaded pictures of the mansion to Instagram with the caption “Checkmate.”

Medicaid data appear to show that Kurkova’s company, HeroCare, made at least $40.5 million from the program since 2020. The bulk of that cash—about $34.4 million—was paid out between 2023 and 2024.

As the business hit it big, Curtis’s husband, Christian, flaunted the couples’ wealth online. A since-deleted video on Christian’s Instagram showed him opening a box of shoes while mouthing a meme: “It’s when you buy something for your business, and the government pays you back for it.” In 2023, he posted a picture of the couple kissing on a private jet, captioned “It’s giving Narcos, but the Moneys clean!”

But is the money clean? We spent the last three months tracing the cash and speaking to fraud experts, who told us that the Kurkovas’ taxpayer-funded business raised serious questions.

HeroCare appears to have earned most of its Medicaid revenue between 2020 and 2024 from a handful of basic plastic commodities. How did the company sell enough plastic tubes to support a $40 million empire?

HeroCare is almost a ghost. The company’s digital presence amounts to a sparsely populated website and a Facebook page with fewer than 30 followers. The website contains no information about manager Curtis Kurkova, and its “Shop” page is empty. As we reported this piece, the “Featured Products” section disappeared altogether.

We made multiple calls to the number listed on the website in hopes of asking basic questions. After no one answered, we got on the road.

Our first stop was the address on HeroCare’s website. We arrived at a Chino medical plaza and headed to Unit 109, which the company listed as its street address on its most recently available Statement of Interest form. We rang the bell and a woman answered the door.

“Hero Heath Care? I’m not sure,” she said. “This is Pristine Home Health.”

We headed for Van Nuys, where HeroCare claimed on the form to have a mailing address. When we arrived at the site, we saw a small paper “HeroCare” sign taped to the window. The door was locked, and two brochures were stuck in the doorframe. When we returned weeks later, the HeroCare sign was gone.

Finally, City Journal team members drove to Curtis Kurkova’s Hidden Hills mansion and rang the doorbell. They could hear a dog barking inside, but no one answered the door.

In 2018, Curtis and Christian adopted a baby girl. The following year, the couple got married in Napa Valley. Their wedding website asked attendees for help funding their “dream honeymoon to Thailand.”

In 2020, their fortunes began to change. The couple signed a deed of trust on a home in Riverside County for $1.1 million, putting down $110,000 and mortgaging the rest. Then, within the next three years, three more homes were deeded either to Curtis and Christian, including a $4.7 million home in Sherman Oaks, a $1.45 million home in Big Bear, and a $9.8 million home in Encino. “Just closed escrow on our Home Away From Home . . . Two escrows in one year ! Another one for the Portfolio,” Christian wrote on Facebook in 2022.

State filings list three of the homes in their portfolio of past and present properties as rentals, including the new $28 million mansion. We asked Curtis to clarify whether he and/or Christian rented or owned the Riverside, Sherman Oaks, Big Bear, Encino, and Hidden Hills properties. He did not respond.

As we sifted through documents, we noticed some unusual patterns. A recent deed for the couple’s Big Bear City home, which they sold to another couple, revealed that Curtis Kurkova wasn’t always Curtis Kurkova. He previously went by Curtis Ray Hotchkiss Jr. and legally petitioned to change his name in 2023.

The businesses that Curtis formed changed names, too. Between July 2024 and June 2025, Curtis created a separate entity and cycled through multiple LLCs: HeroCare East LLC, Hero Healthcare Group, HeroCare 2 LLC, before ultimately filing a certificate of cancellation, stating that HeroCare 2 “has not conducted any business.”

Someone who appears to be Curtis’s brother, Michael Amar—a licensed respiratory practitioner previously known as Michael Hotchkiss—formed a separate company, Hero Healthcare Group, in 2025. Amar’s company lists the same phone number as one that HeroCare listed as its own number in a 2023 Facebook post.

We called Michael to ask about the situation. He repeatedly emphasized that Hero Healthcare Group is not the same company as HeroCare LLC.

A California Department of Public Health official sent us documents confirming that medical-equipment-distribution licenses under the names Michael Hotchkiss and Curtis Kurkova expired in May and June of this year, respectively. The official could not find a license under the name Michael Amar but said that HeroCare’s Van Nuys address still has an active site license.

We asked Curtis Kurkova and Michael Amar for comment on the department’s records. Neither of them responded.

California has long been a gold mine for Medicaid fraudsters. As City Journal reported, HHS sources have estimated that Medi-Cal’s fraud rate is 25 percent since 2019.

Officials have not publicly accused HeroCare of misconduct. Companies that offer similar services, however, have faced fraud investigations in the last five years. In 2021, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a $3.31 million settlement with SuperCare Health Inc., one of HeroCare’s competitors in the respiratory equipment space. According to the press release, SuperCare “defraud[ed] the state and federal government by knowingly billing Medicare and Medi-Cal for servicing ventilators that were no longer medically necessary.”

In 2024, New York U.S. Attorney Damian Williams announced a $25.5 million settlement with Lincare, Inc., which resolved claims that the company had “fraudulently continu[ed] to bill federal health care programs for the rental of costly non-invasive ventilators . . . when patients no longer needed or used the devices.”

HeroCare’s promotional materials suggest the company focuses on pediatric respiratory products. On its website, the company claims that it “specializes in onlyrespiratory products for children.” Federal data, however, show that HeroCare made about 30 percent of its Medicaid revenue between 2020 and 2024 billing for urinary catheter codes.

The company’s rapid growth raises more significant questions. In 2020, HeroCare received at least $7,800 from Medicaid. In 2021, that figure jumped to $396,500. In 2022 and 2023, it exploded to $5.68 million and $15.56 million, respectively. Finally, in 2024, the company collected a staggering $18.86 million.

Fraud expert Sam Adolphsen, a former chief operating officer for Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, said that HeroCare’s billing increases raised red flags.

“Huge year over year billing increases, with claims for multiple types of urinary catheters, from a specialty respiratory shop, billed to nearly identical patient counts month after month, by a provider bragging about private jets—that raises a lot of questions that must be resolved,” he said. “This appears to be, by definition, a credible allegation of fraud, in a state where the political leadership seems to totally ignore fraud.”

Fraud specialist and CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, Haywood Talcove, thinks state and federal authorities should check HeroCare’s books.

“Medicaid fraud often reveals itself through outliers,” he said. “HeroCare Medical is a California-based respiratory equipment and supply company serving medically fragile children, including children who need tracheostomy, ventilation, oxygen, and other home respiratory support. That is an extremely small and vulnerable population. The growth from roughly $8,000 in 2020 to more than $18.8 million in 2024—and about $40 million from 2020 through 2024—is the kind of statistical anomaly that demands a serious investigation. At a minimum, DOJ, HHS-OIG, and California Medicaid officials should determine whether the services were medically necessary, actually delivered, and properly billed.”

We reached out to Curtis Kurkova, Christian Kurkova, and Michael Amar with a list of assertions ahead of publication. As part of our request, we sent Curtis our reported HeroCare billing totals. None of the three responded to our messages.

After we sent the requests, a lawyer who identified himself as “Mike” called City Journal. He accused us of being “homophobic” and, when asked about Curtis Kurkova’s business dealings, refused to answer whether HeroCare was currently in operation. Before hanging up, he suggested that he might not be representing Kurkova at all.

City Journal team members went back to the $28 million mansion in Hidden Hills to ask the couple about HeroCare’s billing practices, but this time, the gates in front of the estate were shut tight. A Ferrari and a Genesis were parked in the driveway. Eventually, a Tesla left the house, but Curtis Kurkova wasn’t inside. Curtis and HeroCare, it seems, have vanished into thin air.

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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.…

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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…

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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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