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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 economy and the continent’s top university system.

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.

South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. South Africa now struggles—literally—to keep the lights on. Power outages are so common that many middle-class families buy generators. Suburban homes regularly feature tall security gates and electric fences to fend off violent thugs. The number of truck hijackings along the nation’s highways are “high even by global comparisons,” according to one scholar. Those who can afford it pay for private security to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

Corruption is rampant. South Africa’s race-based procurement model shows “systemic signs of corruption and political interference,” according to the World Bank and the OECD. President Cyril Ramaphosa boasts an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions as of 2015. Former president Jacob Zuma has faced a litany of corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money-laundering allegations.

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

Three decades later, the South Africa model is being replicated in an unlikely place: California. The state’s leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.

For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. During the Great Migration’s second wave, black families set up in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, seeking middle-class jobs and a better life for their children. California was seen by many as a utopia, with stunning physical beauty, abundant economic opportunity, and a political culture that embraced individualism and meritocracy, rewarded risk taking, and upheld the equality of all people under the law. That era is over.

This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.

During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.

The road between Pretoria and Sacramento is shorter than you would think.

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In September 2022, Newsom signed Executive Order N-16-22, which revolutionized the workings of the state government. Newsom ordered state agencies to create or update their strategic plans to “more effectively advance equity.” When agencies “identified disparities,” the governor instructed them to respond by changing their organizational “mission, vision, goals,” and more.

What this meant, in practice, was that California would increasingly conduct government business on the basis of race. The order encouraged bureaucrats to adopt “inclusive practices,” help “disadvantaged business enterprises” access federal infrastructure dollars, and administer state programs through a racial equity lens. In other words, the executive order effectively enshrined the principle that California’s government would prioritize citizens based on the color of their skin.

Newsom’s order echoed talking points from post-apartheid South Africa. In California, the governor emphasized the need to “address[] disparities for historically underserved and marginalized communities.” In South Africa, the government sought to “remove discriminatory barriers of the apartheid past.” Both created a permanent bureaucracy devoted to the racial transformation of society: South Africa launched the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Commission to “enhance the economic participation of black people”; Newsom’s executive order established a Racial Equity Commission to develop a whole-of-government “Racial Equity Framework.”

Newsom’s executive order was predicated on the notion that racial disparities are presumptive evidence of systemic discrimination. That notion is increasingly embedded across California government: Newsom stacked the Racial Equity Commission atop a sprawling, preexisting DEI infrastructure that had already metastasized across public institutions. It is not an exaggeration to say that California’s public institutions—from state government down to school classrooms—have been infected by racialist ideology.

Take, for example, the California Arts Council, a state grant maker that distributes funds to local art projects. In 2021, CAC published a training deck to help its members identify “the relationship between government, white supremacy culture, and racial equity practices.” CAC’s racial equity page defines “racial equity practices” as “closing the gaps so that race no longer predicts one’s success,” and claims the “power elite” in the American colonies—and apparently the modern U.S.—“constructed white supremacy (and construct it still) to define who is fully human and who is not.”

The California Water Boards make the state’s racialist ambitions even more explicit. “Providing the same resources, support, or treatment does not guarantee that everyone will have fair or equal outcomes,” a racial equity page published on CWB’s website reports. Instead of colorblind equality, CWB promotes an “equity approach,” in which “individuals and groups receive different resources, opportunities, support, or treatment based on their specific needs.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Institution after institution, agency after agency, the effective message is the same: the United States of America is rotten with racism, white people are oppressors, the government must equalize outcomes, and wealth redistribution is justified to achieve that end. This is what the racialist project demands.

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In 2021, the California State Board of Education approved a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum “as a guide” for high schools. That same year, the state legislature enacted a high school ethnic studies graduation requirement. The model curriculum was based, in part, on the “pedagogy of the oppressed” developed by Marxist theoretician Paulo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and defeat their oppressors.

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin was co-chair of the committee tasked with developing the new curriculum. As one of us reported in 2021, Cuauhtin has argued that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.”

Cuauhtin also developed a “mandala” that accuses whites of committing “theocide” against indigenous tribes and replacing their gods with Christianity. The solution, according to Cuauhtin and since-cut material from a draft curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” through “transformational resistance,” with the ultimate goal being to “decolonize” American society.

The model curriculum encouraged teachers to lead students in a series of songs and affirmations. One of those affirmations, “In Lak Ech,” encouraged students to chant “Tezkatlipoka”—a god whom the Aztecs worshipped with human sacrifice—asking for the power to be “warriors” for social justice. Then, students would chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, searching for “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Finally, the chant would climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, decolonization,” as students shout “Panche beh!” (In 2022, the California Board of Education and Department of Education removed the chant after a nonprofit and three parents sued the state for violating the First Amendment.)

The state’s updated model curriculum is still riddled with left-wing propaganda. The curriculum includes a sample Native American Studies lesson, for example, that hopes to “inspire” students to take “critically conscious action” and teach them to “identify counterhegemonic truth telling.” A University of California–approved course outline appended to the curriculum recommends that students study Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and examine issues like the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

While California doesn’t require school districts to adopt the state’s model curriculum, the very existence of an ethnic-studies requirement allows school districts to import racialism to the classroom. In San Francisco, for example, the local school district approved an ethnic studies curriculum that described Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who murdered a cop, as a “political prisoner,” targeted “white male privilege,” and asked what “white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society.”

None of this has anything to do with ensuring children are proficient in reading and math or are prepared to enter the workforce following graduation. Rather, the point is to create foot soldiers for the racialist revolution.

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The May 2020 death of George Floyd, and the ensuing “summer of love,” served as a flashpoint for California’s racialist revolution. Not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, Democrats seized the moment to push radical policy proposals that previously would have been unachievable, including the creation of the first statewide reparations task force in United States history.

In September 2020, Newsom signed A.B. 3121. The bill created a nine-member Reparations Task Force to investigate the effects of slavery and racial discrimination on people of African descent living in California and the United States more broadly. In 2021, the task force began its work, with meetings beginning in June and continuing into 2023.

It is worth pausing to note some important context: the California Constitution of 1849 explicitly prohibited slavery, and when California entered the Union in 1850, it did so as a free state. California was never a slave state.

Nevertheless, the task force pushed ahead. At a September 2022 meeting, the task force provided an update on community feedback it had received so far. One significant trend was “acknowledgment” that the “Black Community” had been “Exploit[ed] by ‘whitey.’” Another respondent called for “the redistribution of wealth, number one, bar none.” Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted testimony for another meeting calling for just that: “The reparatory justice movement is needed to bring about a redistribution of the wealth in the United States and to repair the damage that corporate capitalists and federal and state government have done to individuals, groups, and communities in the past and present,” she said.

In June 2023, the reparations task force released its final report, a 1,000-page doorstop of a document featuring a long list of recommendations. It amounted to a comprehensive vision for the South Africanization of California.

The task force recommended, among other things, the creation of a reparations agency; compensation packages; subjecting all state laws to “racial impact” analysis; criminal-justice reforms; investments in housing and education; and initiatives to address health disparities and wealth gaps. It also recommended that the state legislature formally apologize “for the atrocities committed by California state actors who promoted, enforced, and facilitated the institution of chattel slavery and its ongoing legacy of systemic discrimination.”

For cash reparations, the task force suggested payouts not only to individuals who descended from enslaved people but also to anyone with a descendant who was black in America prior to the beginning of the twentieth century—even if that ancestor had been a free person. Since “discriminatory policies made no distinctions between” slaves and their descendants, the task force reasoned, “compensatory remedy must do the same.”

The report called for a “down payment” on cash reparations, which would give the government time to settle on a final compensation scheme. The task force emphasized the need to communicate to the public that this “initial down-payment” was just “the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices, not the end of it.” Preliminary calculations indicated cash payouts could amount to hundreds of thousand dollars for some black residents; a conservative estimate put the total cost at $500 billion. For context, the entire California budget totals about $350 billion.

The report made a host of other recommendations to remake California. The task force called for the creation of a state agency to oversee existing government agencies, including the Department of Justice. It called for free tuition for postsecondary students, eliminating standardized test requirements for state-university graduate programs, and instituting single-payer health care. It urged the implementation of rent control in formerly redlined areas, adding green spaces in black neighborhoods, and greater investment in “food justice” initiatives for the black community.

The task force also demanded a “right to return” for black Californians whose ancestors had been displaced from neighborhoods or communities by the government. The task force elsewhere pointed to a case in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County, which served as an example of this “right” in practice. In the 1920s, a black-owned beachfront property had been seized by Los Angeles County via eminent domain. In 2022, the county returned the land to the heirs of the former owners, who then sold it back to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

In September 2024, Newsom signed an official apology. “The State of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating, and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” Newsom said in an accompanying statement. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past—and making amends for the harms caused.”

The governor didn’t stop there. In October 2025, he signed S.B. 518, which established California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. This permanent state agency is responsible for administering and verifying eligibility for reparations programs. Newsom also signed legislation earmarking up to $6 million in funding for the California State University system to study ways to verify descendant status, apparently to determine eligibility for future reparations payouts.

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When reviewing the demands made by the California reparations task force, an obvious question comes to mind: Are all these proposals legal? Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute, seemed to have doubts.

“I don’t think California’s legislators have been terribly committed to pretending to use racial proxies [as other states do],” Morenoff said. “By and large, the California legislature doesn’t play that game. They are very transparent in telling you what they are doing: ‘We are creating a benefit for a particular race’. . . . I always work with the rule of thumb that if the California Legislature is in session, someone is proposing some insane identitarian proposal that is obviously unconstitutional. And I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve been proven wrong.”

California’s Democratic legislators have now set their sights on gutting the legal constraints that hold back the racialist revolution—most notably, Prop. 209, which bans racial discrimination in public programs. On June 9, 2026, California Democratic State Assemblyman Corey Jackson was speaking at a state hearing on ACA 7, a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit the scope of Prop. 209.

During the hearing, Jackson received some pushback from Republican State Senator Steven Choi, who argued that the “dark age” of discrimination was over. “The Constitution of the United States, [the] California Constitution, specifically states that no person shall be treated differently,” Choi said.

Jackson, who did not respond to our request for comment, suggested that existing protections weren’t enough: “What we’re saying is we don’t care what the constitution says.”

Despite all the progress that California’s racialist revolutionaries have made during the Newsom administration, progressive activists outside government, and Democratic legislators inside of it, want to go further.

The California Budget & Policy Center published a paper in April 2021 outlining how the state could use tax policy to pursue “racial equity.” The center argued in its summary of the paper that “[c]enturies of racist policies, from enslavement, land theft, and genocide,” among other policies, are responsible for “American Indian, Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander Californians” being “less likely to have high incomes than white and Asian households.”

The solution, according to the group, is to use ostensibly race-neutral means to raise taxes on whites and Asians in order to funnel the money to preferred races. State Senator John Laird and Assemblywoman Mia Bonta both spoke at the California Budget & Policy Center’s annual conference this year.

In November 2026, the California Budget & Policy Center may get its wish. This fall, Californians will vote on a proposed “billionaires tax,” which would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on anyone with a net worth above $1 billion. The tax would be retroactive, with significant anti-avoidance provisions. California has about 200 billionaires, most of whom are white or Asian.

If the proposal passes, it will be disastrous for California. It will result in a drain of human capital, as well as major capital flight to other jurisdictions, significantly reducing the state’s tax base. This would be especially devastating at a time when taxpayers are already fleeing California in large numbers.

Every year of the Newsom administration, California has suffered a net migration loss. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, the state experienced a net domestic migration loss of more than 1.4 million people. The mere proposal of a billionaires tax has prompted the state’s wealthiest residents to look elsewhere: Pirate Wires spoke to about 10 percent of the state’s billionaires and found that “[a]lmost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now.”

To understand where all this is going, consider today’s South Africa. Since 2011, GDP per capita in South Africa has declined, infrastructure has deteriorated, and the unemployment rate is the highest in among G20 countries. The South African experiment also demonstrates that once a government chooses the racialist road, it must walk down it further and further.

Since 1994, roughly 20 percent of freehold farmland formerly owned by whites has been transferred to or purchased by blacks. The government, however, doesn’t feel this is enough. By 2030, South Africa wants to bump that figure up to 30 percent. The nation’s government has also debated constitutional changes that would allow land expropriation without compensation.

Back in California, state Democrats are pushing A.B. 801, known as the California Community Reinvestment Act. If passed, the bill would create new obligations for state-chartered banks, credit unions, fintech firms, and mortgage lenders. Assemblymember Mia Bonta, the bill’s sponsor, said that it is “[d]esigned to narrow the racial wealth gap,” benefitting “historically underserved communities” and “communities of color.”

Last year, California’s Legislative Black Caucus introduced a suite of bills aiming to further the racialist revolution, including one that would prioritize higher education admissions for descendants of slaves and another that would “allocate a portion of Home Purchase Assistance funds to first-time home buyers who are descendants of American chattel slavery.”

On and on it goes. These measures are far more than the ad hoc diversity trainings common during the era of “peak woke,” or toothless symbolic announcements. These policies and proposals represent a concerted effort to strip wealth from whites and Asians and redistribute it to favored racial groups.

Newsom’s ambivalence may be the only thing holding California’s racialist revolution back. The governor has vetoed a handful of reparations bills backed by the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, in some cases citing budget and legal constraints. He probably knows such proposals are unpopular with voters.

But with the creation of California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, Newsom has built a permanent government agency with an explicit mandate to administer reparations programs. This agency will outlast Newsom’s governorship, allowing his successor to continue the racialist revolution.

We reached out to Newsom’s office for comment on this story. In an after-deadline response, an official suggested that we were not journalists and did not answer our questions about the state’s policies.

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California’s racialist revolutionaries seem incapable of grasping a simple truth: all these heavy-handed policies will not work. No matter how much wealth is seized, no matter how much government spending is redirected to favored racial groups, outcomes in the real world will never look the same as a Census table. These policies failed in South Africa, and they will fail in California, too.

The revolutionaries also refuse to recognize another obvious fact: rather than being the racist nightmare they make it out to be, America has had formal legal equality among the races for more than 60 years, not to mention a robust welfare state and decades of affirmative action policies.

The effort of California leaders to forge a racialist state offers two warnings. The first is for Californians. If you believe that citizens should be treated as individuals, rather than as stand-ins for their group identity, then it’s time to punish politicians at the ballot box. If their incentives don’t change, their actions won’t, either.

The second warning is for the rest of America. Blue states take cues from California. What starts in the Golden State often ends up in other state legislatures—and sometimes on the floor of Congress. Americans should reject racialism in California for the same reason they should reject it anywhere: because all men are created equal.

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

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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 women out here just prostituting. They’re walking right by, and the police drive right by them,” the school’s gun-toting security guard said. “It’s normal.”

This is Figueroa Corridor, one of California’s most notorious sex markets. Here, prostitutes gather, night after night, selling sex acts that, according to one former cop, cost as little as $25. Last year, members and associates of a gang were indicted after allegedly trafficking adults and minors—including foster children—along the corridor and branding them with tattoos.

This was all the predictable result of public policy. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law decriminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. When he signed the bill, Newsom suggested it would help would reduce the harassment of women.

We went to Figueroa to see the results for ourselves. As we walked the corridor, saw the sex market, and rode along with a former LAPD vice cop, one thing became clear: on Figueroa, human flesh is big business—something state leaders appear to have no desire to change.

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The scene stretches across almost four miles of hot, dusty cement. Nearly nude women cluster at the start of side streets just off the main road. Lines of cars slowly cruise along, apparently hoping to buy. Pimps either oversee the prostitutes themselves, on a nearby phone, or through hired low-level watchers. Sirens blare constantly, but officers often just roll on by. When asked about activity on the corridor, one prostitute said, “money and p*ssy,” before twerking and walking away.

Stephany Powell, a former sergeant in an LAPD Vice unit and former executive director at Journey Out, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit serving human trafficking victims, rode with us along the corridor.

“Statistically, the average age of entry for human sex trafficking is between the ages of 12 and 14 years old,” she said. “We’d see 14-, 15-year-olds that were out on the prostitution tracks. We also would see 25-to-30-year-olds . . . some of them had been out on the streets on the prostitution tracks since age 13. And in those cases, nine times out of ten, they had a trafficker.”

Figueroa has been a sex-trafficking den for decades. But recent policy changes have made the corridor harder to police. In California, it had been a crime to loiter with the intent of committing prostitution since at least 1995. Patrol officers could use this law to curtail the street market—and stop, identify, and rescue trafficked minors.

That began to change in 2016. That year, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed S.B. 1322, prohibiting minors from being charged with solicitation of and loitering with intent to commit prostitution. The law was arguably well-intentioned, reflecting a belief that trafficked children shouldn’t be treated as criminals.

But that wasn’t enough for the state’s progressives. In 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener authored S.B. 357, a bill that would fully decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution. A trio of the state’s most powerful progressive institutions—the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU’s California chapter, and Equality California—rallied behind the bill, which passed in 2022.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in July of that year, suggesting that it would reduce the “harassment of women.” He also referenced “transgender adults,” seemingly endorsing LGBT activists’ view that the loitering statute had criminalized “walking while trans.”

“Black adults accounted for 56.1% of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017-2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city’s population,” Newsom wrote. “To be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution. It simply revokes provisions of the law that have led to disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults.”

Since the law’s passage, however, Figueroa has more prostitutes than it did before. Before S.B. 357, Powell says she delivered around 30 makeup kits along the entire corridor each night that she engaged in outreach efforts. When we drove past a particularly active handful of blocks, Powell said that after “S.B. 357 passed, we counted about 60 girls just from this track [alone].”

More minors are apparently being trafficked, too. The Times reported that LAPD Sergeant Al Navarro’s officers, who work at the nearby 77th Street station, rescued 123 children in 2024—a nearly eightfold increase from 2022, the year before S.B. 357 took effect.

The law itself is driving these trends. Before S.B. 357, police officers could use a woman’s attire and behavior to determine that she was loitering to commit prostitution. Once that behavior was decriminalized, prostitutes began wearing hardly any clothes—and law enforcement found itself helpless to control the sex trade.

“A lot of the girls hardly have anything on, they’re practically naked. In many cases you can see right through whatever they’re wearing,” Powell said. “Before S.B. 357 . . . what would happen if we were working vice and we’d see somebody out there like that, we could arrest them for solicitation of prostitution. Now, in order for you to arrest them for solicitation of prostitution, there has to be an act involved.”

S.B. 357 has also enabled traffickers. In the past, a patrol officer could arrest a loitering prostitute to get her off the streets and encourage her to testify against a trafficker. Today, law enforcement has to use resource-strapped undercover units to target traffickers one-by-one.

“SB 357 removed a key enforcement tool that kept communities free from red light blight,” former Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva told us. “This ill-advised bill condemned the marginalized to be sex trafficked, and human trafficking has exploded.”

The situation is so dire that the federal government intervened. In August 2025, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli spearheaded the region’s first-ever RICO human trafficking case against the vicious Hoover Criminal Gang. Essayli’s office charged six members and associates of the Hoovers with various crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, money laundering, and sexual exploitation of a child.

The indictment spells out the depraved allegations. The Hoovers and their associates allegedly targeted adults and children as young as 14; branded their victims with tattoos; and, in some cases, required their victims to secure $1,000 per night. In one instance, a Hoover associate and two unindicted co-conspirators allegedly tried to kidnap prostitutes from San Bernardino, a plot that failed only when the two targets broke free and escaped.

On July 1, 2026, a federal follow-up operation took down another ten suspects, including the operator of a seedy motel, who was charged with “financially benefiting from the Hoover gang’s sex trafficking operation.”

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City Journal’s four-day visit to the corridor took place just before the second operation against the Hoovers and revealed the challenges faced by the ongoing federal efforts. Figueroa still pulsed with activity, with the entire apparatus of apparent prostitutes, pimps, watchers, and Johns out in the open for all to see. Police drove on by. Women walk the corridor, risking disease, beatings, and death with each step.

When he signed S.B. 357, Gavin Newsom suggested that the new law would help reduce harassment against women. What it enabled instead is a wave of crime, suffering, and abuse.

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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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 told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”

The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.

In other words, Angelenos have been condemned to die underground, all in the name of racial justice.

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Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.

Helming this effort was the Labor Community Strategy Center, its offshoot the Bus Riders Union, and a wider coalition of activists. The center believed that, at root, Metro’s fare-enforcement policies were designed to create a “sterile lily white rail experience,” as its black indigenous and “[q]ueer” co-director, Channing Martinez, put it. Martinez hoped to pressure Metro, a “South African Apartheid pass system,” to institute free fares, abolish the transit court system, and nullify the L.A. Sheriff’s long-held ability to enforce fares aboard the trains.

In November 2016, the Labor Community Strategy Center filed a civil rights complaint claiming that L.A. Metro was “systematically targeting Black riders.” Black riders, they alleged, made up less than 20 percent of riders but received at least half of all citations. As a remedy, the center proposed (emphasis removed) that Metro remove all police and fare-collection staff, institute “[p]olicies of reparation” for black riders, and put an “immediate end to all fare collection.”

Less than a month later, L.A. Metro’s Board of Advisors unanimously demanded that Metro create a plan that would “completely decriminalize fare evasion amongst youth transit users” and ensure that youth fare evaders not be “required to interact with law enforcement.” Board members specifically singled out “[y]outh of color” who, they said, were “disproportionately cited for fare evasion.” Founding Metro board member Mark Ridley-Thomas, one of the members who proposed the idea, said the motion would address the “long-standing problem of criminalizing this segment of the population.”

Then, the dam broke. In early 2017, L.A. Metro approved a plan to remove the county sheriff’s department’s exclusive patrol authority, shifting more than half of its former duties to the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments. Metro itself took over fare-enforcement duties in 2017, formally removed those duties from law enforcement agencies’ contracts in 2022, and, at some point, apparently told the police to focus on “hard crime” instead.

Almost immediately, Metro slashed fare enforcement. In 2016, when the sheriff’s office enforced the fares, officers typically performed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 fare checks per month. In 2018, based on publicly available data, Metro averaged fewer than 300,000 fare checks per month. In 2019, that average fell to a staggering 63,000 checks per month. Finally, in March 2020, L.A. Metro’s bus system suspended fare collection altogether as a Covid precaution until 2022—which conditioned riders to a free system.

Today, Metro hardly enforces fares. Agents conducted only about 5,000 fare checks per month in 2025, down almost 100 percent since 2016. In 2020, Metro instated a “Fareless System Initiative Task Force” to examine how a fare-free system could advance equity. “Equity is very, very important to us,” former Metro CEO Phil Washington said.

In short: activists demanded that L.A. Metro make fares free. And now, with hardly any legal pressure, the city has effectively done it.

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Free fares inevitably mean one thing: crime. The system is a hellscape drenched in human feces, where riders are subject to verbal or physical threats, open needles, and screaming homeless people. One million people must contend with the system every day—including some who have been brutalized on buses, trains, and platforms.

Take, for example, Mirna Soza Arauz, a 67-year-old grandmother who was fatally stabbed in the throat by a deranged homeless man named Elliot Nowden. Soza was on her way home from an overnight shift at a local burger restaurant when Nowden attacked her from behind. She managed to exit the train at the Universal City Station with blood gushing from her neck. Nowden stole Soza’s bag and ran.

It wasn’t Nowden’s first Metro offense. He was banned from riding Metro trains in 2019 after stabbing a college student in the chest on the Expo Line—a ban evidently not enforced. In February 2024, he was arrested for an assault at the same Red Line station where he would stab Soza two months later.

Months ago, we submitted a records request with L.A. Metro demanding surveillance footage of Soza’s murder. Metro delayed the request for weeks before ultimately determining that releasing the footage was not in the “public interest.” Soza’s family disagrees. Her three children signed a consent letter allowing Metro to release the video of their mother’s stabbing—which would allow the public to see what Metro tries to hide. L.A. Metro has still not provided the video, against the Soza family’s wishes.

Similarly, Jesse Rodriguez was stabbed to death two weeks before his 24th birthday on the Red Line in September 2023. According to Rodriguez’s family, police said the attacker was having a “mental health crisis” when he stabbed Rodriguez once in the heart with a hunting knife. L.A. Metro denied our request for surveillance footage of Rodriguez’s stabbing.

These aren’t the only horror stories. In February 2024, 63-year-old Darryl Winborn was pepper-sprayed to death on a Metro bus in Koreatown; in June 2024, a 38-year-old father of four who rode Metro daily was shot in the head and killed; in August 2024, a woman was brutally assaulted around 5:30 a.m. when a man allegedly beat her and threw her onto the tracks at the Allen Metro station, leaving her disfigured with a broken nose and multiple broken bones. There are many more incidents.

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As its system deteriorates, L.A. Metro has done everything but restore law enforcement. In 2020, Metro’s board moved to “re-envision transit safety” with a reactionary post–George Floyd peace guard known as the Metro Ambassadors. Clad in neon-green Metro shirts, the ambassadors are meant to be a “visible, uniformed presence” to “deter” crime and administer NARCAN. According to a December 2025 report by UCLA researchers, the unarmed ambassadors have been threatened at gunpoint, sexually assaulted, punched, and kicked in the ribs.

L.A. Metro is also in the process of establishing an in-house public safety team, which will hire and deploy its own law-enforcement officers alongside ambassadors and crisis-intervention teams by 2029. Through Metro’s Care-Based Services Division, crisis teams aim to “reduce reliance on traditional law enforcement,” Metro says. The system has also replaced some old lights with new LED lights; played classical music at 72 decibels (the sound of a vacuum) at a dangerous station; and built some taller fare gates. When we rode the trains, the police officers we saw didn’t even appear to have digital scanners to check if riders pay at the fare gates.

“Usually, you might see the LAPD get on board the train and say, kind of halfheartedly, ‘okay, everyone pull out your TAP cards,’” Enforce the Fares member Alex Davis told us. “You can pull out basically any card and as long as you pull out a plastic card and kind of wave it around, the cops won’t do anything.”

Obviously, none of this is working. Between 2017 and 2025, crime more than doubled. Adjusting for ridership, battery and aggravated assaults both increased by more than 100 percent, and narcotics offenses rose by more than 800 percent.

The lawlessness starts at the entrance: about half of L.A. Metro riders don’t pay, according to data analyzed by Davis. By comparison, Metro’s fare-evasion rate was between 3 percent and 7 percent across stations in 2007. Most importantly, more than 90 percent of violent criminals on the Metro evade fares, meaning the sort of people who go on to stab old ladies in the neck could have been caught by fare enforcement, but aren’t. Despite L.A. Metro’s numerous pilot programs and quasi-safety measures, the one method proven to work for the system is the one method board members are reluctant to try: classic policing.

L.A. Metro’s years’ long anti-racist, anti-law enforcement experiment has also cost the city millions of dollars in unpaid fares. With a fare-evasion rate of about 50 percent, Metro could be raking in double what it collects; at least an extra $86 million per year. That’s a small fraction of Metro’s nearly $9 billion operating budget. But the lawlessness Metro has encouraged over the past few years undercuts the very “basis for Metro’s continued taxpayer support,” Davis said.

While Metro’s board constructs its progressive dream world, the system’s ridership, the majority of whom are low-income people who rely on public transit to live and commute, are getting shot, stabbed, and assaulted.

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What would it take to bring back fare enforcement? According to local pro-safety activists, not much. As of 2023, L.A. Metro employs an existing force of over 200 Transit Security Officers, who could easily fare-check 20,000 passengers per day. “That’s clearly the biggest lever we have to pull in order to improve safety,” Davis said. “Why not do the one thing that we have evidence was very effective when it was happening?”

L.A. Metro’s ideological commitment to transit equity appears to stand in the way between a safer Metro and more dead Angelenos. In fact, Metro has a recent example to prove that fare compliance reduces disorder. In the summer of 2024, Metro tried a Tap to Exit program that resulted in a 40 percent reduction in crime and other incidents at the North Hollywood B Line station. When Metro paused that program briefly in April 2025, “reported incidents”—primarily involving “homelessness, unsanitary conditions, and destination-less riders”—shot up 116 percent at Union Station (another B Line location) and 67 percent at North Hollywood.

Many of the crime statistics in this story are based on L.A. Metro’s public database. Sometime after June 3, Metro appears to have removed over 4,600 incidents from that database, mostly from 2017 and 2018. Our figures reflect those updates. We asked Metro why they removed thousands of crimes from their records and whether the online database was the most accurate source for crime statistics. They did not respond to either question or to our request for comment on the story.

Americans were horrified when Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska was brutally murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina light-rail train. It was a wake-up call to the country that something has gone terribly wrong if random bystanders are being slain on public transportation systems.

In L.A. Metro’s case, that “something” is an easily identifiable variable: the complete absence of fare enforcement and crime deterrence.

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. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

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

There’s no sugarcoating it: These were hyper left-wing candidates. They ran on a platform of abolition: abolish ICE, abolish the police, abolish prisons, and abolish Israel. For the DSA, this was a massive victory; these wins showed that their urban organizing machines can translate raging anti-Israel sentiment on the Left into knocking out Democratic incumbents.

These results have left the Democratic establishment completely crushed; it’s exposed their hold on voters—at least in the left-wing urban areas that make up their party’s base—as weak and ineffective. In New York, the establishment has tried to resist the DSA’s growing grip on political power; we saw their efforts to stymie Mamdani’s rise by running Andrew Cuomo as an independent candidate despite his primary loss. But they’ve failed: The DSA has control over the municipal government and over the greater New York City congressional delegation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I walk into the kitchen and my wife has Fox News on, I turn on Turner Classic Movies. I’m just like, ‘Nope, don’t care. Don’t want to hear this. Like, look at that. Black and white, 1936. Yes. OK, now I’m happy.’

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

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

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

In California, state Democrats have embraced…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealers ar…

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

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

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

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

Since 2023, the …

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

The centerpiece of this initiative is the Solar on Multifam…

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

The initiative, called the Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program, is part of California’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” system, whic…

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