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 a crime, [but] because they’re simply trying to find one.”

As federal agents examine Newsom’s connections, we decided to do the same. We reviewed records dating back to his tenure as mayor of San Francisco. They reveal that, over nearly three decades in politics, Newsom has amassed a network of appointees, employees, and associates implicated in a range of ethical violations and criminal offenses—including, in some cases, serious felonies.

Newsom has suggested he wants to improve California’s culture of self-dealing. Last year, his spokesperson said that “the governor expects all public servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity.” Our review reveals that, in fact, Newsom has surrounded himself with corruption and criminals.

This is Gavin Newsom’s circle of corruption.

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Dana Williamson

Governor Newsom appointed Dana Williamson, a “bareknuckle political brawler,” as chief of staff in January 2023. Less than two years later, she left the governor’s office after becoming the subject of a federal corruption probe. Last month, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, among other charges.

Williamson was involved in multiple corrupt schemes that began before she joined Newsom’s office. In one, prosecutors say, she and two others conspired to drain $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to Xavier Becerra. In another, Williamson claimed bogus business expenses worth $1.7 million, which she used to purchase luxury vacations and “private jet travel.”

She also faced a charge stemming from the investigation itself. Last month, Williamson pleaded guilty to having made false statements to federal agents. The DOJ reported that Williamson had hoped to distract the FBI from her criminal conduct by, among other things, concealing her “involvement in passing information to former clients . . . to give them an advantage in litigation against the state.”

According to one Democratic consultant, Williamson operated “like a mafia boss.”

London Breed

Newsom served as San Francisco mayor from 2004 to 2011. One of his most enduring “accomplishments” was boosting the political career of London Breed, the future city mayor who proceeded to commit multiple ethics violations and is reportedly under federal scrutiny for alleged corruption.

Newsom repeatedly promoted Breed. In 2005, he appointed her to the city’s Redevelopment Agency Commission. In 2010, he named her to a post at San Francisco’s Fire Commission. These appointments likely helped Breed win San Francisco’s 2018 mayoral election.

As mayor, Breed presided over the creation of the city’s racialist “Dream Keeper Initiative” and a range of scandals. In 2021, she was ensnared in a scandal of her own after San Francisco’s Ethics Commission fined her nearly $23,000 for “Violating Campaign Finance, Ethics, and Gift Laws.”

The commission published a press release detailing some of the violations. In one case, from 2018, Breed had referenced her title as “Mayor” when asking Governor Jerry Brown to commute her brother’s prison sentence. In another, from 2019, she accepted gifts from a subordinate, Mohammed Nuru, who was later convicted of fraud.

Breed’s troubles may not be over. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that the FBI is “looking into” whether she appointed billionaire Stephen Sherrill to a Board of Supervisors seat in hopes of securing employment from Sherrill’s former boss, Michael Bloomberg. She has denied the allegations.

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Mohammed Nuru

Mohammed Nuru was a public works official under Mayor Newsom. For years, Nuru was a major figure in city politics, exercising “substantial power and influence over” San Francisco’s “business and policy, including its public contracts, permits, and construction projects.”

In 2020, Nuru was arrested for his role in a massive bribery and corruption scandal. He had orchestrated a bribe-and-kickback racket spanning more than a decade, exercising his political power in exchange for cash and gifts. In 2022, Nuru pleaded guilty to federal charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Newsom’s ties to Nuru predate his mayoralty. Nuru had reportedly volunteered on Newsom’s first mayoral campaign while serving in city government. In 2003, Nuru allegedly helped orchestrate a coercive voting scheme through the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), a city-funded nonprofit under contract with his department.

The alleged scheme involved coercion. In January 2004, nine SLUG street cleaners spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle and claimed that Nuru pulled them off work to campaign door-to-door. Four workers said that SLUG “crew chiefs” requested their voting receipts. “I felt like I was in another country, like it was some kind of dictatorship,” one said.

Newsom won a narrow runoff. He received roughly 25,600 more absentee votes than his opponent—the same ballot type that nine workers alleged they were coerced into casting for Newsom. San Francisco’s city attorney later confirmed that SLUG had misused city funds to influence an election, and the nonprofit was barred from receiving future city contracts.

Nuru claimed at the time that he never pressured anyone. A Newsom spokesman at the time reportedly “said that Nuru had served as a campaign volunteer but that the new mayor had no knowledge of the allegations or the investigation.”

“For at least twelve years, Nuru shook down contractors eager for City business, trading his authority and influence for millions of dollars in cash, construction work, travel, meals, and gifts,” U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds said in a statement after Nuru’s sentencing. “His abhorrent conduct erodes the public’s trust in its government, and this case demonstrates the justice system can and will punish corrupt public officials.”

Walter Wong

Newsom and Nuru are both reportedly connected to a man named Walter Wong. In 2020, the Department of Justice announced that Wong had been charged with multiple fraud-related counts. In 2020, he reportedly pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. As part of a settlement, Wong and his companies agreed to repay the city nearly $1.5 million for contracts and grants “awarded through a rigged process.”

Wong, one of San Francisco’s “most well‑known permit expediters,” apparently helped clients push their applications through the city’s byzantine bureaucracy. In 2008, Wong began a longstanding “corrupt relationship” with Nuru. The “permit expediter” would funnel envelopes to Nuru containing as much as $5,000 in cash and bribed him with more than $260,000 worth of construction labor and materials—all in exchange for contracting favors from Nuru.

Newsom’s reported connection to Wong stems from a business venture. In 2003, a report emerged that Newsom’s company, PlumpJack Development Fund, had invested in a partnership called Ecker‑Folsom, which hired Wong. Newsom claimed that he was unaware of the hire at the time, and in 2004, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had “never used an expediter” in any of his projects in which he was “proactively engaged.”

By 2010, however, Newsom had apparently changed his mind on using expediters. In an interview in Forbes, Newsom described how he eased the path for Chinese solar companies to invest in San Francisco. “We have public‑private transaction teams, so that you have one person to meet and you will never have to deal with the bureaucracy,” Newsom said. “We will carry your permits through the entire bureaucracy. We’ve got workforce incentives, payroll tax exemptions, and other enterprise support incentives from the state of California, and we’ll pull all of them together for you.”

Tom Girardi

In 2019, Newsom appointed Tom Girardi, a high-profile trial attorney, to his 111-member Judicial Selection Advisory Committee. Within about a year, Girardi’s unraveling began: he was accused of embezzlement in 2020, disbarred in 2022, and found guilty in 2024 of four counts of wire fraud. The Department of Justice says he embezzled tens of millions of dollars.

“Tom Girardi built celebrity status and lured in victims by falsely portraying himself as a ‘Champion of Justice,’” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada. “In reality, he was a Robin-Hood-in-reverse, stealing from the needy to support . . . a lavish, Hollywood lifestyle.”

It was a spectacular fall from grace for the litigator who claimed once to have dined with President Bill Clinton. Last year, Girardi, now in poor health, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison and ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution.

Melahat Rafiei

In 2021, Governor Newsom appointed Melahat Rafiei, a one-time state Democratic Party official, to the Orange County Fair Board. Four years later, Rafiei was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $10,000 for attempted wire fraud. As part of her plea deal, she reportedly admitted, despite not being charged, that she tried to bribe two local officials “for favorable cannabis legislation.”

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Mark Ridley-Thomas

During his 2018 run for governor, Newsom pledged to appoint a dedicated homelessness czar to address California’s spiraling homelessness problems. In 2019, Newsom backed away from that plan and opted to tap Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas as one of two heads on the governor’s “advisory team” on homelessness.

Newsom’s selection quickly soured. In 2021, Ridley-Thomas was forced out of his L.A. position after he was indicted on federal corruption charges. Two years later, he was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for a bribery and fraud scheme connected to his son, Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, who was fending off sexual harassment allegations.

The elder Ridley-Thomas conspired with Marilyn Louise Flynn, former dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. “During the conspiracy’s course,” the DOJ said, Flynn admitted Sebastian to graduate school and provided “a mechanism” for Mark to funnel campaign funds to his son’s nonprofit. As the DOJ put it, the elder Ridley-Thomas “knew that Flynn needed his help obtaining county contracts.”

For her part, Flynn was sentenced to three years of probation—including 18 months of home confinement—and fined $150,000.

Victor Makras and Harlan Kelly

In 2010, his last full year as mayor, Newsom appointed Victor Makras to the San Francisco Retirement Board. Three years earlier, Makras’s company had made a $5,000 payment at Newsom’s request to fund the mayoral swearing-in ceremony.

More than a decade after that appointment, Makras was convicted of bank fraud and making false statements to a bank. The court slapped him with three years of probation and a $15,200 fine for his role in fraudulently obtaining a $1.3 million loan.

Harlan Kelly Jr., who reportedly worked as a “high-ranking official” in the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission under Mayor Newsom and stood next to him at a rally, was a co-conspirator in that scheme. In 2024, Kelly was sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted of bank fraud and other fraud-related charges, which reportedly “grew out of a years-long investigation into bribery and public corruption in San Francisco city government.”

Rodrigo Santos

In 2004, Newsom promoted Rodrigo Santos, a native of Ecuador who became a prolific donor to San Francisco political figures, to serve as the president of the city’s Building Inspection Commission.

Between 2012 and 2019, Santos defrauded clients out of $775,000. In some cases, he even altered checks written to the Department of Building Inspection (DBI) to read “RoDBIgo Santos” (our emphasis) to deposit them into his personal account. In 2023, Santos was sentenced to 30 months in prison for bank fraud, honest services fraud, falsifying records, and tax evasion.

Rudolph Dwayne Jones

From 2004 through 2010, Rudolph Dwayne Jones served as Gavin Newsom’s deputy chief of staff. Across more than a decade in and around San Francisco politics, Jones functioned in various roles, including as a consultant to groups seeking city contracts.

In 2023, city officials charged Jones with bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and aiding and abetting financial conflicts of interest. Officials reportedly accused Jones of bribing another since-indicted official, Lanita Henriquez, to “steer City contracts and grants towards Jones and the entities he controls.”

After the charges were filed, city officials suspended Jones and most “affiliated entities” from bidding on or receiving city contracts. Jones and Henriquez have pleaded not guilty and are apparently awaiting trial.

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In California, Newsom faces problems of his own. A state ethics body recently fined him for failing promptly to report 36 behested payments—charitable donations made at a government official’s request—that were mostly directed to the California Fire Foundation. The governor has behested millions to a nonprofit tied to his wife.

We reached out to Newsom’s office for comment on this story. In response, a communications official accused us of “stitching together decades-old connections to manufacture a make-believe scandal” and suggested that we focus instead on “President Trump’s corruption.”

California’s culture of self-dealing and corruption stretches back decades. As mayor of San Francisco and now governor, Newsom has had ample opportunity to change it. Instead, he has spent nearly three decades in politics surrounding himself with many of the people responsible. As the old saying goes, “You are the company you keep.”

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. Jedd McFatter is a researcher with the Government Accountability Institute and Susan Crabtree is national correspondent at RealClearPolitics; both are coauthors of Fool’s Gold.

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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 another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.

The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.

In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.

Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.

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In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”

By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.

This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.

Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay-certification letters from the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As NGLCC states on its website, “Certification is a journey, not a destination.”

Mary Ann Horton has experienced this “journey” firsthand. Horton, an early internet pioneer credited with helping develop the e-mail attachment, is a white male who “transitioned” and is now married to a woman. Horton’s company, Red Ace, is registered in California as a woman- and LGBT-owned business.

The application process, Horton told City Journal, required “a mess of documentation.” To prove that Red Ace was “lesbian-owned,” Horton sent Supplier Clearinghouse a domestic-partner affidavit. To establish that the business was woman-owned, Horton submitted a birth certificate, which had been reissued in Washington State post-“transition.” To prove transgender status, Horton filed a “therapist carry-letter,” a document from a medical professional certifying transgender identity.

These designations came with perks. After Red Ace secured these labels, Horton said, San Diego Gas & Electric brought the company on as a part-time cybersecurity contractor. During the hiring process, Horton told us, a company official said that being on the diversity list made the contract much easier to secure.

“If I was a straight, white male, I might be concerned I don’t have the same opportunity,” Horton said. “It worked out great for me.”

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LGBT-owned companies in California play other roles. In 2022, SDG&E spent $8.6 million, or 0.36 percent of procurement, on LGBT businesses, apparently including one that produced a training video on supplier diversity. “Never fear when your Ambassador for Excellence is here,” an animated character says in the video. “I can show you exactly how to source diverse vendors.” Other certified LGBT businesses in California include a sign-language interpreter, a kombucha maker, and a “coaching” firm whose services include a “series” to help people “manage” their feelings about “[t]he latest election cycle.”

In California, preferential public contracting is technically illegal. In 1996, voters approved Proposition 209, which banned the state from granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, education, and contracting. More than two decades later, in 2020, they rejected an effort to repeal the ban.

CPUC’s arm-twisting regulations violate the spirit of the law. The commission lists several specific “goals” for utilities’ contracting rates: 15 percent to minority-owned firms; 5 percent to women-owned firms; 1.5 percent to disabled-veteran-owned firms; and, most recently, 1.5 percent to LGBT-owned firms. It claims that these goals are not a “requirement” or “quota.” In practice, however, the agency cajoles utilities into compliance by requiring them to collect extensive demographic data, submit detailed annual reports, list their plans for increasing procurement from favored groups, and explain “any circumstances that may have resulted in not meeting” their procurement “goals.”

Despite the commission’s efforts, however, utilities and businesses don’t seem interested in LGBT certification. Large utilities’ procurement with LGBT-owned businesses decreased by 5 percent in 2024. Supplier Clearinghouse lists 3,750 Minority Business Enterprises, but only 451 LGBT-certified firms.

CPUC did not respond to our request for comment by deadline.

The state imposed these rules based on the view that government spending should not merely purchase goods and services, but should also engineer social outcomes. Under this framework, buying a hammer from a firm owned by a black transgender lesbian has more social value than buying the same hammer from a firm owned by a straight white man.

But Californians don’t need an energy system delivered by gay contractors; they need an energy system that works. Utility regulators should be in the business of regulating utilities, not verifying contractors’ sexual preferences. Companies should award contracts based on competence, quality, and cost—not the sexuality of the business owners.

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

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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 fuels reduction.

“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said last spring. “[W]e’re going to get them done.”

We filed a public records request to discover whether Newsom is keeping his word. As of last month, the Newsom administration had fast-tracked fuels-reduction work on roughly 87,000 acres of land. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres—less than 1 percent.

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These numbers are disastrous. The governor’s office insisted that these projects, which are part of the state’s larger wildfire-prevention efforts, were “critical” and would help “protect communities from catastrophic wildfire.” The documents we obtained, which concern the fast-tracked projects, reveal that the Newsom administration has failed to protect the state.

What has put so much of California at risk to burn? In part, the state’s environmental rules. In California, fuels-reduction projects typically require environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Under standard CEQA review, a vegetation-management project typically requires an initial study, an Environmental Impact Report, a public comment period, alternatives analysis, and agency certification. That process can take several months for simple projects and a year or more for complex ones.

Newsom’s emergency proclamation provided a way for certain projects to bypass this CEQA process but limited the exemption to small projects of no more than 3,000 acres. The application window expired last month. Now, despite the governor’s declaration of war against “red tape,” it seems that the red tape won.

The same story is unfolding around the state. In the San Ramon Valley, east of San Francisco, the local fire district recently sought to conduct wildfire mitigation work on California State Parks land in areas that the state itself classifies as “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.” The local district had developed a mitigation plan, secured local funding, and was ready to start working.

But according to the district, California State Parks imposed “regulatory and procedural barriers” that slowed and narrowed the project, including restrictions on treating protected manzanita species, mandatory cultural and habitat monitoring, and oversight fees. As a result, the district says that it was able to complete wildfire mitigation work on only 22 of the 300 acres planned—and wasted about 75 percent of the project budget on state-mandated compliance costs.

The Newsom administration suggested that the fast-track initiative would avoid such catastrophic failures. Earlier this year, the governor’s office announced that California had approved more than 300 expedited wildfire-safety projects in 300 days. This might sound impressive, but a closer examination reveals the ruse: approved projects include a 0.24-acre tree-pruning project near Camp Nelson; a 0.36-acre project that will fell trees near Thousand Oaks; and a six-acre effort to manage vegetation along a transmission line in Sonoma County.

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And as we have seen, approved projects are not the same as completed projects. Despite stacking the list with small projects, only about 13 percent had been completed as of last month.

We sent a comment request to the governor’s office, which directed us to the California Natural Resources Agency. Using updated data, an agency spokesperson told us that the state had “fast-tracked approval of over 400 projects, across nearly 100,000 acres,” and claimed that about half of those projects, “spanning over 35,000 acres,” were either “underway or completed.” When we pressed CNRA about the acreage total, another official admitted that only “798 footprint acres” had been completed, and that the agency couldn’t “anticipate how much progress” had been made on the rest. After we sent our first comment request, Newsom’s office published a press release about the emergency declaration and related actions, which didn’t mention how many fast-track acres had been completed.

The fundamental role of government is to ensure the physical safety of its people. In fire-prone California, that means allocating enough resources to reduce extreme fire risk and making sure approved mitigation work is completed. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, the state budget has increased by $106 billion. Yet funding for wildfire and forest programs—brush clearing, thinning, prescribed burning—has fallen, from a peak of $1.1 billion in 2022 to $620 million in 2026. Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year, a record $349 billion, would reduce wildfire and forest funding even further, to $457 million.

Newsom’s actions are reckless and ideological. The state has funded solar panels and sex-change procedures for illegal immigrants but cannot be bothered to protect its residents from recurring wildfires. As the summer heats up, California residents should remember: Newsom’s priorities have left them more vulnerable than ever.

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. Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

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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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The big news this past week was out of Kentucky. U.S. Representative Thomas Massie, the onetime libertarian gadfly and now podcast-style critic of Israel and the “Epstein class,” lost in a primary to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL endorsed by President Trump and AIPAC.

The big takeaway with Massie’s bruising defeat is that Trump is still the big dog. The president can still knock out members of his own party with relative ease—even people, like Massie, who have long held their own against tough challengers and who have developed national brands. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has not slipped.

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Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions in city and county spending, L.A.’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs, and feces. City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly,…

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In May 2023, I published an exclusive whistleblower report chronicling the secret child sex-change program at Texas Children’s Hospital. Despite having promised to cease performing such procedures—which involved puberty blockers and surgical procedures on children as young as eleven—TCH continued engaging in transgender therapies and operations on confu…

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This week there was an explosive story in the New York Times by longtime columnist Nick Kristof, who traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories and assembled a very long piece accusing the Israeli government of systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

As part of his allegations, Kristof writes that Israeli prison officials have been training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. These are very serious claims—both because of their horrific nature and because they are being made in the most important newspaper in the world. Kristof recounts the testimony of one of the Palestinian prisoners:

On one occasion, [the prisoner] said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”

Is this true? First, it’s worth noting that every sentence is hedged with “he said,” meaning that Kristof and his editors are very careful, knowing that this is going to be a highly explosive story and they are writing defensively. Kristof carefully distances himself from the allegations he’s making—he always characterizes them as claims made by this Palestinian journalist or prisoner, rather than stating them as proven facts.

Second, if you follow the hyperlinks in the story, which, when you click through them, all redirect to human-rights organizations and activist groups that are mostly anti-Israel. Kristof later claimed that he read medical literature indicating that rape dogs were possible, but the cases he cited were, in fact, instances of human-initiated zoophilia. So, the sourcing on this—when you really boil it down and you take the activists out—is firsthand testimony from a single person who we have to believe is telling the truth, and not incidentally, might have a strong motivation to lie.

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Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has sought to transform its massive prison system into a Nordic-style rehabilitation program. Newsom has placed a moratorium on all executions, transferred condemned prisoners to facilities across the state, dismantled San Quentin State Prison’s death row, and turned the notorious prison into a therapeutic center,…

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