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 California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, has awarded $24 million to tribal groups and other nonprofits as part of its “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program. The man effectively overseeing the program, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, believes that California was founded on a “state-sanctioned policy of genocide” and that the state has pursued “decades of land dispossession, discrimination, and disconnection.” The Newsom administration, he said, was making progress in returning the land to the “leadership of California Native American tribes.”

As part of this commitment to “cultural burning,” California has created separate fire-certification processes for nontribal and tribal populations. White, black, Latino, and Asian fire bosses must receive technical certifications, including a 40-hour burn-boss course and, in some cases, a federal certificate. “Cultural fire practitioners,” by contrast, are certified through simple tribal recognition that a person has “substantial experience” burning for cultural purposes.

The “cultural burns” themselves follow various rituals. Some begin with drumming, sage burning, and a prayer. Attendees sometimes go around in a circle, introducing themselves to the land. In the words of Ron Goode, chief of the North Fork Mono Tribe, the land listens to the incantations, and the intention is “to make sure that everything on the landscape—Mother Earth, Creator, everybody—understands why we’re there and what we’re there for.”

Then the burning begins. One tribal member uses a traditional elderberry fire stick instead of a modern lighter. Some use dry branches and cottonwood bundles as kindling. In the words of one tribal chief, “Fire gives life to the land, and everyone benefits from this living spirit.”

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While some of the “resiliency” funding has gone toward what appear to be legitimate fire-management projects, a careful examination of the state grant information reveals that much of the program operates as a slush fund for the tribes.

In recent years, CalFire has awarded grants that have dubious fire-management benefits: $1 million for a grant that will help a tribe provide “forest-themed ingredients” to tribe-owned restaurants; $599,000 for another to help renovate land for use as a Native American summer camp; $166,000 to one that will pay for “[t]ribal staff and members” to observe spotted owl nests; $746,000 to one supporting a tribe’s “food sovereignty” and “Fire-Centered Climate Action Plan”; and $521,000 to one that will help a tribe maintain “close kinship” with plants, animals, and “other natural relatives such as water and fire.”

In 2022, California projected that tribes, “cultural fire practitioners,” and others would conduct 25,000 acres of prescribed burning annually by 2025. The state has not released any data on the tribes’ progress, and some tribal leaders apparently insist on keeping the fires small. As Ron Goode explained, “We never burn anything bigger than a big beaver hut.”

For Butte County’s Maidu Indians, the cultural burn initiative seems less about fire management and more about soliciting state funds for cultural programs. “Cultural fire has a lot of cultural aspects to it,” said tribal member Magan Herrera. “We’re burning deergrass for basketry, not necessarily for wildfire resilience, right? But it does have both of those worlds.”

In a video released by CalFire, it appeared that a white man started the process of burning a small lot of land and tribal members later joined in. “We actually learned a lot with this grant,” said one tribal member on the work crew. “When we first started, we really didn’t understand. We thought it was just cutting down trees and piling and burning, but really it was much more.”

While any group is entitled to preserve its heritage, taxpayers are not obligated to subsidize it. California Democrats have sought to mask their handouts to the tribes as a public good, but these are reckless expenditures for a fiscally strained state, with massive risks. The dry season is approaching—and California politicians are playing with fire.

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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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 Multifamily Affordable Housing (SOMAH) program. SOMAH began under Governor Jerry Brown, who signed legislation requiring a state commission to apportion up to $100 million a year from California’s cap-and-trade program to pay for the installation of solar panels on apartment buildings in poor areas. Since then, California has devoted nearly $900 million to SOMAH, which the state hoped would create 300 megawatts of power by 2030 and advocates envisioned would create a million solar-using renters.

The results have been disastrous. Since 2015, the program has installed or reserved only 129 megawatts of solar power for approximately 65,600 residents—nowhere close to the target of 1 million “solar renters.”

What happened? First, incompetence. For a decade, businesses and utilities have been forced to buy emissions credits, and while the state has lavished nearly $900 million on SOMAH, administrators designed the program so poorly that they have paid out only $131 million for solar installation.

As the program’s largest contractor admitted in a draft audit, potential customers were turned off by the paperwork, bureaucracy, and red tape. “Initially, we found housing owners excited about the program,” the contractor said, “but after a long and laborious process, they are much less enthusiastic.”

That is an understatement. From the beginning, the SOMAH program has been plagued by delays and cancellations. More than 400 applications have wound up cancelled or withdrawn, or about a third of the total. On average, projects take three and a half years to make it through the program’s gauntlet of paperwork and inspections.

Some projects have been fully installed—only to sit idle for a year or more waiting for permission to begin operating. As a result, more than $700 million of the program’s budget remains unspent. In other words, California can’t even give away a heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, product.

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These failures do not mean, however, that no one is profiting. The managers of the SOMAH program have spent about $60 million on overhead, including salaries, conferences, website development, and more. And, as part of that budget, they have devoted at least $5.5 million to “community-based organizations” (CBOs), most of which are left-wing nonprofits that, in one case, labeled giving solar panels to low-income housing residents a way to fight “racial injustice.”

Under the guise of marketing and outreach, SOMAH paid more than $163,000 to the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). Vivian Yi Huang, the group’s co-director, extolled the need to “fight against the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism of the extractive economy.” The organization called for Richmond, California to “Defund the Police and Invest in Black Lives” and is a member of the Defund Police Coalition in Oakland, California.

California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) told supporters that it “led in the creation” of SOMAH. Officials awarded it $230,000. The nonprofit wants the “democratization” of “land, labor, and resources” to “reverse the long course of environmental racism, the climate crisis, and colonialism.”

CEJA uses aggressive language to support its apparent goal of banning oil. “What’s at stake is our very survival,” its then-executive director said in 2021. “We must make the transition to 100 percent clean energy and bring all communities along to avoid a devastating climate apartheid.”

The group’s political arm, CEJA Action, endorses candidates and publishes voter guides as it “builds the political power of communities of color to advance environmentally and socially just policies.”

While APEN and CEJA no longer partner with the state, one of the active CBOs, Communities for a Better Environment, is no less radical. Last year, the group demanded the immediate release of everyone who was detained in immigration raids in California. “[T]here is no environmental justice without migrant justice,” the group wrote. “[W]e stand in solidarity with migrant, low-income, queer and trans, and people of color.”

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Have these groups delivered results? No.

In 2023, a state-contracted auditor interviewed some CBOs. It found that they were only “responsible for a handful of submitted applications.” This year’s draft audit noted an “inverse relationship” between new applications and spending on these groups.

The other main beneficiary of the SOMAH program is a San Francisco-based corporation called Sunrun Inc., which bills itself as the country’s largest solar provider and has been the contractor for 78 percent of all SOMAH projects. The company has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates—including $50,000 to Gavin Newsom’s campaigns—and has employed an army of lobbyists in Sacramento.

Newsom, in turn, has packed his administration with former Sunrun employees. The governor appointed the company’s public policy manager to the California Energy Commission and appointed its former chief policy officer to a regional water quality control board. In recent years, Sunrun representatives have met with government regulators’ offices to discuss SOMAH, including last December, when the company supported efforts to expand the program.

SOMAH and Sunrun did not respond to requests for comment.

California’s infrastructure projects seem always to fall short. SOMAH shows why. Liberal nonprofits help pass sweeping climate laws and receive money from the programs those laws create. In turn, those groups use their expanded influence to push for still more mandates and spending. The laws finance the activists, the activists demand more laws, and the cycle feeds itself—and helps well-connected firms, like Sunrun, collect new contracts.

Meantime, Californians increasingly think solar isn’t worth the headache. As one property owner told auditors, it’s “hard to justify poking a whole bunch of holes in your roof all over the place, just for a small amount of benefit.”

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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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, which taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes—all under the banner of fighting “climate change.”

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Since 2019, California’s government has earmarked $49 million for the farmworker program, which operates through an opaque web that includes a government agency, nonprofit providers, and private contractors. California’s Department of Community Services and Development selected La Cooperativa Campesina de California, a nonprofit that serves farmworkers, to administer the program. La Cooperativa, in turn, has partnered with a for-profit, “minority owned” company, MAROMA Energy Services, to help run the program. Contractors do the work of installing solar panels and other appliances.

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

“We only require an ID,” Velores said. “It doesn’t need to be from this state, or [the] United States.”

Beneficiaries work hard to loop laborers into the system. A contractor for John Harrison Contracting—a California-based “Minority Business Enterprise” and Farmworker Housing Component subcontractor—would drive “hundreds of miles a day” across Southern California, trying to persuade farmworkers to sign up for the program, Inside Climate News previously reported. One challenge was to convince workers that the program was not a scam. The other challenge, after the Trump administration increased ICE raids, was finding potential clients, many of whom “stopped showing up to job sites.”

We spoke with MAROMA customer service representative Ángel Quintanilla, who confirmed that the company had provided solar panels for illegal immigrants. “You don’t need to have documentation,” Quintanilla said. “They ask for their pay stub and a form of their income and, of course, the gas and the electricity bill.”

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Despite a $49 million budget and nearly seven years of operation, the farmworker “weatherization” program has only provided services to about 2,000 families. That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services—a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability.

One problem: the same man, Mauricio Blanco, seems to be connected to entities at multiple stages in the flow of funds. Blanco worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for “weatherization” services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work. He acknowledged but did not address our request for comment.

We sent the California Department of Community Services an extensive list of questions for this story. A spokesman told us that the Farmworker Housing Component helps “vulnerable and disadvantaged communities” keep their homes temperate year-round, has saved the equivalent of more than 20,000 metric tons of carbon, and “contributes to the state’s climate investment and priority population goals.” He did not deny that the program had funded services for illegal immigrants.

California’s political leaders initially pitched the cap-and-trade program, and initiatives like low-income farmworker weatherization, as a way to fight “climate change.” In reality, however, these programs seem designed to do something else: keep the cash flowing through the state’s web of government agencies, nonprofit providers, and private contractors. Installing solar panels on some 2,000 homes will do almost nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—but it will line the pockets of a few connected people who know to repeat the platitudes and pull the levers of power.

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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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, are these people coming from?

There is a reason for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corporation reported that 41 percent of the street homeless surveyed across three Los Angeles neighborhoods—Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row—were “last housed” somewhere other than L.A. County.

Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that out-of-town homeless are flooding L.A. is a “myth.” In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location data. In 2025, RAND removed the metric from the organization’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”

We asked LAHSA and RAND why they buried this data. LAHSA said it stopped publishing previous-location figures because of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the data to the annex “due to a need to save costs on publishing,” and confirmed that the data would remain there in the group’s upcoming report.

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Another reason might be that the massive migration of homeless people to Los Angeles violates progressive pieties—and these groups would rather suppress those data than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA said it stopped publishing results for the previous-location question “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” but noted that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)

If these groups wouldn’t publish or promote this information, we decided to get it ourselves. We spent two days recreating RAND’s 2024 study of L.A.’s homeless population, using a slightly larger sample size to ensure precision. We approached people on the streets of the same three neighborhoods—Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row—and, after identifying ourselves, asked more than 200 homeless a simple question: “Where are you from, originally?”

The results were astounding: 64 percent of the L.A. street homeless said they were from outside the City of Los Angeles, and 53 percent said they were from outside Los Angeles County—a significant increase compared with the LAHSA and RAND studies. Nearly 40 percent told us they were from other states, mostly from states that voted for President Trump in 2024. Six percent told us that they were from other countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.

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Several of these non-L.A. residents were candid, describing their migration to the city for its fair weather or generous services. In Hollywood, a young woman named Norika said that after being a foster child in New York, she served in the Marine Corps, and had just arrived in L.A. days before. Proudly pointing to a full set of clean, straight teeth, she said that she did not use drugs. Holding a plastic bottle of vodka, she said she was drinking to cope with the pain of living on the streets, where, she said, she has already been raped.

On Skid Row, we encountered a young man as he was about to administer intravenous drugs. He told us that he came to Los Angeles from a small town in upstate New York for sobriety treatment but had departed the facility due to concerns about the program director’s “shady” activities. He would not elaborate and returned to his drug preparation.

Later, we encountered an earnest-looking elderly black woman sitting primly on her suitcase outside of a Skid Row shelter. She told us that she had purchased her own Greyhound ticket from Washington, D.C. at a cost of $379. She seemed to be in shock.

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For years, Los Angeles’s homelessness policy has been rooted in the idea that the condition is a housing problem. The city and county have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “housing first” and “harm reduction” programming—in a nutshell, providing housing and drug paraphernalia instead of mandating treatment—while failing reliably to punish quality-of-life crimes, such as public camping, drug consumption, and petty theft.

The homeless respond to incentives. They flock to places where it is easy to camp, do drugs, and commit crimes, and where the government provides housing, benefits, and drug paraphernalia. That’s exactly what Los Angeles has done. As a result, there is a “magnet effect” that continuously attracts the homeless from around the world.

The implications of our survey are clear: just building housing won’t solve Los Angeles’s homelessness problem. The wrong kind of housing program might even make it worse. Giving more homeless people a permanent home, with no strings attached, simply inspires nonresidents to come here.

The real way to solve Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis is to reverse the polarity of the magnet: enforce drug and camping laws, mandate treatment, and insist on clean and orderly streets. The only alternative is lawlessness—the end result of an approach that has turned the City of Angels into an open-air homeless encampment.

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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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 confused and highly vulnerable young people. One year later, we exposed how Texas Children’s Hospital may have been falsifying medical records and knowingly breaking Texas state law to continue providing “gender-affirming care.”

While Republican lawmakers in Texas took decisive action after the publication of our report to ban sex-change treatments on minors, the Biden administration decided that the real problem wasn’t that children were being secretly castrated—it was that a brave physician had dared to blow the whistle on these horrors. In June 2024, Biden’s Department of Justice indicted Dr. Eitan Haim on four federal charges of wrongfully obtaining individually identifiable health information and sending them to me. Thankfully, the charges were dismissed shortly after President Trump took office in January 2025, but the conduct of TCH remained unpunished.

That’s all changed now. This week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a historic settlement that will force Texas Children’s Hospital to fire five doctors who performed or were complicit in the shocking child sex-change procedures. The settlement further requires Texas Children’s to pay $10 million to establish the U.S.’s first-ever Detransition Clinic, which will assist survivors of transgender ideology in reversing the damage inflicted upon them.

This is amazing news and is a testament to the immense courage of physicians willing to stand up to the hyper-ideological tide of so-called transgender medicine and “gender-affirming care.” It’s also evidence of the power of investigative journalism to drive groundbreaking and meaningful change.

And here’s the truth: None of this could have happened without your support. My investigative reporting is powered by an army of dedicated and concerned citizens who have supported my work by subscribing to this Substack. That’s why, if you haven’t already, I’m asking you to become a paid subscriber and support our work. If you’re wondering how you can chip in and join the fight, this is how.

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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, with art, classrooms, a café, and podcast studios.

As part of this transformation, the Newsom administration approved a $189 million contract to provide new digital tablets—generic, flat-screen devices in a plastic shell—to every inmate in the state prison system, at “no cost” to offenders. The administration heralded the effort to replace inmates’ old tablets—which were piloted in 2018 and given to nearly all prisoners by 2023—as a step toward “digital equity” for “justice impacted” individuals, who could, in theory, use the devices to contact their families, consume “educational” content, and “learn new technology.”

In reality, taxpayer-funded tablets have also been used for more lurid endeavors. In this exclusive City Journal investigation, we contacted dozens of death-row inmates, who told us that prisoners in the state system use such devices to watch pornography and have explicit sexual conversations. Some prisoners, according to a former high-ranking California corrections official, use their tablets to groom minors. Though the state has claimed to regulate explicit content, the inmates told us that users can easily evade detection.

When reached for comment, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the tablets were “tightly controlled education tools” that provided inmates with “access to the Bible, education, and reentry resources that actually reduce crime.”

But inmates told us a different story. For some, the devices have become personal sex machines. In the words of one inmate, California’s death row is populated with desperately “horny” criminals who see the tablets as a way to satisfy their basest fantasies and desires—all thanks to the California taxpayer.

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In the 1980s, a rapist and serial murderer named Robert Maury earned the nickname “the Tipster Killer” for calling in anonymous tips identifying the locations of the dead bodies he left behind. During this period, he killed a woman by strangling her with a nylon clothesline, strangled and killed another two women, and brutally raped a fourth before he was caught by authorities.

Now, Maury is living at a state prison facility in Stockton, California, where he has viewed pornography on his taxpayer-funded digital tablet. In an interview, Maury told us inmates can receive “nude pictures” and watch pornography through their devices. In his case, he claimed to have received a topless photo from a 22-year-old German psychology student who was “hoping that I would share my story with her for her class project.” After the student sent the photo, Maury said he “flirted” with her “for a while.”

Maury said another way that inmates can watch pornography is through the video chat application. In this scheme, he explained, an inmate can call someone on the outside, that person can “put porn on their TV,” and the inmate can “watch with them.” Maury specified that he has never explicitly asked anyone to broadcast pornography in this manner, but when it happens, he “just say[s] cool and thank you.”

Samuel Amador, another serial killer who was sentenced to death, had a similar experience. He said inmates watch pornographic videos and have sexually explicit conversations through their tablets. The videos, he said, are delivered in “30 second clips.” Amador has created a rotation on his tablet between explicit and wholesome content: “I watch porn an[d] short clips of my family at the Beach.”

Sometimes, guards catch lewd messages, Amador said. But, in general, the restrictions are easy to evade. “[T]hey try to prevent us,” he said about sexting, “but we get around their bullshit.”

Jamar Tucker, a capital inmate at High Desert State Prison who has killed three men, noted the system’s loopholes. He indicated that while the rules prohibit inmates from receiving nude photos, he has received videos of women “dancing . . . in a thong.” He uses racy photos, he says, for sexual pleasure.

The potential for abuse is obvious. The Newsom administration has made the tablet program universal, with no access-restrictions based on offense. And inmates, including child predators, can communicate with members of the public through their tablets, apparently with no age restrictions, at a cost of five cents per text message or 16 cents per minute of video.

In a recent case, Nathaniel Ray Diaz, who was convicted of committing sex crimes against a 12-year-old girl, allegedly used a prison-issued tablet to contact and exploit her from inside Avenal State Prison. Diaz allegedly told the girl to send him sexually explicit images, which he received through a co-conspirator. The girl reportedly told investigators that Diaz forced her to speak with him through the tablet “for hours, every day,” from the time she came home from school until the prison phones turned off at midnight.

Prosecutors alleged that, in total, Diaz made “thousands of calls” to the girl, violating a no-contact order and—by soliciting explicit photographs and exploiting a minor—committing additional child sex crimes. The Eastern District of California Attorney’s Office told us that Diaz is in custody awaiting trial.

Douglas Eckenrod, former deputy director of California’s adult parole operations, indicated that the Diaz case is only the tip of the iceberg. He was in the room as the state discussed expanding the tablet program after an initial test run, and had raised concerns about pornography, grooming, and other abuses. These were apparently brushed aside. Now, he says, there is no way to monitor the nearly 90,000 inmates in the state prison system who have access to taxpayer-funded devices.

“I would bet my pension that there’s a vast amount of childhood pornography on the tablets,” said the former official. “There are probably several thousand [children] that are currently being groomed.”

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What is California doing to stop this abuse? Last month, state officials attempted to tighten restrictions on prison tablets, formally banning obscene text messages, sexually explicit images, and sexual behavior on video calls. But death-row inmates we interviewed said that prisoners could easily bypass the restrictions.

Maury, the serial killer, indicated that prisoners, especially younger men who “grew up with the Internet,” have found ways to continue viewing pornography and sending sexual messages to the outside. “If you try hard enough,” he said, there “is always a way around the system.”

Meantime, despite the obvious risks, Governor Gavin Newsom is moving full-speed ahead with his initiative to “reimagine our prison system” and turn San Quentin into “the nation’s most innovative rehabilitation facility.” Newsom has offered no indication that he will reverse course on the free tablet program. In fact, the new vendor contract allows for four one-year extensions, which could push its total cost to $315 million. At least one Democratic legislator is demanding that the state make inmates’ messages free of charge.

Eckenrod, who anticipated the dark side of “digital equity,” believes California has opened the floodgates to abuse. “We created a pathway for them to reach out and groom folks,” he said. “There are going to be victims that didn’t need to have been victims because of these decisions.”

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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This week, there’s quite a bit of news out of California.

For one, the race for mayor of Los Angeles is becoming increasingly contentious and high-profile. In addition, we saw a volatile gubernatorial debate, in which the Republican and Democratic candidates sparred among themselves on the various issues plaguing the state. And, of course, two Californians—Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris—are at the top of bookmakers’ lists for becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2028.

So, California really is at the center of things politically right now—both in terms of driving online discourse and as a window into what the Democrat political landscape might look like going into the next presidential election.

First, what’s going on in Los Angeles? The mayor’s race has come down to three candidates: Karen Bass, the incumbent ex-communist mayor; Nithya Rahman, a far-Left city councilwoman; and Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star and insurgent candidate who has campaigned on a tough-on-crime approach to the city’s problems with homelessness, drug abuse, and social disorder.

With Spencer Pratt, the obvious analogy is to Donald Trump. The question that both faced was similar: Is it really possible to turn a reality television career into a media-savvy campaign and a successful outsider political movement? Can you actually bridge that gap and become president of the United States, or, in this case, mayor of Los Angeles?

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an innocuous Muslim civil rights group—a reputation it reinforces with litigation and claims of anti-Muslim bigotry. But the group finds itself under increasing scrutiny for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The following month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis followed suit, citing CAIR’s being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism financing case.

But as other states move to sideline CAIR, California is embracing this alleged terror front. CAIR-CA, the organization’s largest statewide affiliate, is flush with taxpayer cash. In the last five years, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) has rubberstamped at least $41 million in funding to the group. The vast majority of that money, it turns out, comes from the federal government. These federal dollars are flowing into CAIR-CA’s coffers even after it was the target of a recent Department of Justice investigation.

This report—based on a trove of documents provided to us by the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN), a California-based nonprofit—reveals good reason for the DOJ to be digging into CAIR-CA. It also raises serious questions about why Gavin Newsom’s government is funding an organization with alleged terrorist ties.

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CAIR was founded in 1994 with the ostensible aim of advancing Muslim-American civil rights. The organization claims that it “is not and never has been an agent” or affiliate of “any militant group.” But the historical record offers justification to question that characterization.

CAIR’s co-founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were leading members of the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. That committee “effectively became the US-based Hamas infrastructure,” according to a George Washington University Program on Extremism report. In an October 1993 meeting planned by the Palestine Committee—secretly monitored by the FBI—participants discussed how to support Hamas’s efforts as well as how to help derail the Oslo Accords.

A year later, CAIR was born, with Ahmad and Awad assuming leading roles. For 11 years, Ahmad served as CAIR’s national chairman. Awad remains CAIR’s national executive director.

Some of this information came to light during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, which saw five of that sham charity’s leaders convicted for collectively funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. The investigation uncovered a network of Hamas-linked organizations. While CAIR was not prosecuted, the court found “ample evidence to establish” that it was associated with the Palestinian terror group. An FBI Special Agent reportedly testified at trial that CAIR was a “front group for Hamas.”

Lara Burns served as an FBI Special Agent for more the two decades and was the lead investigator on the Holy Land Foundation case. She currently serves as the head of terrorism research at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“You can’t look at what CAIR is doing today in isolation,” Burns said. “The government established the fact [during the trial] that a conspiracy existed among these organizations, including CAIR, to support Hamas, and that acts were taken in furtherance of that conspiracy. . . . CAIR’s role was to operate an entity out of Washington, D.C. that would serve to defend the interests of the rest of the network—against scrutiny from the media, against scrutiny from law enforcement. . . . In my opinion, the executive director, Nihad Awad, and other components of CAIR that were a part of this original infrastructure, are still operating CAIR in furtherance of an agenda to support Hamas.”

CAIR-CA leaders have also engaged in pro-terror rhetoric. On October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’s terror attack on Israel, Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco office, posted to social media: “We are witnessing decolonization.” On July 31, 2024, following the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Billoo again took to social media, where she declared him a martyr. On November 12, 2023, Hussam Ayloush, the CEO of CAIR-CA, likened Israel to Nazi Germany and claimed: “Israel should be attacked.”

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One would think that CAIR’s ties to an Islamist terror group would make government agencies pause before providing it with public funds. But under Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s state government has seemingly never met a “marginalized group” it did not want to shower with other people’s money. CAIR-CA is rolling in tax dollars.

In 2022, CDSS awarded CAIR-CA $7.2 million in federal funds via a state program to provide immigration-related legal assistance. For its part, CAIR-CA pledged to serve approximately 1,800 people through September 2024, and earlier this year, claimed to have fulfilled that promise “across . . . various subgrantees.” According to IAN, a public records request submitted to the CDSS did not confirm how many legal cases have been handled as part of the grant; in its most recent annual report, CAIR-CA said that it had helped “dozens of Afghan families” through the project. In September 2025, CDSS rubberstamped an additional $23 million in federal funds for CAIR-CA.

In 2024, CAIR-CA’s IRS filings revealed that it had distributed more than $4 million in subgrants to 39 organizations. Among these sub-grantees were various groups with Islamist ties. For example, CAIR-CA sub-granted roughly $185,000 to California chapters of the Muslim American Society (MAS). GWU’s Program on Extremism identifies MAS as an open “Brotherhood legacy group” in the U.S. In 2004, a top MAS official estimated that nearly half of the organization’s activists were Muslim Brotherhood members. (MAS, which did not respond to our request for comment, claims to have “no affiliation” with the Muslim Brotherhood.)

CAIR-CA also sub-granted $30,000 to the Islamic Society of Orange County, which has ties to an individual connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1992, ISOC’s director invited Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” to deliver a lecture, during which he reportedly “dismissed” nonviolent interpretations of jihad. A year later, Rahman was charged with seditious conspiracy for his connection to the attack. (ISOC did not respond to our request for comment.)

In 2024, CAIR-CA sub-granted $117,000 to California “relief” chapters of the Islamic Circle of North America. ICNA was originally established as a U.S. affiliate of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement, whose founder’s ideology influenced the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, in 2000, a former ICNA president penned an article that seemingly endorsed the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the U.S. (ICNA did not respond to our request for comment.)

CAIR-CA has claimed, however implausibly, that it has no control over the selection of its sub-grantees. In January 2026, the director of CAIR-CA, Hussam Ayloush, wrote to a congressional committee claiming that his organization “had no input or role” in determining the sub-grantees. Instead, he suggested that CDSS had selected them.

While CDSS told IAN that it “reviews and authorizes all . . . subgrantees,” the department did not release records showing that it approved or authorized the CAIR-CA sub-grants. Additionally, Alyoush’s signature appears on the sub-grant contracts, which, according to IAN, suggests that CAIR-CA exercised significant discretion over millions in federal tax dollars.

“Ayloush personally signed every one of these ALSP grants as executive director of CAIR-LA,” a spokesman for the Network Contagion Research Institute and IAN told the New York Post. “[A]n entity contractually charged with administering funds and subgranting services necessarily plays a role in identifying subgrantees and their performance under the grant.”

In response to our request for comment, a CAIR-CA spokesman called allegations against the organization “baseless” and “part of a broader defamation campaign.” “All contributions and grants that CAIR California receives are fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes,” he said, “subject to rigorous internal and external auditing and reporting. This transparency is why both private and public funders have worked with us and continue to do so.”

In March 2025, IAN requested that the Department of Justice launch an investigation into CAIR-CA, stating that a “forensic audit” was needed to determine the scope of the organization’s “financial misconduct, compliance [breaches], and support for terrorism.” Three months later, the DOJ confirmed that an investigation was underway.

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Given California’s track record under Newsom—on whose watch the state has lost billions of dollars to fraud—taxpayers should not hold their breath that state agencies will hold CAIR-CA accountable. Nor should they expect California to come to its senses anytime soon and stop turning over buckets of tax dollars to a “civil rights” group with alleged ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But the failures of California state government present an opportunity for the Trump administration. If the Department of Justice were officially and permanently to revoke CAIR-CA’s accreditation with the Executive Office for Immigration Review—a status that the group relies on to receive federal immigration funds—then tax dollars currently flowing into its coffers would be halted. In other words, the solution is simple: turn off the taps.

Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. 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.

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Another week has brought another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. Why is this still happening? How have we become so habituated to left-wing violence that such an incident only dominates the news cycle for two or three days?

A grim feature of assassination attempts against President Trump is that you have to measure them on a scale of proximity to success. So, the Butler assassination attempt—in which Trump was shot in the ear—is, in that sense, more serious than the other botched attempts, including the most recent at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But even these comparatively less serious attempts still carry grave implications and are symbolic of a real problem. And if you stack up enough of them, it’s only a matter of time before more people get hurt.

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California once built massive infrastructure projects—dams, highways, and aqueducts—that were the marvel of the world. During the Great Depression, engineers erected the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget. But those days are over. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has been unable to complete, and hardly able to be…

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Sometimes it feels as though week after week brings bad news, but this past week, something happened that’s worth celebrating: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the infamous left-wing, anti-conservative smear machine, has been indicted by a grand jury and is now facing federal criminal charges.

The SPLC is famous for its “Hatewatch,” a list they maintain of supposedly hateful figures and groups on the Right. Some of these groups are legitimately bad—the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and other white nationalist groups—but others are completely mainstream right-wing organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Here’s what happened: Over the course of ten years, essentially since the emergence of the “alt right” in 2015 up until the beginning of Donald Trump’s second administration in 2025, the SPLC was allegedly pumping millions of dollars in donor funds through various shell corporations and sham entities to the precise organizations that they were putting on their “Hatewatch” list, including the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and some of the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.

In short, the SPLC was astroturfing, enabling, and funding the white nationalist movement, putting the white nationalist movement on its “Hatewatch” list, and then using the white nationalist movement’s supposed threat, which they were propping up, to fearmonger and fundraise from donors across the country. According to some reports, the SPLC now has about $1 billion in its war chest—an enormous sum, raised, in part, through deception.

This is a very powerful technique of the organized Left. They create phantasms of the radical Right, and then raise money, engage in activism, seek publicity, and attempt to shape political narratives and policy decisions based on phantasms that they themselves created. They use their self-created monsters as vehicles to lump normal right-wing actors—like me—into ugly, smear-by-association campaigns.

The SPLC’s tactics worked in the past because establishment conservatives at, say, universities or think tanks, didn’t want to go out on a limb and protect the more radical groups from the SPLC machine. That’s understandable in the case of groups like the KKK or American Nazi Party, which deserve no defense. But the SPLC’s strategy began to crack because its definition of hate became so expansive that it conflated the most unsavory characters with normal conservative intellectuals and activists. When they began conflating classical liberals and mainstream social conservatives with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the Right was finally able to push back.

When I was in the thick of the fight against critical race theory earlier this decade, I remember having some fear of the SPLC, because I had seen what had happened to others they had targeted in the past. I remember having this sense that when they began publishing defamatory articles about me, I had better fight back hard, because these people were trying to knock me off the board altogether—ruin my reputation and take away my ability to support my family.

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Former President Joe Biden’s administration oversaw an unprecedented wave of migration across the southwestern border of the United States. Migrants convoyed in “caravans” in hopes of overwhelming border authorities. Cartels trafficked drugs and people in droves. At some points, American authorities estimated that more than 130,000 people were crossing …

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This week, our investigative team at City Journal published an exclusive story about Gavin Newsom providing free sex-change procedures to homeless illegal aliens. The story is so absurd that, at first glance, it might seem fake. But it’s completely real.

Here’s an excerpt from a conversation our reporter, Jonathan Choe, had with one of the transgender migrants living at a publicly funded homeless shelter in San Francisco:

CHOE: Were you able to get hormones?

MIGRANT: Yeah, I did that with my doctor.

CHOE: So, Medi-Cal, you got the breast implants?

MIGRANT: Yes.

CHOE: Wow. Taxpayer funded. So here, in California, they give you the breast implants here?

MIGRANT: Yes.

CHOE: Free?

MIGRANT: Yeah.

Jonathan Choe is an amazing reporter. He has a knack for bumbling into extreme situations and getting people talking. He actually went to a number of homeless shelters in San Francisco, and at each homeless shelter he found transgender migrants who told him very directly that they were there to get hormones, breast implants, and, as Jacqueline says, “bottom surgery.”

Bottom surgery, of course, is a euphemism for a procedure called a vaginoplasty. A vaginoplasty is the procedure by which a surgeon will castrate an adult male, carving up his penile tissue and inverting it into what is called a “neo-vagina.” It’s an incredibly disturbing procedure that often has heavy psychosexual undertones for the person seeking it out.

One of my main takeaways from what we uncovered is that the median California voter has placed himself in a completely submissive moral position relative to “oppressed groups.” The California voter will accept any moral demand, any moral imposition, any moral cost—and still not change his vote, because he thinks that if he doesn’t go along with the zeitgeist it means that he’s a “bad person.”

Consequently, California voters have essentially given a blanket ‘yes’ to being morally blackmailed by the layer of activists, administrators, and ideological fanatics within the California state government. With the voters’ acquiescence, the fanatics will concoct whatever bureaucracy or process is necessary to ensure that, in the end, the trans illegals are getting gender surgeries in San Francisco.

The inability of the median voter to stand up and say ‘Enough!’ is why California ends up providing taxpayer-funded vaginoplasties for illegals. In a hyper-feminized, consensus-seeking, offense-avoiding progressive political culture, there is no other option but to provide this boutique medical procedure for what are essentially the perfect avatars of the oppressed: trans homeless illegal aliens.

Newsom’s response to our reporting exemplified the emasculated nature of California’s political class. As the story was gaining traction—going viral on X, picking up attention on Fox News, driving conversation across the country—Newsom’s communications team doubled down and admitted that they were providing trans surgeries to illegal aliens as part of compassionate “care.”

It’s the ultimate ideological endpoint. The only thing they know how to do is mindlessly repeat the mantras and say “yes” to every new ideological fad. For the Left, transgender illegal aliens are the closest you can get to intersectional light-bringers. Catering to their every whim constitutes the fulfillment of the Left’s moral conscience. All moral questions must be deferred to them; no benefit can be denied to them.

What the American Right Can Learn from Viktor Orbán’s Loss in Hungary

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If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that my mission is ultimately never about merely reacting or responding to narratives in the news—it’s to be driving and shaping them. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, and it’s what my team is doing now as we expose the torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse occurring in the once-great State of …

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Last month, we received a report from a whistleblower who claimed that illegal aliens were staying in San Francisco’s homeless shelters. Following up on the tip, we visited numerous publicly funded shelters in San Francisco, and spoke to employees and residents about their policies, sometimes through a translator.

We discovered not only that the shelters…

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Last week, the New York Times ran a piece diving into how President Trump took the U.S. to war with Iran. To be clear, all the usual caveats apply: it’s the New York Times and, as such, it has its biases and may not have all the details right. But it was still quite a stunning piece, which provides a play-by-play of how the decision to attack Iran unfolded.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom is embroiled in a national fraud scandal. Thus far, much of the coverage has focused on alleged schemes related to unemployment insurance, hospice care, and food stamps. In this exclusive investigation, we shine a light on one of California’s largest initiatives: the In-Home Supportive Services Program, or IHSS, which pa…

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Gavin Newsom’s California is like a Third World country—a one-party state run by cartoonish, incompetent leaders, rife with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of waste, fraud, and abuse. Can anything be done to fix the catastrophic mess that Democrats, after 16 years of wielding unchecked power, have made in the Golden State? Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate for governor of California, joins us to discuss the immense scale of damage Democrat governance has wrought on California, and whether a Republican really has a shot to win.

The following is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. Sign up now for premium access:

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Rufo: I’m very excited to talk with the man of the hour in California, Steve Hilton. Some of you might recognize Steve from his Fox News days. He had a great show on Fox, and now he’s going into the lion’s den as he runs for governor of California.

He’s currently leading in the polls—at least among Republicans—but it’s a wide field. So, Steve, why don’t you just start out by telling us what exactly is happening in California? What on earth is going on?

Hilton: What’s happening in California is a complete disaster. We’ve had 16 years of Democrat one-party rule. That’s what’s going on. And that’s why you have me, a Republican, leading in the polls ahead of all the Republicans—and all the Democrats as well.

The basic story is that California today is what you get when Democrats get everything they want. It’s a very important lesson for the whole country, because for sixteen years now they’ve controlled everything. They’ve had all the statewide elected offices, from governor and attorney general on down. They’ve controlled both chambers of the legislature with a supermajority, and that means that they can pass anything that they want without any kind of Republican input. They’ve controlled all the big counties and the big cities.

What have the results of one-party Democrat rule been? Today, we have in California the highest poverty rate in the country—tied with Louisiana. We have the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states. We have the highest cost of living—gas, electricity, groceries, and housing are all more expensive here than anywhere else in the country.

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