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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is all this possible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese nationals, including some associated with the Chinese Communist Party, run massive illegal marijuana operations just beneath Mount Shasta. They and the county’s other illegal growers rake in billions of dollars per year, and terrorize the rural community with shootings, gang violence, and trafficking. This massive criminal enterprise operates in the shadows of America’s most populous state.

We met local law enforcement, spoke to policy experts, and rode along for an early-morning raid in a primarily Chinese area of the county. The picture that emerged was shocking. Growers operate massive illegal weed operations with impunity. County authorities have seized bags and bags of toxic, unregulated, and banned pesticides from Siskiyou pot farms. An expert told us that Chinese nationals are running illegal grow operations on U.S. soil to poison Americans. One group seems poised to benefit from the mayhem: the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s a Tuesday morning in Siskiyou County, and it’s silent as the sun rises over the nearby mountain range. Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue is in front of his county office preparing to conduct a raid on a marijuana farm.

A radio cuts through the quiet. The first batch of officers dispatched to the site is calling LaRue to tell him that a wanted grower has escaped.

We hop in LaRue’s truck and convoy down County Route A12, a dusty path that leads to the epicenter of Siskiyou’s illegal marijuana cultivation: the Shasta Vista subdivision. Here, growers smuggle out illegal marijuana in vans, shoot at unwanted visitors, and produce an estimated $2 billion of unlicensed marijuana annually.

We reach the subdivision’s entrance in time to see hordes of Asians in pickup trucks, minivans, and water trucks flee the area. LaRue says that this is normal. Once gang lookouts spot authorities, they alert the community and “start getting in their cars and booking it out.”

“Sometimes this looks like a freeway,” he says, pointing to the main road, where cars are exiting dirt driveways. “There’s just car after car coming out, that’s got dust all over [them] from turning off one of these side roads.”

Asian lookouts line the subdivision’s main road, huddling together in groups and retreating as a pack when the sheriff’s truck approaches. We see a sprawling landscape filled with hundreds of hoophouses, many hidden behind padlocked gates and “No Trespassing” signs as Mount Shasta looms in the background.

LaRue parks his truck at the first parcel of land, where his deputies have already started securing the site and hunting for evidence. He leads us to a large tarp-covered pool.

“This is a big swimming pool you’d get at Costco and it’s full of water—and this is not for swimming,” he says. “Water trucks are delivering out front. It comes through [a hose] into the pool, and then on the other side, it’s being pumped out into the greenhouse. That’s the kind of traditional system we see [here] at these illegal marijuana grows: water being trucked in and then being used for illegal cultivation.”

LaRue leads us to an area across from the pool, where growers have set up a plywood shack and trailer. Inside, he points out the Chinese labels on imported food items, a bowl of chicken feet sitting out in the open, and piles of trash scattered around the floor. Outside the trailer are bags of toxic pesticides with Chinese labels—all banned for use in the U.S.

“As you look around, you see that really, the story is that trash doesn’t leave the property, no matter what it is. And you’ll see plastic everywhere,” he says. “It’ s either burned or buried, and it doesn’t leave.”

LaRue walks us past open sewage pits to a massive hoophouse, a tarp-covered greenhouse made of PVC pipe. The average parcel in Siskiyou uses these structures to raise 2,000 plants, each of which produce between one and five pounds of flower per grow cycle. In the Shasta Vista alone, per LaRue, the total amount of weed grown could top $2 billion a year.

“This is just one tiny parcel, right?” he says, surveying the plants. “Start multiplying this by thousands and that’s the true number. Even the stuff you see today, you think, ‘Wow, if this was your only problem, this could take forever to resolve.’”

Once we step outside, deputies will destroy the hoophouse with a bulldozer, which they’ve found is the most effective way to prevent future grows. Unfortunately, LaRue says, the growers return as soon as officers leave.

Today, officers will destroy thousands of plants and confiscate hundreds more processed marijuana bulbs, doing their best to cause lasting damage to the growers’ infrastructure. But it’s a Sisyphean task: in California, illegal marijuana cultivation can be difficult to prove and is generally a misdemeanor.

“Most people aren’t afraid of that,” he said of the potential punishment. “It doesn’t deter any activity, as is demonstrated by what we see.”

Deputies don’t encounter growers on today’s raid, but when they do, things can turn ugly. In one case, authorities went to evacuate the subdivision during the massive 2021 Lava Fire. An Asian man with methamphetamine in his system carried 132 pounds of weed to the evacuation checkpoint. Apparently mistaking the checkpoint for a marijuana search, authorities say he pointed a gun at responders before officers shot him. Apparently as a result of similar incidents, the sheriff’s office says cops are “routinely called to act as security” before firefighters arrive at cultivation sites.

Siskiyou is desperate. Residents have been shot and killed. Authorities have found people suspected of marijuana cultivation murdered.

“There is this dread out here of the criminal enterprise doing all kinds of things, from violent crime to stealing water,” LaRue said. “With this illegal enterprise that we have, we have people that show up and are being kidnapped, or they’re being tied up, they’re being robbed, they’re being shot . . . imagine having that as your neighbor.”

LaRue says about 60 percent of growers they encounter in the Shasta Vista, a subdivision almost exclusively dedicated to marijuana cultivation, are Chinese. They probably aren’t running these massive farms alone. “We do know that there are certain associations with some of the Chinese gangs—the triads for example,” LaRue said. “There were some other associations that link back to Communist China.”

It wasn’t always like this in Siskiyou. Things began to change around the time California legalized recreational marijuana.

Starting around 2015, Asian cultivators began flooding the area. Cultivators bought up residential land en masse. Today, the estimated number of illegal growers in the largely Asian Shasta Vista subdivision could total over 7,000—about 20 percent of Siskiyou’s entire population.

Aerial images we received from the sheriff’s office show the stark changes since the growers arrived. In 2017, many lots in the Shasta Vista sat dormant. By 2021, those same lots were filled with greenhouses.

County Supervisor Jess Harris has lived in Siskiyou his whole life and saw the transformation firsthand.

“My entire life, you always had the Mexican cartel grows,” he said. “But it wasn’t ever a major issue on private property or anywhere residential. Ten years ago, somewhere around there, all of a sudden there was this big boom of land on subdivisions that prior weren’t developed, and all of a sudden were full of illegal cannabis grows.”

Ten years ago, California’s then-lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, championed Proposition 64, a measure to legalize recreational marijuana use. Shortly before it passed, Hmong growers had begun moving to the Shasta Vista. According to Harris, Chinese growers moved in after the law passed.

“I was hearing rumors that the Chinese were coming in and actually telling the Hmong, ‘Here’s a cash offer for your land. Take it or take a bullet,’” he said.

How did the growers purchase the parcels of land in the first place? In most cases, LaRue told us, the individuals growing the marijuana are not the landowners. Siskiyou authorities have tracked the property deeds back to individuals with Chinese names who reside in separate states like Washington, or in other parts of California.

“Honestly, we have no idea who actually owns the parcel because there’s this shell game of names that go on property deeds,” LaRue said.

A federal taskforce would consider it a Herculean task to track down the property-owners supposedly in charge of marijuana operations. A 62-officer jurisdiction like Siskiyou County would find it even harder. A larger county facing a similar infiltration, however, has been able to document how the scheme works.

A 2019 criminal complaint against a Southern California real estate broker sketched a potential outline of the scheme. First, foreign nationals descend on California, where they’re wired money from China to buy up land. With the help of real-estate agents embedded in the scheme, they bury property deeds in obscure LLCs and shell companies. From there, masterminds appoint proxies to run marijuana grow operations—everything from purchasing infrastructure supplies to facilitating distribution of the pot on the black market.

A case in Siskiyou demonstrates how managers try to work the local officials. In 2017, a brother-sister duo named Chi Meng Yang and Gaosheng Laitinen tried to bribe Siskiyou’s then-sheriff to ignore illegal grows. Yang offered the sheriff $1 million in exchange for his “friendship” and help lobbying to legalize medical marijuana in another state.

Once managers establish themselves as criminal landlords, they recruit laborers to handle day-to-day operations. In Siskiyou, LaRue says, authorities have found overwhelming evidence that some of the Chinese nationals who cultivate marijuana on farms are illegal immigrants. They “have come over the border—and this was during the Biden administration—and they were either working off debt, or they’re working essentially just because they were brought over across the border,” LaRue said.

But the shell companies and real-estate fraud only scratch the surface of the criminal activity that investigators have found on these farms. In the past few years, authorities have reported that Chinese criminal organizations are smuggling illegal pesticides into California, potentially contaminating millions of pounds of marijuana.

At the raid, we saw empty vats of chemicals scattered across the property, some of which had Chinese labels. The sheriff told us these were highly toxic pesticides, used, in theory, for tasks like bug prevention. But at least one investigator believes that illegal grows are using chemicals like these as part of a larger plot to poison Americans.

In the early years of his marijuana farm raids, LaRue often found hundreds of mylar bags of Chinese-labeled products. At first, his office assumed these were household products. It wasn’t until an agent translated some labels in 2023, he said, that law-enforcement discovered that the bags littering grow sites contain toxic fumigants.

LaRue contacted CalEPA with Siskiyou’s discovery of illegal pesticides. Law-enforcement officers also reported symptoms of exposure to poisonous chemicals. Authorities called in help from the National Guard unit that analyzes chemical agents to identify the pesticides. What they endured, LaRue said, should have been enough for the state to classify the Shasta Vista as a Superfund site.

The chemicals have injured multiple emergency responders. In one case, firefighters encountered pesticides at a grow site and suffered chemical burns. In another case, law enforcement personnel accidentally walked into an active fumigation on a marijuana farm. They suffered respiratory symptoms and were hospitalized.

Siskiyou County authorities have documented dozens of “mystery” chemicals at these sites, some of which are carcinogens, groundwater pollutants, and toxic air contaminants—and none of which, per LaRue, are approved for fumigation use in California.

Methomyl is one restricted compound found in pesticides in Siskiyou. Almost all methomyl products are restricted-use pesticides, according to the federal EPA, because they can cause respiratory paralysis or death. Other states have applied that label to methomyl products because of their toxicity; in Michigan, methomyl was used to kill animals like skunks, opossums, and raccoons.

These compounds just scratch the surface of what investigators have found. They’ve also discovered organochlorine pesticides like pentachloronitrobenzene, a soil fungicide that can cause convulsions, coma, pulmonary edema, and myoclonic jerking movements; pyrethroid insecticides like cypermethrin and lambda-cyhalothrin, which can cause coma and seizures within 20 minutes of exposure; and the pyrrole insecticide chlorfenapyr, which can cause convulsions, seizures, and cardiac arrest.

If the growers were interested in killing insects, they could go to the local Home Depot and buy a commercial insecticide, Rob Roggeveen, national coordinator at HIDTA’s Marijuana Impact Group, said. His theory? Chinese masterminds may intentionally inject lethal chemicals into the plant as a form of “chemical warfare” against the United States.

“This stuff is definitely being sent here to poison the plant that then gets ingested by the consumer,” Roggeveen said. “And what better way to do it than on a product that’s not going to get you right away? It’ s going to take time for it to fester in the body.”

“It’s chemical warfare at its finest,” he added.

Paul Larkin, a legal expert with a background investigating organized crime at the Justice Department, said that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of trying to infiltrate America with lethal substances.

“There is utterly no doubt that the fentanyl problem that we have, and still have, is attributable in large part to what China has done,” Larkin said. “You have to look at the entirety of the drugs that China is getting into the U.S. or helping get into the U.S. because it not only makes them money, first of all, if people overdose and die; it reduces the population and it will also weakens the United States from within.”

Who’s responsible for the criminal behavior on these sites? Officials believe that the hydra that is California’s Chinese-dominated illegal cannabis empire may have a head: the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s not hard to believe that the CCP has played a part in the criminal enterprise in Siskiyou—especially given the scheme that investigators discovered in the Mojave Desert. In July 2022, authorities discovered an illegal marijuana farm on a 75-acre property that was later reported to be owned by a CCP intel official. Authorities are investigating similar potential CCP connections throughout the state.

It’s also no secret that California Governor Gavin Newsom, the cheerleader behind California’ s legalization of marijuana, is friendly with the Chinese. He’s brokered massive deals with Chinese companies and accepted gifts from Chinese-linked entities.

Newsom’s communications director did not respond to a comment request by deadline.

LaRue says he has spoken with Newsom. The governor, he thinks, is turning a blind eye to the illegal activity for political reasons.

“The state understands how bad this is, but they don’t want to talk about it, I think, because it’s bad press,” LaRue said. “This is exactly what he wouldn’t want people to see. It really is another failure, under his leadership, whether he wants to own it or not.”

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

Ogbatue is hailed on social media as a philanthropist who has built roads and housing, sponsors annual medical clinics, and provides food for the needy in Abatete. He is also, it turns out, CEO of California Home Health Agency (CHHA), a lucrative taxpayer-funded company that provides in-home medical care and a range of specialty treatments.

How did Ogbatue make his money? Between 2018 and 2021, CHHA made less than $2 million from Medicaid. Then, over the next three years, the company raked in more than $34 million—a massive increase, which coincided with a series of high-dollar real estate transactions. Experts we spoke with said that CHHA’s billing numbers raised major red flags.

Ogbatue and his wife, Agnes, have built a small fortune. Between 2023 and 2024, Nathan and Agnes amassed at least $7 million worth of property, including a Riverside mansion with a sports court, putting green, archery range, and a pool. Nathan’s taxpayer-funded business appears to have played a significant role.

That business, CHHA, dates back at least to 2013, when Agnes submitted its first publicly listed utilization report. She appears to have filed that mandatory form for every year through 2019. California’s Health Care Access and Information department told City Journal that since then, it has not received a report from CHHA “despite continued requests.”

In the years that followed, CHHA’s Medicaid revenues exploded. In 2018, the agency received just $89,570. In 2022, CHHA pulled in nearly $4 million. Across the following two years, the company garnered over $17 million and $13 million, respectively.

The real-estate records seem to reveal a similar trajectory. In 2000, Ogbatue bought a Riverside home for $330,000. Then, between 2023 and 2024, he and his wife purchased the $2.7 million Riverside mansion, a $1.9 million beach house, and $1.4 million in other Riverside properties. In all, the Ogbatues acquired more than $7 million worth of property between 2023 and 2024.

The home that Ogbatue bought in Redondo Beach was tied to another Nigerian family. Before Ogbatue took possession of the home, it served as collateral for the bail bond of Tamara Motley, who was sentenced to prison in December 2023 for submitting $24 million worth of fraudulent claims to Medicare. As of 2023, Motley was married to former Nigerian Senator Ahmed Ogembe, whom the Obgatues named as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the sale of the Redondo Beach property.

California Home Health Agency’s website makes no mention of Nathan or Agnes Ogbatue. When we called the number on the site, a woman picked up, but declined to answer our questions, saying it was a customer service line only.

We drove to California Home Health Agency’s location in a strip mall in Riverside. The blinds were shut tight as we knocked on the door. After a while, a woman answered, and directed us to call Nathan.

We showed her a photo of Chief Nathan Ogbatue in Abatete standing in front of golden statues of himself and Agnes. She confirmed that Nathan Ogbatue was the man in the photo.

Next, we drove to the Ogbatues’ six-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion, but the gates were closed. We called and asked to talk, but Nathan himself brushed us off, saying he didn’t have the time. In a previous conversation over the phone, he denied that he was the “Owelle” (roughly translating to “chief”) of Abatete and said our investigation wouldn’t get anywhere.

“We worked really hard, to be honest with you. If we were doing anything funny we wouldn’t talk to you,” he said. “I’m talking to you because I have nothing to fear. What I’m telling you is that we worked hard.”

We spoke to Ogbatue over the phone three times. During two of those calls, we asked how many people he employed, but he would not give us an estimate.

Nathan Ogbatue was crowned chief of Abatete, a southern Nigerian farming town, in a boisterous ceremony in 2012. A YouTube video shows his acceptance speech, during which he pledged “to place the interests of Abatete first in all my private and official transactions . . . so help me God.”

Ogbatue has apparently delivered on that promise. He reportedly paid for a palace, roads, and renovations to the town’s civic center, which hosts multiple painted murals of the Ogbatues and sits beside two golden statues of the couple.

Villagers are grateful for his generosity. Two years ago, an outlet released a compilation of beneficiaries of Ogbatue’s philanthropy. Over the past 12 months, Ogbatue has sponsored a children’s Christmas party and distributed sacks of food to the needy.

As these projects took shape in Nigeria, we hoped to answer one remaining question: How did Chief Nathan Ogbatue make so much money through the Medicaid program?

California is riddled with Medicaid fraud. As City Journal previously reported, the state’s largest home health program is particularly vulnerable to scams. One expert estimated that up to 40 percent of all spending on that program is lost to fraud.

Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a video statement earlier this year that in California, the number of home health agencies has almost doubled between 2019 and 2024.

“In 2024 alone, spending for home health care in California increased by more than 21 percent,” he said, “representing the largest growth rate for any major health category nationwide.”

No officials have publicly accused CHHA of wrongdoing. Two experts we spoke with, however, suggested that the company’s billing patterns raise serious questions. Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, reviewed CHHA’s Medicaid data and noted several potential issues.

“What jumps off the page is not the amount being charged for each service—it is the extraordinary volume of services being billed,” he said. “This agency went from roughly half a million dollars in annual Medi-Cal payments to $17 million in 2023, while reaching the very top of the statewide distribution for the frequency of certain nursing and home-health-aide claims.”

Mark Haskins, a fraud expert and former investigator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was alarmed by CHHA’s billing totals, small office, and failure to file mandatory disclosure forms.

“In my experience, companies with unidentifiable employees, billing for a large number of services, and failing to supply a utilization report to the state for more than six years that would easily verify much of the information in question have all the earmarks of a fraudulent shell company that fabricates stolen patient and even NPI numbers to submit fabricated billings,” he said.

Talcove suggested that CHHA’s failure to file utilization reports during its period of growth pointed to a systemic issue statewide.

“California appears to have had a significant oversight gap: one part of the state was responsible for collecting the reports, another for licensing the provider, and another for paying the Medi-Cal claims,” he said. “The failure to file mandatory reports apparently did not stop the provider from billing or receiving millions of dollars.”

We sent Ogbatue a list of questions and assertions, including the reported Medicaid billing totals, before publication.

A lawyer from King & Spalding sent a long response. She argued that CHHA provides professionally ordered and medically necessary home health care via a “network of more than one hundred contracted registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, and home health aides.” She suggested that the pandemic drove demand for CHHA’s services and claimed that the company’s revenue increase in 2022 “coincides with a health plan contracting for additional home health nursing services.”

Haskins wasn’t convinced by that explanation. He raised multiple questions, including about the company’s failure to file utilization reports and the identities of its service providers.

“If the CHHA claims over 100 clinicians on 1099s, submitting an accurate HCAI report would create a permanent, public audit trail showing an impossible ratio of visits to payroll, massive contract labor line items, or billing volume that contradicts their CDPH staffing ratios,” he said. “However, by skipping the filing, they keep their aggregate utilization numbers out of public oversight data sets.”

While we were in Riverside, we spoke to Ogbatue on the phone outside of his home. During that conversation, he implied that we were racist for asking how California Home Health Agency made its money.

“All the white people that made more money than me, have you ever chased them?” he asked. “I don’t care if you’re white or orange or polka dot. A snake is a snake, whether it’s black, white, or orange.”

Ogbatue told us to contact his lawyer, Wilfred Aka. Aka was disbarred by the federal U.S. Tax Court and the federal Board of Immigration Appeals, was suspended by the California state bar in 2019 and 2020, and faced disciplinary charges with the state bar in 2025. He did not return our calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One group, more than any other, has cashed in on this arrangement: California’s public-sector unions.…

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

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

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

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

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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Dr. Paul Gottfried has been following the development of American politics for longer than many readers have been alive. A political philosopher and godfather of the paleoconservative movement, Gottfried was a student of the Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse and has closely monitored the radical Left’s transformation from classically Marxist to woke to the internal tensions it is experiencing now. In this interview, Gottfried discusses the intersection between wokeism and Marxism, where the Left is heading, and what the Right should do about it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Rufo: We’re excited to talk to the man himself, Paul Gottfried, who has observed so many political cycles, from the New Left as a student of Herbert Marcuse to the second Trump administration now. Paul, I just wanted to get a sense of things from you. Having seen so much radical political development, and having been one of the key thinkers in paleoconservative thought—which was out of fashion for a number of years but has really come roaring back during the Trump years—what do you make of it as you look back at all these changes?

Gottfried: I think that it’s very hard to process them, although I’ve lived through them for sixty years. The country has become much more socially and culturally radical than it was even when I was a graduate student—something that I hear Christopher Rufo has discussed quite well in his books. And what I’ve seen is a changing of the leftist guard. In my youth, we were dealing with a New Left that was to a much larger extent influenced by classical Marxism than the Left is now.

What I think has happened, and what I’ve argued in books, is that we’re living through a post-Marxist Left, one which is only very vestigially influenced by traditional Marxism and much more heavily influenced by what you have written on extensively, which is wokeness—which I think has become the major characteristic of the Left in our times.

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For much of his political career, California Governor Gavin Newsom has presented himself as a champion of open government. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom declared the city’s commitment to transparency and signed major open-data legislation into law. As lieutenant governor, Newsom condemned the state government for enabling secrecy. “We are one of the…

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The latest debate dividing the Right centered on a rather unlikely subject: burritos. Specifically, online discourse over the price of burritos morphed into an enormous and bitter controversy, with some right-wing commentators alleging $20 burritos are a sign of terminal American decline and other pundits claiming that young right-wingers upset by food costs are lazy and entitled.

It’s true that burritos’ prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Inflation’s effects on grocery prices have caused the cost of a Chipotle beef burrito to climb 50 percent since 2020, and people are feeling that. The burrito is a useful stand-in for all the other ways in which prices for basic items have risen dramatically in recent years, far outpacing wage growth in many cases.

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Rats have been with us since the beginning. For thousands of years, wherever humans settled land, built cities, or crossed oceans, rats were never far behind, constructing a civilization of their own beneath our feet.

In Los Angeles County (L.A.), rats abound. You may see only an occasional rat dart across an alley or root through a restaurant dumpster, …

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Over the past few months, we have been attempting to sort through all of the geopolitical complexities of the second Trump Administration.

On that subject, there’s hardly a better person to talk to than Sarah Adams, a former CIA analyst and one of the sharpest investigators in the business. On this week’s podcast, Adams explains the logic behind America’s campaign against Iran, and separates myth from reality as it relates to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Editor’s Note: This interview took place on July 31, 2026, before news reports emerged about a potential deal to open the Strait of Hormuz.

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Rufo: As you’re using the skillset that you honed over many years to evaluate the Iran war, what are you looking at to try to make sense of what’s happening now? What explains our recent conduct in the war?

Adams: Part of what’s happening right now, of course, is that we had sixty days to put this ceasefire deal into place. That has obviously gone haywire—the deal is pretty much up in smoke. There have also been escalations by Iran, including an attack on Jordan, where we had casualties, and attacks on Egypt.

The unfortunate thing is that everybody thought that during these sixty days, we were going to de-escalate. The thinking was that everybody was going to sit down, come to some sort of a deal, and move on from it. Now, with these recent escalations, it’s very unclear how long this is going to be prolonged. The key things that we’re looking for as we move forward are also unclear, since we don’t seem to be at the negotiating table.

Lomez: Sarah, could we take a little bit of a step back and look at this whole situation from the perspective of why we’re in Iran in the first place? This is a question that Chris and I have tried to get to the bottom of. We understand in the abstract that Iran is an enemy. They don’t like us; we don’t like them. But I think there’s quite a bit of skepticism out there from, say, MAGA conservatives toward the idea that this is a military engagement worth pursuing for us.

I hope that, perhaps from an intelligence perspective, you can give us a bit more clarity on what exactly Iran is up to. Why are they a threat right now? What are they up to that makes them such a thorn in our side and justifies this kind of action?

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I recently convened focus groups with Democratic and independent voters in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There were a total of four groups, all assembled with the aim of answering an essential question: How can the Right craft narratives that better appeal to independents and soft Democrats? How do we persuade them to be more receptive to our arguments, on issues ranging from the culture war to economics?

The path to winning them over is not a simple one.

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As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed dis…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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