America is preparing for a midterm election that will almost certainly see the Democrats recapture one, if not both, houses of Congress. In a normal year, the Left would use the power shift to grind the Republican agenda to a halt and negotiate legislative concessions with the president. But this is not a normal election, and the Democrats’ plans and strategies are not normal, either.

They have telegraphed a not-so-subtle message: reprisals are coming.

In a recent address, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA agent, indicated that she would use the power of the Congress to investigate White House officials. She hoped that the threat of prosecutions would send a “deterrence message” to any college graduates considering a career in the Trump administration.

Other left-wing figures set their sights on Elon Musk. Vox Media podcast host Kara Swisher suggested that the technologist was destined for prison. “Under Kamala Harris, he might be in jail right now,” she said. “He has a very big sense of fate, and I think it’s coming for him.” Jonathan Last of the Bulwark made the same point in more vulgar language: “We start with the U.S. Congress, and it ends at the fucking Hague for Elon Musk.”

In normal times, this kind of loose talk could be dismissed as bluster, but ten years into the Trump era, the evidence demands that we take it seriously. In President Trump’s first term, the Democrats hatched the Russiagate operation and impeached him twice. During Trump’s time in exile, Democrats orchestrated a series of politically motivated prosecutions, which led to nearly three dozen felony convictions. They even put his mugshot in the newspaper.

What’s driving the desire for reprisals?

First, the Democrats have long sought to invalidate the Trump phenomenon. They simply cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump became the president of the United States and that his ideas—build the wall, restore law and order, Make America Great Again—enjoy popular support. They believe Trump is an embodiment of every “ism” and “phobia” in the book: racism, sexism, nativism, Islamophobia, transphobia. To invalidate his presidency, they believe, is to invalidate these prejudices.

They want to turn Trump into another Richard Nixon. If the president ends his political career in disgrace—or in prison—it will serve as a warning to any future right-wing populist that that is the inevitable fate of his movement and, if he attempts to win the presidency, his life.

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Salmon, beef, organic produce, and Amy’s Kitchen meals: these are just some of the luxury foods that California welfare recipients can get delivered to their homes each week, for free.

Californians like TikTok user “Lupita” are taking full advantage. Earlier this year, she posted a video of herself opening a taxpayer-funded grocery box, apologizing to her manicurist as she unboxed it by hand. Inside, she found carrots, heads of broccoli, apples, oranges, celery, rice, lettuce, and more.

“Yesterday, I was like, ‘I need some lettuce,’ but the lettuce was like five dollars,” she said. “And look at this. Fresh lettuce! Thank you, God.”

She can also thank Governor Gavin Newsom. As part of his nearly $12 billion Medicaid reform package, welfare recipients—including illegal immigrants—can receive free, “medically tailored” meals and groceries, delivered straight to their door. They can get foods for free that would cost ordinary people a small fortune.

The food service is part of CalAIM, Newsom’s multibillion-dollar Medi-Cal reform package. Signed into law in 2021, CalAIM directs Medicaid dollars to social programs like transitional rent payments and housing deposits. Newsom called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to completely transform the Medicaid system in California.”

The transformation is working. The most popular of CalAIM’s “Community Supports,” by far, is “medically tailored meals.” That program and a related offering send prepared meals or “tailored” grocery items to qualified Medi-Cal recipients’ homes.

The state makes eligibility easy. Applicants need a qualifying Medi-Cal card, a provider’s recommendation, and an eligible condition. In a 2024 presentation to a Los Angeles nonprofit, Andrew Barrier, a former executive of a California medically tailored food contractor, told his audience how easy it was to enroll.

“They’re not looking to push people away from the program, they’re really looking for people to be on it,” he said. “Step one is that chronic condition. This is really how most people come in, and they could have diabetes, pre-diabetes, cardiovascular, mental- and behavioral-health disorders—we’ve seen anxiety, PTSD, depression, ADHD. Again, the list is very, very long.”

From there, the food shows up at recipients’ doorsteps. Medi-Cal pays contractors to deliver the food for up to 12 weeks, after which eligible recipients can re-enroll. And it’s not cheap: across 24 weeks, between food and delivery, a single “medically tailored meals” recipient costs taxpayers more than $1,500.

The food itself drives much of the cost. California contractors offer beef, chicken, organic produce, and more. Barrier’s former company, Project FoodBox, offers Medi-Cal recipients Amy’s Kitchen meals and burritos. Over several months, these foods would cost ordinary Californians hundreds of dollars at the grocery store.

Jocelyn Salala, a chef living in Los Angeles, told City Journal that she signed up for Project FoodBox through Medi-Cal in April after she was laid off. She has since put the deliveries to creative use.

“I was constantly trying to put all these ingredients into my food,” she said. “I took the sugar snap peas and made a cocktail. It allowed me to think outside the box, and I was really only buying protein at the store.”

Salala, who also runs a website about Swahili food and culture, said the amount of food that came each week was more than enough for one person.

“It was a lot of produce,” she said. “I got so much celery. I still have some in my freezer that I use for broths.”

California’s medically tailored meal and grocery offerings seem to have been inspired by the “Food Is Medicine” movement. Proponents argue that sending people state-funded health foods will reduce hospitalizations, ultimately saving taxpayers money.

Their view has gained some traction. Earlier this year, a study out of Massachusetts found that receiving medically tailored meals was associated with about 31 percent fewer hospitalizations. In September, the House Ways and Means Committee voted unanimously to create a pilot program that would pay hospitals to provide medically tailored meals to discharged patients.

But sending welfare recipients luxury health foods raises obvious questions. For one, what happens after the state stops sending the meals? And is this yet another free-food initiative, atop the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program?

In California, the answer to the second question is easy: yes. About 90 percent of the people receiving CalFresh, the state’s version of food stamps, are also enrolled in Medi-Cal. At the end of his presentation, Barrier told the audience that such people could receive medically tailored food and keep their existing welfare benefits.

“This does not impact any of their other health benefits, CalFresh, food stamps,” he said. “The answer is always no if someone asks you.”

Companies across the country are cashing in on the Food Is Medicine movement. California-based contractors like Project FoodBox and Project Open Hand have raked in millions of Medicaid dollars. Between 2022 and 2024, companies nationwide made nearly $100 million billing Medicaid code S9977, an unspecified “meals” code that includes medically tailored food.

The nation’s biggest S9977 biller in that span, by far, was Barrier’s former company, Project FoodBox. Between 2022 and 2024, the California-based firm received more than $67.8 million from Medicaid. Since then, Project FoodBox has opened a location in the Bronx, where it hopes to advise “families and individuals” about “community-based services.”

Another large biller was California-based Hunger: Not Impossible, now called Bento Health. The firm billed Medicaid more than $7.7 million and describes itself as a “service provider that connects Medicaid health plan members with curated groceries”—in other words, Instacart with a personal shopper.

Bento will apparently send luxury food items to illegal immigrants. On its website, the company says that eligibility for its services “is not tied to immigration status, employment status, nationality, or any other factor other than your insurance provider’s eligibility criteria.” Bento did not respond to a comment request.

California law confirms this interpretation. In 2024, the state extended “full-scope” Medi-Cal coverage to illegal aliens. The state has since frozen illegals’ ability to sign up but allows previous enrollees to keep their coverage. Medi-Cal’s rules for these enrollees change next year, but until then, illegals with “full scope” coverage can access CalAIM’s “Community Supports,” including medically tailored meals. In short, qualified illegal aliens in California can get state-funded luxury food boxes—for free.

We reached out to Project Foodbox, Project Open Hand, and other medically tailored food providers for comment, but did not receive a response. We also contacted California’s Department of Health Care Services, which argued that the food programs had “result[ed] in a 10.5% net cost reduction.”

The medically tailored meals program is expanding. Thirteen states now use federal waivers to divert funds to deliver medically tailored food. In California, meantime, middle class families are struggling to buy groceries—and keep up with the cost of sending luxury foods to those on the welfare rolls.

Reader Q&A

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Nixon and the Golden Bear

In 2008, California voters approved funding for a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A group of contractors donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the ballot measure. A state program manager projected that the initiative would create more than 100,000 construction jobs.

Eighteen years and more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid. The state hasn’t even laid track on the rump Merced-Bakersfield line that it wants to open in the 2030s. In a recently resurfaced video from his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the full project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”

The bullet train, like almost every effort to build things in California, was killed by environmental regulations. The state’s high-speed-rail website contains more than 130,000 pages of environmental-review-related materials. Stacked together, they stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds. All this has cost taxpayers more than $677 million and served as a meal ticket for consulting firms that backed the 2008 ballot measure.

California law typically requires an entity to perform an environmental review when its building project requires a state permit. In practice, that applies to many major efforts in California. These reports create delays, new expenses, and burdensome requirements, some of which have nothing to do with meaningful environmental protection.

We wanted to find out how much environmental paperwork the bullet-train project has generated. To do that, we had multiple AI systems scan the reams of reports linked on the California High Speed Rail Authority’s website, and asked them to catalog the files, establish each one’s page-count, and sum those numbers.

Both systems tallied more than 130,000 pages. To verify the results, we reviewed one of the AI systems’ spreadsheets, which included each document’s web link, title, and page count. Remarkably, across more than 27,000 pages of cross-referenced files, the AI system didn’t make a single page-count error. A California High Speed Rail Authority spokesperson told us that the authority “does not maintain a running page count of all environmental documents,” but did not deny the 130,000-page figure.

Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures. One proposed that biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts. Still others contemplated using dogs to sniff for lizard scat or spending $119.4 million on an overhead tube partly to limit the train’s “acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds.”

Such measures have prompted a flurry of expensive change orders. Contractors have requested $480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand”; $352,490 for lizard surveys and reports; and $290,000 to implement the state’s environmental-requirements-tracking software. In one case, California’s high-speed rail agency revised its draft environmental report after the state proposed a regional mountain lion as a candidate for protected status.

Environmental reviews are one reason that costs continue to spiral. Another is poor oversight. A November 2018 state audit, for example, found that a contractor received a $3 million amendment from the rail authority. The authority, however, could not demonstrate that it had independently verified the contractor’s claims. Instead, it had lifted part of its report “directly from the contractor’s amendment request.” In June 2018, the authority unanimously approved amendments worth more than $142 million.

Who benefits from all this? Politicians and contractors. The scheme is straightforward: the contractors back the bullet-train boondoggle and shuffle money to politicians, and California directs millions of dollars to the firms to perform endless environmental reviews. It’s a massive gravy train.

Three contractors, HNTB, AECOM Tech, and Parsons Brinckerhoff (later acquired by WSP), were among the biggest donors to a committee supporting the 2008 bullet train ballot measure. They donated $63,000, $75,000, and $76,500, respectively.

The firms have also sent wads of cash to California Democrats and their pet causes. Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns received $5,000 from AECOM’s PAC, $18,500 from WSP, and $26,000 from HNTB’s PAC. Governors Jerry Brown and Newsom solicited payments worth $55,000 and $75,000, respectively, from AECOM for charitable purposes. HNTB’s PAC donated to California rail advocate Scott Wiener’s campaign.

Their efforts seem to have paid off. AECOM, WSP, HNTB, and Parsons Brinckerhoff were paid $38 million, $61 million, $86 million, and $101 million, respectively, to perform high-speed-rail-related environmental reviews, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. One former HNTB employee, Ian Choudri, has become the bullet-train project’s chief executive.

California voters were promised a high-speed rail system delivering riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. Nearly two decades later, they face the prospect of a train transfer and an hours-long bus ride between Bakersfield and Los Angeles.

The main beneficiaries of this program are not California residents but consulting firms that bankrolled the ballot measure. For them, the point of California’s bullet train is not to move people, but to move money, for as long as possible—with taxpayers footing the bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowden, a homeless offender banned from Metro after stabbing a colleg…

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In 2019, I volunteered on a campaign to stop Washington State’s Initiative 1000, which would have legalized racial discrimination in employment, college admissions, and government contracting. On one side: the state’s Democratic machine, left-wing NGOs, progressive media, and major corporations. On the other: a small band of conservatives and mostly non…

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

Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex …

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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 all…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese nationals, in…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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