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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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California once built massive infrastructure projects—dams, highways, and aqueducts—that were the marvel of the world. During the Great Depression, engineers erected the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget. But those days are over. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has been unable to complete, and hardly able to begin, construction on its high-speed rail system. Many other government projects are beset by delays, cost overruns, and dreams that never materialize.

Though the bullet train has become the most famous symbol of this dysfunction, Newsom has overseen an even more important system failure: the overhaul of California’s 911 emergency line.

During his first year in office, the governor confidently projected that he would replace the state’s emergency call system within three years, a goal that officials previously estimated would cost $132 million. But nearly seven years later, the state has spent more than $450 million on a regionalized “Next Generation” digital system that suffered such appalling failures and disruptions during its initial rollout that the Newsom administration scrapped it entirely.

Meantime, the old system is hanging on by a thread—and it’s only a matter of time, some believe, before it goes dark.

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For years, California has needed to replace its old analog 911 system with a modern digital system that uses location, text, and video services to identify people in need quickly. Other states, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, have single statewide “Next Gen” systems. But in 2019, after years of planning, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) adopted a regional approach, naming four contractors responsible for designing, building, deploying, and operating the new technologies across four regions and a statewide backup provider.

The buildout was glacial. Cal OES and contractors apparently spent months surveying sites and testing software in a lab. The pandemic, which should have deepened the developers’ sense of urgency, “stopped a lot of progress,” according to a Cal OES official. It took more than two years for a single county to activate the technology fully.

By 2022, contractors had launched Next Gen in at least a couple local dispatch centers. The results were disastrous. Dispatchers in Tuolumne County, the first to launch the technology at full capacity, were unable to process calls, identify locations, or immediately see callers’ phone numbers. When they tried to transfer calls, the line on the other end would remain “silent.” A whistleblower claimed that citizens were “losing faith in the 9-1-1 emergency system.”

For good reason: Tuolumne’s emergency system experienced multiple breakdowns. According to an internal document obtained by an NBC affiliate, the county’s network suffered a blackout for some 12 hours straight. In another case, a man who attempted to call 911 five times to report that his garage was on fire couldn’t get through. In yet another, dispatchers could not connect the lines after receiving a “911 call of an active heart attack.”

“Could you imagine making the scariest phone call of your life and thinking no one is coming?” the whistleblower said.

Another county saw similar problems around the time the contractor updated the police department’s phone equipment. In Riverside County, Desert Hot Springs dispatchers reported more than 100 “trouble tickets” between 2023 and 2024, including dropped or abandoned calls, failed callbacks, and bad audio. As an NBC News affiliate reported in a story about 911 rollout failures, one dispatcher told a woman who requested an ambulance for her boyfriend that the call-transfer system was “not working,” causing “a delay in emergency medical aid.”

In 2025, dispatchers from Desert Hot Springs received a call from a woman requesting an ambulance for her stepfather, who had fallen and was unresponsive. According to internal emails we obtained via a public records request and our conversations with a Desert Springs dispatcher, the system logged out multiple dispatchers. Eventually, the system rebooted, and the woman was able to contact the dispatchers, who directed medical services to the home.

Emergency personnel discovered a grim scene. There were “at least 1000 roaches” climbing on the walls, children living in mold-infested rooms, and a man “found on the floor of his bedroom on his back in the supine position.” Firefighters attempted to perform life-saving measures, but the stepfather had died.

One Desert Hot Springs dispatcher, who had firsthand knowledge of the incident and spoke with City Journal on condition of anonymity, blamed updates associated with the Next Gen system and NGA 911, the contractor responsible for managing them. The dispatcher sent a whistleblower complaint to Cal OES, arguing that the system failure might have caused the man’s death. “This is NOT acceptable,” the dispatcher wrote. “People’s lives are on the line and your failed system may have just cost this person [his] life.”

An employee at NGA 911, also speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed the dispatcher’s account, arguing that the router was part of a separate system, that the dispatchers “panicked,” and that the man could have died even if the system had worked as intended. “He didn’t die because of delayed response,” the NGA employee said. “He died because he fell and he smacked his head and he died there on the spot. So, it’s not a result of system failure.”

Cal OES, for its part, insisted that the Desert Hot Springs incident had nothing to do with “the state’s implementation of NG 9-1-1,” and claimed the city’s call center “has not transitioned” to the new system.

Regardless, the failures in Tuolumne and elsewhere were apparently enough for Cal OES officials to pull the plug. After a series of warnings and delays, in November 2025, the Newsom administration officially terminated the regional approach. In a postmortem report, Cal OES indicated that the regional rollout overwhelmed dispatch centers and was ultimately too fragile and risky to work.

In total, California has spent $502 million on Next Gen 911 since 2019—nearly four times more than what the state estimated in 2018–19, about four years after the initial due date, for a system that was built out but never fully activated.

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In the blame game that ensued, the Newsom administration has pointed the finger at the contractors—Atos Public Safety, NGA 911, Synergem Technologies, and Lumen Technologies—and promised to “be actively involved” in the process moving forward. In response, some contractors blamed the state and claimed that the decision to scrap the Next Gen system was a mistake. “It’s going to be hundreds of millions . . . to actually redo what they’ve already built,” said Jeff Schlueter, COO of Synergem Technologies, the firm responsible for the rollout in more than 250 dispatch centers.

For now, Cal OES plans to start from scratch and pursue a statewide, rather than regional, approach, estimating that the new system will take until 2030 to complete. Incredibly, Governor Newsom has encouraged all the current vendors who oversaw the failed system to compete for a bid on the new statewide system, and Cal OES has already decided to extend an interim contract to one, Atos, through 2026—shelling out additional cash to the provider who has already failed to deliver once.

Will this new statewide system work? California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has strong doubts. In a report published earlier this year, the legislative analyst recommended that the state “pause” all implementation of the program until Cal OES can answer some basic questions, including “What Is the Nature and Scope of the Problem?” and “Will [the] New Plan Solve the Problem?” Nobody believes that the new system will be completed by 2030. “They said that ten years ago,” one dispatcher told us.

Meantime, California is stuck with a 1970s-era emergency call system that is falling apart. The legislative analyst has warned that the legacy system is “in very poor condition and is subject to failure.” And Cal OES is woefully behind on updating other parts of the state’s emergency services. As of this past February, 339 dispatch centers hadn’t undergone maintenance on their call-handling equipment in seven to ten years or more. Some equipment is built with parts not made anymore.

The result: waves of outages that have increased dramatically in recent years. According to the FCC, in 2017, California’s legacy system averaged 17,000 minutes of outages per month. In 2022, that number increased to 59,000 minutes per month. And between October 2022 and June 2024, the legacy system suffered 22,001 hours of outages—about 62,000 minutes per month. Since then, Cal OES has stopped publicizing outage numbers.

These outages have caused serious problems for local communities. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department 911 system had an overnight outage. Similarly, in 2025, a system crash forced dispatchers to write notes by hand and relay information via radio or phone, rather than with the computer-aided system.

In Oakland, the old system nearly left a police officer dead. In 2019, an off-duty Oakland cop named Danny Chor approached a woman who was vandalizing cars. During the confrontation, the woman stabbed him in the neck. Chor made multiple calls to 911 but could not connect. A nearby truck operator tried to help, but his call also failed. The bystander then called his employer, who was able to connect to the dispatchers directly. First responders brought Chor to the hospital in the back of a patrol car, fearing that he would not survive if they waited for the ambulance.

Since then, the system has teetered on the verge of collapse. A 2023 grand jury report on Oakland’s 911 dispatch system found that, in 2022, nearly half of all callers waited 15 seconds or more for a response. The system managed records with legacy software no longer supported by the vendor; parts had to be purchased on eBay because they were no longer produced; and the vendor had only one technician who could still decipher the software. Oakland, one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S., could experience a total blackout.

“If the proposed hardware and software is perpetually delayed to ‘six months from now,’” the grand jury concluded, “the city risks a catastrophic failure of the system.”

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One might be tempted to view Newsom’s Next Gen 911 rollout as a complete failure—after all, the old system is falling apart and the new system has been “paused.” But as with so many of California’s infrastructure projects, including the “butterfly bridge” and “high-speed rail,” the endless delays and cost overruns produce some hidden winners: the state officials who manage the system and the private companies that secure never-ending contracts.

In the case of Next Gen 911, Newsom employed an army of unionized officials to oversee the work and approved enormous contracts to the four main vendors: $198 million to Atos Public Safety, $108 million to NGA 911, $56 million to Synergem Technologies, and $56 million to CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies). The state is sure to spend millions more.

Meantime, the losers are always the same: the taxpayers and residents who, in this case, have to keep paying a fee on their monthly phone bill for technology that doesn’t work and keep their fingers crossed that the current system won’t fall apart and send their local dispatchers into a total blackout.

In Los Angeles, where the county sheriff’s department has experienced repeated problems with the system, the stakes are even higher. The Olympics are coming to L.A. in 2028, and city hardware is falling apart. As a systems expert formerly with LAPD told us, it will take a “come-to-Jesus” system failure for the California state government to get serious about its transition to Next Gen 911.

When—not if—that disaster happens, Cal OES will realize: “we’re effed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Former President Joe Biden’s administration oversaw an unprecedented wave of migration across the southwestern border of the United States. Migrants convoyed in “caravans” in hopes of overwhelming border authorities. Cartels trafficked drugs and people in droves. At some points, American authorities estimated that more than 130,000 people were crossing into the U.S. each month; arrivals came not just from Latin America but every corner of the earth.

At the height of this drama, some border states sought to stop the wave of illegal immigration on their own. Texas dispatched thousands of National Guard soldiers and spun razor-wire barriers across the desert. Arizona sent construction cranes to stack hundreds of shipping containers into a makeshift border wall near Yuma. Then-Arizona Governor Doug Ducey called it a “border crisis.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott called it an “invasion.”

California, on the other hand, welcomed the flood. In this City Journal investigation, we have traced the money and can reveal that Governor Gavin Newsom has granted approximately $1 billion to an army of nonprofits that has encouraged unchecked numbers of migrants to enter the country, fought deportation orders in the courts, and led street protests against ICE. These groups often operate under the guise of “humanitarianism” or “immigration justice,” but many, as we have uncovered, are in fact left-wing activist groups that use propaganda, lawfare, and street protests to transform America’s demographics and build political power for California Democrats—all on the public dime.

This is the story of how Gavin Newsom subsidized the illegal invasion and turned a wave of desperate people into pawns in his political game.

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California was ground zero for the Biden-era migrant wave. The state saw an enormous number of people cross its border, including more than 400,000 illegal immigrants between 2021 and 2023 alone. Under Newsom’s leadership, the nation’s largest “sanctuary” state granted hundreds of millions of dollars to nonprofits that have encouraged the flow of humanity across the border, variously providing migrants with transportation, shelter, social services, and legal protection.

The expenditures have been enormous. According to our review of state funding records, since Newsom took office, California has granted massive contracts for migrant-related services: more than $250 million to Catholic Charities; $85 million to Jewish Family Services; $12 million to Centro Legal de la Raza; $23 million to the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area; and more.

Many nonprofits benefiting from these funds are shockingly radical. Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit that has been awarded more than $2 million from California since Newsom took office, helps migrants enter the United States—hence the group’s name, “to the other side.” On social media, Al Otro Lado touts its efforts to provide “freedom of movement” to migrants. In addition to providing legal guidance, the group deploys volunteers to “remote migration routes to leave water, food, and essential supplies.”

According to its own materials, Al Otro Lado is anti-borders and openly hostile to the American nation. In one Instagram video, the group’s litigating attorney Diego Teixeira clumsily summarized the view: “I honestly just believe that there’s no reason for why we should have borders.” In another video, the group shows off books from its library, such as Undoing Border Imperialism, that “remind us that the U.S. is [sh*t].” The organization, which did not respond to our comment request, is currently suing the Trump administration to prohibit the government from turning away certain migrants at the border.

Other groups focus on ideological subpopulations. Oasis Legal Services, another taxpayer-funded group, has worked on helping “queer and trans immigrants navigate immigration relief and benefits.” In a recent report, the group boasted that “the odds of winning an asylum case go up to 99% for clients when they are represented by an Oasis team member.” (The group denies that it encourages the entry of immigrants.)

Adam Ryan Chang, Oasis’s executive director, believes that “homosexual audacity” is his “superpower,” and he has framed his work with the nonprofit as part of a broader left-wing campaign of “liberating” the “LGBTQ+ community.” In a recent annual report, the group highlighted its work of apparently representing migrants with a sexually transmitted disease. In 2024, the report said, “one in six of new clients is living with HIV and the rest are all at significant risk of contracting HIV.” In 2025, the proportion increased to one in five.

In response to a request for comment, Chang said people “living with HIV are not barred from entering the United States on that basis.”

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Once unauthorized people have crossed the border, Governor Newsom has sought to ensure that they don’t get turned away. Since the beginning of his term, he has granted more than $100 million to nonprofits that fight deportation orders—sometimes even for clients with criminal convictions.

One of the most prominent anti-deportation nonprofits is the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, or ImmDef, which has been awarded at least $6.7 million in state funds since Newsom took office. The group portrays the United States as an oppressor, denouncing the Trump administration’s “white supremacist” agenda and accusing ICE of causing “terror.” ImmDef has explicitly called to “abolish the immigration prison system” and to “abolish ICE”—which, in effect, would abolish the border itself.

ImmDef, which did not respond to our comment request, is open about its radical views and ambitions. In a 2023 video, its CEO, Lindsay Toczylowski, suggested that a Biden-era effort to restrict asylum claims was analogous to countries shunning Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. In a recent panel, she listed one the group’s primary focuses: “getting people out of ICE prison.”

In keeping with that priority, ImmDef represents thousands of migrants in deportation proceedings, even working with some before they cross the border. The group’s Cross-Borders Initiative provides legal consultation and social services to migrants between the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego, effectively exploiting the loopholes and technicalities of the immigration and asylum system to facilitate migration.

Once illegal immigrants are in the United States, ImmDef provides legal representation to fight deportation orders, including for those with criminal convictions. ImmDef is explicit about this: it has adopted a “merits-blind universal representation model” and provides “post-conviction relief” to illegals convicted of criminal offenses.

It’s impossible to find out precisely how many illegal-alien criminals have benefited from the “merits-blind” policies of ImmDef and other taxpayer-funded groups. That’s thanks to a California law that prohibits officials from disclosing defendants’ immigration status in criminal court without a judge’s permission. But there are alarming hints.

In 2023, the taxpayer-funded San Diego County Immigrant Legal Defense Program, which has worked with ImmDef and another state-funded group, came under scrutiny for using county funds to provide immigration legal services to 34 noncitizens convicted of crimes such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and acts “involving moral turpitude.” In its most recent annual report, the program claims to have provided legal aid to 65 such individuals deemed inadmissible on “grounds related to criminal activity.” In response to our comment request, the program insisted that such migrants made up a “very small share” of its annual caseload.

Last year, under pressure from state Republicans, the Democrat-led legislature restricted the spending of public immigration defense dollars on felons. But skepticism is warranted. The state has other channels by which it can protect felons from deportation, and, moreover, the law contains no reliable enforcement mechanism.

Meantime, the state’s more liberal Democrats apparently want to scrap the reforms and dramatically expand legal protections for unauthorized migrants. Assemblymember Mia Bonta, wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta, is working to extend state-funded legal aid to all illegal immigrants fighting deportation.

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The final part of Newsom’s illegal immigration machine is the activist element, which is designed to resist federal authorities who would challenge California’s status as a “sanctuary state.”

Last summer, the conflict between President Trump and Governor Newsom came to a head. Protesters launched anti-ICE demonstrations around the country, most notably in Los Angeles, where the riots cost the city $32 million and led to hundreds of arrests. Throughout L.A., agitators burned cars, looted stores, shut down the freeway, and threw rocks, bottles, and fireworks at law enforcement officers—all, effectively, to stop Trump from deporting illegal aliens from the United States.

Activists framed the protests as spontaneous and grassroots, but behind the scenes, a web of powerful, and sometimes publicly funded, organizations drove the narrative, and, in some cases, the “direct action” in the streets. At the center of this web is the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles (CHIRLA), which, since Newsom took office, has been awarded some $110 million from California taxpayers.

CHIRLA can be described as a one-stop activist machine, with the ability to produce propaganda, engage in legal action, and—most importantly—get people into the streets. The group coordinates the L.A. Rapid Response Network, which tracks ICE raids and takes “direct action to shut down detention centers.” During the wave of protests in L.A., CHIRLA activists agitated on social media, led a street protest, and called for a “Summer of Resistance.”

At the height of the unrest, CHIRLA’s executive director, Angelica Salas, spoke at a street protest, telling crowds that ICE agents were conducting a “militarized siege” against illegal migrants. “We are going to stop Trump’s terror campaign against our community,” Salas said. “We will not stop marching. We will not stop fighting.”

Congress took notice. The House Judiciary Committee launched an investigation to determine whether CHIRLA was using public funds to “support violent criminal activity that impedes the enforcement of federal immigration law.” Senator Josh Hawley accused the group of “bankrolling civil unrest” and threatened a criminal investigation. CHIRLA denied Hawley’s accusations, claiming that its protest tactics are “rooted in non-violent advocacy, community safety, and democratic values.” (In response to our comment request, the group suggested that City Journal was trying to “weaponize government power and intimidate advocates like CHIRLA.”)

CHIRLA was not alone. Al Otro Lado released a statement opposing the ICE raids and standing “in solidarity” with the protesters. The Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, an immigrant-services nonprofit, was reportedly “heavily involved” in the demonstrations. The center—which features a picture of an anti-ICE protester on its website—has been awarded $18 million by the Newsom administration since 2019.

We reached out to the governor’s office for comment on this story. In response, a spokesperson denied that California was “‘funding criminal activity’ or bypassing public health law.”

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Who benefits from this system? Certainly, the migrants who entered the United States without documentation and would like to stay. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the army of nonprofits, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats who keep the system running—and keep politicians like Newsom in power. The work of these groups involves not only advancing an open-borders political agenda but also maintaining the flow of funds to left-wing activists who can use the issue of immigration to achieve the broader vision of revolution.

From this perspective, the 2 million illegal migrants in California are pawns—merely the instruments of an activist class that would like to see America burn.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Susan Crabtree is national correspondent at RealClearPolitics and co-author of Fool’s Gold.

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

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

CHOE: Were you able to get hormones?

MIGRANT: Yeah, I did that with my doctor.

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

MIGRANT: Yes.

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

MIGRANT: Yes.

CHOE: Free?

MIGRANT: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since we launched our initiative just a few short months ago, we have broken numerous headlines, driven action by the Trump administration, and placed Newsom on the defensive as he prepares to launch a widely anticipated presidential bid next year.

Our exclusive reporting so far has included:

• Uncovering racialist abuses in San Francisco’s “Dream Keeper Initiative,” which has doled out millions of dollars to fund explicitly race-based programming such as all-black drag shows, “Afri-centic” therapy, and free doulas exclusively for “Black women and birthing people.”

• Shining a light on Gavin Newsom’s decision to pour tens of millions of dollars into constructing a single overpass to assist monarch butterflies and mountain lions in crossing one Southern California freeway.

• Exposing the enormous and unprecedented scale of fraud, waste, scamming, and theft that Newsom has presided over as governor: a minimum of $180 billion since he took office in 2019.

• Revealing the eye-popping amount of fraud and theft that takes place under California’s $30 billion “In Home Supportive Services Program.”

• Disclosing that San Francisco’s homeless shelters are becoming havens for transgender-identifying illegal aliens, who can receive “gender-affirming care” on the taxpayers’ dime.

We’re generating concrete, hard-hitting results. Our reporting has drawn the attention of top administration officials, and it has been followed by criminal charges against California officials who either participated in fraud or were negligent in preventing it.

We want to continue our work exposing Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud. But the truth is that none of this happens without your support. That’s why I’m asking you to become a paid subscriber. I’ve had a longstanding goal of increasing our paid subscriber base to 5,000, but we remain a few hundred short of that mark.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, please consider a gift subscription to friends and family. If you have yet to become a paid subscriber, please sign up now.

Thank you for helping us keep up the good fight.

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

We discovered not only that the shelters were housing illegal immigrants but also that they were apparently housing a population of male-to-female “transgender” illegal aliens, who had hoped to obtain “gender-affirming care.” And, to our shock, state and local governments apparently are providing it.

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St. Vincent De Paul’s MSC-South facility is San Francisco’s largest homeless shelter, and, in 2024, signed a $66 million service contract with the city. After we arrived at the front entrance, an employee wearing a do-rag and a light green polo shirt showed us around and confirmed that illegal aliens were living there.

“You got a few people here from El Salvador. . . . You got a few people here from Venezuela. You got a few people here from a little bit of everywhere,” he said.

As a rule, he suggested, management instructed employees to refuse cooperation with federal immigration authorities. “When the ICE thing was going around, we all had a meeting, and they told us, ‘We ain’t letting them in.’”

Among the shelter’s residents was a group of Hondurans who identified as transgender. During our visit to MSC-South, whose executive director did not respond to a request for comment, we spoke with two Honduran men, “Lyca” and “Alondra,” who identified as transgender women. Both indicated that the local government gave them shelter and food.

Lyca, who wore long hair and red lipstick, was candid about this arrangement. He confirmed that he was an illegal immigrant and that the shelter doesn’t ask questions about immigration status. “Tengo Medi-Cal,” he said, referring to the state health-care program, which, under Governor Gavin Newsom, began providing “full scope” coverage to illegal aliens, which includes transgender procedures, or “gender affirming care.” He said he was receiving cross-sex hormone therapy—and bore the physical signs of having done so.

Alondra, a muscular man in a camouflage shirt and dyed hair tied behind his head, said he had been in the United States after claiming asylum. According to the translator, the city government had offered to pay first and second month’s rent on private apartments for him and Lyca. But neither accepted the offer—in Lyca’s case, because he might not be able to pay for the apartment after the second month.

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At the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center, a city-funded shelter on the eastern waterfront that did not respond to our comment request, we heard similar stories. “Jacqueline”—a self-identified “trans woman” from Mexico living at the shelter who claimed to be a lawful U.S. resident—indicated that there were illegal aliens living in the shelter.

Wearing rouge on his cheeks and a low-cut red shirt, Jacqueline flaunted his large chest. He said that he had gotten transgender hormone treatments, and confirmed that he had received breast implants from the state Medi-Cal program. Though Jacqueline claimed to be a legal resident, he suggested that the state also provides implants to illegal immigrants. “Even though you’re undocumented,” he said, “you can get them.”

“You have to have a process, the hormones . . . go through therapy,” he said. “Es un proceso.”

We asked Jacqueline if he had also completed “bottom surgery,” a type of genital procedure that can involve castrating a male and turning his penile tissue into a “neo-vagina.” San Francisco has multiple clinics that offer bottom surgery, which the state reportedly provides to Medi-Cal recipients, under the theory that it can be a “medical necessity” for those whose gender identity does “not match their gender assigned at birth.”

“Did you do bottom, too? Bottom surgery?” we asked.

“I’m waiting for that one,” Jacqueline replied.

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When most Californians think about “homeless services,” they imagine that their tax dollars are going to support veterans, families, and those who have fallen on hard times. But in San Francisco, the reality is that some homeless shelters have apparently turned into havens for transgender-identifying illegal aliens, who can receive “gender-affirming care” on taxpayers’ dime. (The California Department of Health Care Services, which administers the Medi-Cal program, did not respond to our request for comment.)

Sometimes, these policies are hidden under euphemisms; other times, however, they are more explicit. At the end of our trip, we visited a third government-funded shelter, the Taimon Booton Navigation Center, which is focused on “transgender, gender non-conforming & intersex people.” (The center does not post its address publicly and displays a sign referring to what appears to be its former name, the “Bryant Street Navigation Center.”) Outside the facility, which did not respond to our request for comment, we met a group of male-to-female transgender illegal aliens, who told us that they wanted to receive transgender medical treatment.

Apparently, word has traveled down the continent to the transgender communities in Mexico, Honduras, and elsewhere: if you make it all the way to California, the government will pay for your shelter, hormones, and surgeries—no questions asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastas…

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Americans are not having enough babies. For decades, the nation’s fertility rate has steadily declined from a mid-20th-century peak; the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the drop. Now, America’s fertility rate—the metric that indicates the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime—stands at 1.6, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, joins us to discuss what’s going on and what can be done to secure America’s demographic future.

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Rufo: Lyman Stone is a demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, and he really is an expert on everything to do with family, fertility, demographics, and the future. Lyman, perhaps we could open up the conversation with a more general take. What’s happening in the United States as far as demographics and fertility go? Are things going well? Poorly? Or are things somewhere in between?

Stone: Well, that’s the first time I’ve been called an expert in the future. That’s a good one.

The reality is that fertility is declining all around the world, in both rich countries and poor countries alike. The U.S. is not a categorical exception to that. Over the last couple years, really since Covid, we’ve experienced a little bit of stability. Our fertility rate is hovering around 1.6.

Stability, though, is quite bad news. For people who aren’t glued into this subject, a stagnant fertility rate of 1.6 means that if a girl who is fifteen years old today were to have babies at the statistically average rate for the rest of her life, she would end up with 1.6 children.

Now, this period indicator can be biased. So, for a long time, people thought that even though we had this big crash in fertility, it was going to come up in the future. Many observers thought that the decline was just people postponing births.

But the fact that the fertility rate is just hanging flat at 1.6—the lowest level in our history—is quite bad news. It means that the decline can’t simply be attributed to postponement. The births aren’t coming back; the rate is just staying low. So even though it can feel nice that the decline seems to have paused, it’s bad news from a long-run demographic perspective—it means that overall family size is falling in a permanent way.

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Since the rise of Black Lives Matter a decade ago, the biggest phenomenon on the American Left was woke. But that’s beginning to change. Now, we seem to be entering a new era, one in which wokeism is morphing into something else: Third Worldism.

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The war in Iran continues. Iran is threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, while U.S. and Israeli have increased the number of strikes against Iranian infrastructure.

This week, we spoke with Army Ranger veteran Claremont Institute scholar and Will to discuss the military situation in Iran—what happens next, whether a ground invasion is a real possibility, and when the administration might be satisfied that America has accomplished its objectives.

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Rufo: We’re now in the third week of our coverage of the Iran War, and I’m very excited to talk to someone who is highly recommended by almost everyone on all sides of this debate. Will Thibeau is a veteran of the Ranger Regiment, one of the most highly skilled and highly trained divisions of the U.S. military. He’s now a scholar at the Claremont Institute. Will, please give us a sense of the reality on the ground. Where does the conflict in Iran stand right now?

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We’re entering a new phase of the Iran War. It appears that targeted military attacks have slightly declined in frequency. But now we seem to be caught in escalating exchanges against energy infrastructure: both sides in the conflict are targeting natural gas facilities and fighting for control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The administration’s calculus seems to be that we can take out some infrastructure without anything more than a manageable, short-term spike in oil prices. But the reality is that if oil exports remain disrupted for long enough—if the exchanges destroy significant production capacity or if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed—there will be serious consequences at home. When it comes down to it, American voters are simple: If fuel is six dollars per gallon, if the price of groceries rises, and if there is anything resembling gas lines in the future, it’s game over for the Republican Party in the midterms.

The best hawk case for intervening in Iran was that our intervention would be wrapped up quickly with few economic or geopolitical consequences. But I think that view too heavily downplayed the serious geopolitical and economic risks of such a strategy—risks that, with every day that the war drags on, are beginning to seem more and more possible. That doesn’t mean we should panic. But it’s important for us to honestly assess America’s position in this fraught moment and figure out how to drive this war to a conclusion.

I don’t believe the correct response is to level a hysterical critique, make a scene, or burn a MAGA hat, as some podcasters have done. That’s not productive. Still, it’s clear that the administration is highly sensitive to public opinion. If the administration senses that public opinion is slipping to dangerous levels, it will change course and figure out how to declare victory and move on. The president has a track record of being responsive; he’ll turn on a dime if he believes that it’s necessary, with no hint of hesitation or embarrassment. And as the war’s geopolitical and economic downsides become ever more real, I think that we’ll see growing pressure from the Right and increasing public backlash to such an extent that the administration feels the need to adjust.

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In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California. At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seemi…

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We’re wrapping up our two-part debate series on the Iran War. Yesterday, the Edmund Burke Foundation’s Will Chamberlain laid out the argument in favor of intervention. Today, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, makes the case against the war. Readers, please let me know which argument was most persuasive and if either debater changed your mind.

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Rufo: Curt, could you tell us where the war stands right now and your view of things?

Mills: Well, I can only share what I know. And frankly, I don’t think our government is being fully transparent, and the Iranian government, needless to say, is also not very transparent.

We have a full-scale war in the Middle East. The “Gulf War” is the term often used to describe Operation Desert Storm, but in many ways, this is a far better use of the name. U.S. citizens have been evacuated from more than 15 countries in the region. Businesses across the Gulf have shut down. Anybody who’s ever flown either into the Middle East or through the region on the way to India or China has probably stopped at the Dubai or Doha airports—those are not really functional right now.

Doha, Dubai, Muscat, and Riyadh—glittering, nouveau riche cities, particularly post-2008 and post-Covid—are getting slammed by Iran with ballistic missiles and its Shahed drones, the latter of which are an effective military technology that was first deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine.

There is almost no communication between the U.S. and Iran. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating Ali Khamenei, the longtime supreme leader who was pushing 90 and who many thought was the only guy keeping the original clerical rule system around. The administration has replaced Khamenei with his son, who appears to be something of a figurehead as Iran moves into what looks more and more likely to be a full military dictatorship.

The Iranians are resisting in a way that the Venezuelans and Nicolás Maduro did not—a lack of resistance, I should note, that constituted a major precedent for the administration making its move against Iran in late February. Iran is also resisting at a level of intensity that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was incapable of doing. Even in Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein didn’t put up much of a fight; by the time we finally got him in 2003, his regime was a defanged organization.

So, the administration is in something of a quagmire. If the U.S. goal was to just “mow the grass”—an Israeli term—they are eroding some military capabilities, exhausting some of Iran’s missile supply, and assassinating its top leaders. If that was the goal, the administration, at this point, could just declare victory and go home.

But the question is, what are the goals here? The administration has been all over the map. And then of course, the Israelis have different goals as well. To be clear, my view is that this is a joint Israeli operation and that, by all appearances, we are doing this for Israel.

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The Iran War is causing dissension on the Right, with conflicting stories, narratives, and, sometimes, facts. To sort through these, we’re hosting a two-part debate series, stress-testing the best lines of argument from both sides of the debate. Today, we have Will Chamberlain of the Edmund Burke Foundation to make the case for President Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran. Tomorrow, we will have Curt Mills of The American Conservative, who argued against American intervention in Iran.

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