That has to make you laugh a little

...

this is a mistake in the same way it was a mistake for Robert Kraft to ban Macklemore.

Um, you're giving your opponents an easy win.

They can, they can say, "We stand for free speech, good journalism.

We're being, uh, you know, kicked out of the White House." I, I think it's a mistake, uh, strategically, but it's also a mistake on the substance.

The president's best moments are oftentimes in combat with people from the left-wing media.

Uh, has this continued at a steady pace or dropped off in recent years? I don't know if they mean sending to you or the curriculums themselves.

I

mean, I'm very much sympathetic to the case here, but I think Kraft made a strategic mistake.

He has every legal right to say, I own the stadium, I'm not going to permit you because I don't like you.

Whatever reason he has is legally justified.

But strategically, it's a mistake.

He's actually handing Macklemore his biggest win and, frankly, his only win since the 2012 song Thrift Shop.

Yeah.

I'll

Explain maybe, you know, the feedback loop here, because all of it really does defy, you know, any level of common sense.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's just the business logic.

So a public sector union is in the business of expanding the public sector workforce and harvesting tax money from taxpayers.

And so they want to have a bigger government.

They want to have more taxes.

They want to have greater dues.

as their numbers expand and so their interest is just to expand government at all turns and look in california if you're in the professional class tax bracket if you're a doctor or a lawyer or a or a business small small businessman entrepreneur you're likely spending a combined federal state and local tax rate of more than 53 percent and so we already have maxed out scandinavian style tax revenues and they're still searching for more money to take.

And if it is hiding, where is it hiding?

So what are the red flags that you were looking for?

So what we did is the federal government under the Trump administration released all Medicaid data for a certain number of years, and we used AI tools to find outliers.

So businesses that had irregular patterns, had the possibility of double billing, had huge ramp-ups in, in revenues.

So for example, in this case with the Kirkova business, uh, it's a business called HeroCare.

They went from something like $7,000 to $17 million, uh, in a very short timeframe.

And then after we had that initial hit, what we did is we hit the ground, and so we went to every named business.

We searched every possible record.

And the reality is that when the government is this big and this intrusive and this rich, 'cause they have a bunch of taxpayer dollars in the coffers, or they're just bilking future taxpayers, of course it's gonna be corrupt.

They're so large that they reach into politics in Washington, D.C. and into other states, do they not?

Yeah, that's right.

So California public sector unions take the cash, they send it up to their national organizations, and then the national organizations can play politics in all of the various states across the country.

And the question that you asked was the exact prescient question, which is they want to nationalize that.

Why do they want to do that? And the answer is pretty simple.

When Gavin Newsom was facing a backlash over his proposed wealth tax, you have this revolt amongst the most productive and successful members of the economy in California.

And in my reporting, I've heard about 70% of California's tech billionaires have either already made plans to exit or will make plans to exit if this wealth tax passes.

So this has been really a plan of the left for a long time, and it's really taking root, isn't it?

Tell us about it.

Yeah, this is about plague rats that have returned.

So we did a story.

We did FOIA.

We got 1,000 pages of documents from the county health department in Los Angeles.

And the picture that these documents painted was quite grim.

You have a return of typhus.

But have you ever been down there? No wonder typhus is there.

And so what do you think rhetorically is, is the best approach to it? 'Cause it struck me that the best pivot off of this should be, we need to go after the real drivers of why your life is unaffordable, which is inextricably bound up with stuff that the left wants to just pump more free money into to keep the price rising.

Yeah, that, that's exactly right.

And so you need to take the opportunity.

Just say, break it down.

Why is a burrito $20? Burrito's $20 because of bad monetary policy, because of, you know, you could say, you could even talk about, you know, higher mandatory, higher, higher wages.

You could talk about, uh, immigration.

You- there's, there's immigration for housing prices.

[laughs]

He got rich white people, and he got students

I- that's true, but look, M- Mike Rogers is not gonna win, uh, is not gonna win the Black vote.

I mean, the Black vote is gonna go Democrat because of the long-standing voting patterns that we've seen over the years.

They're gonna work very hard to get out the vote.

He's gonna promise, uh, everything as a matter of patronage.

El-Sayed will.

Um, he's, he's locked in on the, the Arab American vote.

Yes

Broad question, go.

Yeah, well, so you have to separate it out.

You have to say the institutions on the right, the media personalities on the right, the president of the United States, and then the voters or the audience.

And there's a big overlap there.

Look, Republican voters love Trump and Trump can reverse his position one way or another and his voters will follow him.

He could do a 180 overnight and his voters will rationalize it and move over.

That's because he has a charismatic connection with his voting base.

Things burn hot, but not forever.

And Rufo has some fascinating observations about where the left's focus has moved.

Right.

He says they've shifted from cultural battles over race and gender to economic anger.

We're talking affordability, inflation, Israel-Palestine, and housing.

Even if the socialist math is bad, the message works because it plugs into real public frustration.

Legislation could grind to a halt, though.

And on investigations and enforcement, Rufo's message is urgency.

Cases can take years, so if the administration wants to move against unlawful activity, it has to act now.

And that and only that is what DEI is about"?

about"?Well, it, I mean, it's a great story, right? And, and I would share some of the premises in, in the sense of acknowledging the history of racial injustice in the United States, obviously slavery, segregation.

These are ugly parts of American history, and thankfully those principles that the founders laid down in the 1760s helped guide us towards transcending those systems.

The question is what to do about it now, and I reject this idea that we are forever tethered towards treating people unequally because we treated people unequally in the past.

And I actually think the system that is most just is, of course, to acknowledge the history of the United States, but then to move towards a system where everybody is treated equally as an individual, everyone gets a fair shake.

And I think more or less we're there in the sense that most Americans, and in particular Americans who run institutions, who dispense opportunities, who have large companies, truly want to do the right thing.

They wanna give people a fair shot.

Te- tell us about that.

Uh, interesting, Nixon also a, a California man, uh, originally, but, uh, a kind of California that got lost slightly as this world that you just described with, with Newsom and so on and the kind of Democratic elite took over.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, look, I'm, I'm drinking a, I don't know if you can see it here, my Nixon's the One coffee mug from the great Nixon Presidential Library.

So yeah, we love Richard Nixon, and, and, and you're right.

So, you know, Nixon's biography is kind of amazing.

He grew up, um, des- de- kind of in very desperate material conditions.

Uh, his father was a kind of a failed entrepreneur, tried to run a lemon ranch on some bad land, opened a small grocery store in a s- small town in the desert in California.

But what's the sort of broader perspective of Newsom's relationship with Silicon Valley?

Interesting, Nixon also a California man originally, but a kind of California that got lost slightly as this world that you just described with Newsom and so on and the kind of democratic elite took over.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, look, I'm drinking.

I don't know if you can see it here.

My Nixon's the one coffee mug from the great Nixon presidential library.

So, yeah, we love Richard Nixon.

And you're right.

But what's the sort of broader perspective of Newsom's relationship with Silicon Valley?

So it's like the fact-- You, you can have these things be true at the same time.

Yes.

I, I, I think, I think, I think you're, you're kind of understating, uh, uh, kind of understating the dynamic on, on one side.

I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing.

Um, the-- After twenty-twenty, the left maintained a kind of apparatus of social annihilation, and I went through it myself.

I had the ACLU subpoena me and harass me with a law fair campaign that cost me a lot of money.

I had the SPLC and the ADL put me on some sort of hate list that was totally bogus, trying to destroy my reputation.

You, like, you can't get heard if you're not now playing this game of incredibly weaponized, like, explosive allegations, which of course is going where that ultimately always goes, which is towards anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the, the oldest attentional move in the book.

What exactly are they investigating about what Gavin Newsom's up to as governor?

Yeah.

Well, some of it is speculative, but there's been a lot of focus on what are called behest payments.

The governor in California has the power to direct, uh, private contributions from corporations and other entities to charities, and one of those charities, of course, was his wife's charity that then in turn paid money to the Newsom family, uh, as salary and other financial transactions.

And I think what's likely is happening is that federal investigators are looking not at any one of these transactions, which are technically legal, but the totality of the flow of funds and to see if Newsom was using his political office to benefit his wife and therefore benefit his own personal finances.

Uh, that's one of the things that they could be looking into, but I'm told that there are many other angles, and there have been swirling allegations of corruption of Gavin Newsom for decades.

And so it's not surprising that he's in the crosshairs right now.

What kind of questions are they gonna be asked? What needs to be exposed when it comes to fraud?

Um, you know, all of the social disorder that you see that's like are endemic, uh, you know, we'll talk about that, uh, to the state right now.

Yeah.

No, we should.

But I, but I think it's, it's worth dwelling on that history that you bring up.

And yeah, I remember my, um, my, my parents were both not, not, n- not necessarily politically active, but, but politically aware.

They, they, they're both attorneys.

They know about politics.

Mm-hmm

Yeah.

A lot.

Yeah.

And, and it's amazing having a girl.

Uh, it's so, so different.

But yeah, I, you know, I, I don't know.

I, I think, um, you know, certainly her life experience i- is, is, is different than mine.

What do you see as the secrets of success?

That's a pretty large amount of fraud, and it's coming from a lot of different places, isn't it, Chris?

Yeah.

I mean, we, we reported...

We had four reporters working on this story for a number of months, and it felt like every lead we chased down opened up a whole dozen new leads about fraud within the California system.

But if you wanna break it down in the simplest way possible, you have three major buckets.

The first is unemployment insurance.

We know that unemployment insurance in California was defrauded of more than thirty billion dollars under Gavin Newsom.

Is, is that a fair characterization?

That's a pretty large amount of fraud, and it's coming from a lot of different places, isn't it, Chris?

yeah i mean we we report it before reporters work on the story for a number of months and it felt like every lead we chase down opened up a whole dozen new leads about fraud within the california system but if you want to break it down in the simplest way possible you have three major buckets the first is unemployment insurance we know that unemployment insurance in california was defrauded of more than thirty billion dollars under gavin newsom The second bucket, the biggest bucket, is Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program.

We know that there is somewhere between 20% and 25% of that budget is lost every year to fraud, currently about $200 billion in total spending.

So we're talking about, let's say, between $20 and $50 billion conservatively on the low end.

and then a kind of grab bag of other programs that are rife with fraud homelessness services food stamps autism services welfare programs and so if you really pull back the total scale of this is uh really astonishing and it seems that california is designed to do two things one It's designed to line the pockets of Gavin Newsom's key allies in the labor unions, the teachers unions, the medical system.

And then second, it seemed to permit fraud because fraud increases spending, fraud increases the kind of perception of job growth within the state, and that some of that fraud is doubtlessly routed into the NGOs, into the unions, into the other parts of the system where Gavin Newsom generates his power.

Is that a fair characterization?

It's more than fair.

The fraud is the point, in fact.

Yeah, it's, it's exactly right, and you put it very, very, very brilliantly.

And look, we've moved away from Bill Clinton, the era of big government is over, uh, into an era of totalizing an ideological government.

And the other key distinction that I'm seeing in California is that they can't build overpasses, they can't build bridges, they can't reduce the price of electricity.

They can't actually deliver any of those critical infrastructural services.

But what they can do is all of these ideological programs, sending money to NGOs, sending money to academics, sending money to transgender doctors.

Um, and so the culminating symbol of governance by California is the bullet train to nowhere that never materialized versus transgender sex change surgeries for illegal migrants.

The point is not how you spend the money.

Are there any, uh, that you're aware of, any types of civil or criminal investigations going on about this?

There are, but what's interesting and the wrinkle here is that the federal government started to take note in twenty twenty-four, twenty twenty-five, continuing to take note now.

And so you get a, this trickle of cases where, you know, for example, people are collecting benefits for providing services for individuals who are in prison or actually dead.

Uh, you have these complex kind of pharma, uh, rip-off schemes.

You had-- Actually ra-- Even one case, there was a rapper in Memphis, Tennessee, called Nuke Bizzle, who had made a song and published a music video about how easy it was to steal cash from California's unemployment insurance program.

And then, uh, surprise, surprise, he did end up getting, uh, indicted and then convicted for stealing, uh, almost a million dollars from the state of California.

But the point is, even a rapper in Memphis named Nuke Bizzle, uh, you know, thought it was so easy that there were virtually no controls.

Mm-hmm.I mean, how does Newsom expect to run for president with this record? I mean, they, they have arrogance, don't get me wrong, on the hard left, but surely these things that you've dug up, people are not gonna ignore this.

I guess the state always accounts for some level of fraud in these programs, but the delta between what you think that fraud is and what they're suggesting the fraud is.

is.Yeah, that's right.

And, uh, so look, it's hospice, it's in-home care, it's pharmacy, uh, it's other, it's other kind of sectors of the, of the medical or Medicaid system.

And in this particular case, the in-home care program, which we'll be repor-reporting on extensively tomorrow, um, is, you know, is now the number one job in the state of California.

And so the government pays people to stay home most of the time with family members and, uh, take care of them, watch them, do their laundry, cooking, cleaning, you know, uh, watch television with them.

And so we're paying approximately eight hundred thousand people, uh, to, to, to stay home or to stay in the homes of the care recipients.

Uh, and because it operates essentially on an honor system, it's not like a hospital surgical suite where there are organizations, uh, you know, accountings, uh, potential places where you could locate it.

What do you do? I'm an in-home healthcare provider.

There's no- not a single reporter ever seems to ask the question, where do these billions of dollars disappear to? Who is, who's banking them?

Well, it's, it's a real interesting question.

And so there's, there's kind of a, the, the direct beneficiary and the indirect beneficiary.

So let's talk about Medi-Cal, which is California's healthcare system for the poor.

During his time in office, Gavin Newsom has almost doubled public expenditure on Medi-Cal.

It's something now, like $200 billion a year, uh, in public spending in California, which is bigger than the GDP of many, many countries around the world.

And we know from government estimates that between 10% and 25% of Medi-Cal is lost to outright fraud, criminals who take that money and in many cases send it overseas.

Yeah.

There's no, not a single reporter ever seems to ask the question, where do these billions of dollars disappear to? Who is, who's banking them?

It, it's a real interesting question.

And so there's, there's kind of a, the, the direct beneficiary and the indirect beneficiary.

So let's talk about Medi-Cal, which is California's healthcare system for the poor.

During his time in office, Gavin Newsom has almost doubled public expenditure on Medi-Cal.

It's something now like $200 billion a year, uh, in public spending in California, which is bigger than the GDP of many, many countries around the world.

And we know from government estimates that between 10% and 25% of Medi-Cal is lost to outright fraud, criminals who take that money and in many cases send it overseas.

Yeah.

There's no, not a single reporter ever seems to ask the question, where do these billions of dollars disappear to? Who is, who's banking them?

It, it's a real interesting question.

And so there's, there's kind of a, the, the direct beneficiary and the indirect beneficiary.

So let's talk about Medi-Cal, which is California's healthcare system for the poor.

During his time in office, Gavin Newsom has almost doubled public expenditure on Medi-Cal.

It's something now like $200 billion a year, uh, in public spending in California, which is bigger than the GDP of many, many countries around the world.

And we know from government estimates that between 10% and 25% of Medi-Cal is lost to outright fraud, criminals who take that money and in many cases send it overseas.

Yeah.