Christopher F. Rufo

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.

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. For them, higher taxes are good business.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 least transparent states in this country,” he said.

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

Rats have been with us since the beginning. For thousands of years, wherever humans settled land, built cities, or crossed oceans, rats were never far behind, constructing a civilization of their own beneath our feet. In Los Angeles County (L.A.), rats abound. You may see only an occasional rat dart across an alley or root through a restaurant dumpster, but make no mistake: they are everywhere, from Skid Row to Koreatown, from Boyle Heights to Santa Monica.

Over the past few months, we have been attempting to sort through all of the geopolitical complexities of the second Trump Administration. On that subject, there’s hardly a better person to talk to than Sarah Adams, a former CIA analyst and one of the sharpest investigators in the business. On this week’s podcast, Adams explains the logic behind America’s campaign against Iran, and separates myth from reality as it relates to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

I recently convened focus groups with Democratic and independent voters in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There were a total of four groups, all assembled with the aim of answering an essential question: How can the Right craft narratives that better appeal to independents and soft Democrats? How do we persuade them to be more receptive to our arguments, on issues ranging from the culture war to economics? The path to winning them over is not a simple one.