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Fraudulent activities in California under the leadership of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom have reached such staggering levels that they make Minnesota’s issues seem trivial, a conservative commentator remarked on the recent “Pod Force One” podcast. The commentator highlighted that, at one time, California had merely two officers dedicated to combating these scams.
“The magnitude of fraud in California is on a completely different scale,” shared Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, during his conversation with “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine. Rufo is recognized for being among the first to expose the fraud issues in Minnesota’s Somali community.
Rufo noted that since Governor Newsom took office in 2019, California has turned into a “prime target” for fraudulent schemes.
“People from various backgrounds, countries, and regions have come to see California’s government as a welcoming ground for fraud operations,” Rufo explained to Devine.
As a filmmaker and author, Rufo emphasized that “fraudsters siphoned off around $32 billion from the state’s unemployment insurance program” during the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the state’s vulnerability.
In one notorious case highlighted by Rufo, Tennessee rapper Nuke Bizzle was caught ripping off taxpayers only after he released a music video “detailing precisely how he was able to defraud the state of California.”
“But there is also this ethnic, ethno-political element,” the influential author continued. “And you see certain populations, for example, the Armenians in Southern California, that seem to be perpetrating fraud at scale.
“One police detective I talked to said Romanians, Armenians, Nigerians, there are certain kind of sub-populations or national populations that have been caught over and over and over ripping off the state government.”
“For whatever complex historical and cultural reasons,” these groups, according to Rufo, “have a culture of exploitation, fraud, ripping off the government.”
“They come to the United States, they come to California in particular, and one insider told us the thing about California is this, you’re most likely to not get caught, and if you get caught you’re most likely to not face charges, and if you do face charges and get convicted, you’re most likely to not serve much, if any time at all,” he added. “And so, it’s a means, motive and opportunity. It’s a classic story of criminal conduct, and that’s why I think you see it happening in California at such scale.”
Rufo, who also led the fight to expose critical race theory and DEI in education, argued that fraudsters have largely been able to get away with stealing from the state because “’no effective fraud controls” have been implemented.
“Just to use the example of unemployment insurance, when California was spending billions of dollars per week at the height of COVID, losing tens of billions of dollars to fraudsters, in our reporting we showed that in the entire state, there were only two individual bureaucrats assigned to actually give oversight to the system to ensure that there wasn’t fraudulent activity,” Rufo said, “and so when they’re being flooded with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pieces of paperwork per day, two people is obviously insufficient to oversee that amount of funding.”
Aside from the criminals themselves, others benefiting from fraud in California include political groups, like labor unions, and Democratic politicians, including Newsom, Rufo argued.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!
“[H]e benefits from the perception of an increase in employment,” Rufo said of Newsom. “So, if there are people working for in-home supportive services, which is probably the most fraud-ridden program in California, it looks like California is adding jobs, even if many of those jobs are fraudulent.”
“And second, and relatedly, the public sector and rather the private sector or semi-public sector unions benefit,” the Manhattan Institute fellow continued. “So, if money is flooding through the healthcare system, those healthcare-worker unions take their cut, they get now hundreds of millions of dollars per year by skimming wages off the top, and then a lot of that money goes back into the coffers of California State Democrats.
“So, when you look at the system as a whole, it resembles a circle, and the money flows from taxpayers to fraud schemes, to unions, to politicians, and then it’s kind of crisscrossing between those various entities.”
Rufo warned “the system will not change so long as the people who have the levers of power benefit from the system.”
“That’s the lesson that we’ve seen over and over.”