California High Speed Rail: It Gets Worse

Last week, I posted a 30,000-foot view of how badly the California High Speed Rail project has fallen short of what was sold to the taxpayers in 2008. The version that legacy media now seems to accept without question is that the project has been trimmed to a "first phase" 171-mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley, for instance here at the Fresno Bee from last February:

Today, after years of delays and cost increases, the rail authority is required to focus on first completing a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield route, which the agency is hoping to finish by 2032 at an estimated cost of $34.76 billion.

However, it isn't clear where the 2032 completion date comes from. 2032 was an estimate for the completion of the whole LA-to-San Francisco project as of 2018, but as 0f 2022, there was no projected completion date for either the entire project or any segment. And this appears to be only the received version of the project that legacy reporters repeat without question. I linked a different version in last week's post that puts the end points 162 miles apart, while warning that the actual stations at Bakersfield and Merced will lie several miles outside either city.

But then I embedded a video from Gov Newsom that refers to a "119-mile first phase". This is quite a discrepancy from the original 171-mile version we see above, and it would put the new northern end point in Madera, just north of Fresno, not Merced. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why does Gov Newsom say the first phase of the high speed rail project will be 119 miles long, when media reports say it willl be 171 miles?" It answered,

The discrepancy between the numbers is due to the difference between what is actively being built right now versus what the final initial segment will look like when passenger service begins.

. . . When media reports or the California High-Speed Rail Authority refer to 171 miles, they are describing the full Initial Operating Segment (IOS). This is the actual route that passengers will ride when the train opens for service, currently targeted for between 2030 and 2033.

. . . The extensions (the extra 52 miles needed to connect Shafter to downtown Bakersfield, and Madera to Merced) are currently under advanced design and environmental clearance. Construction contracts for these extensions are being awarded in subsequent phases.

In other words, although there's construction on a 119-mile segment between Shafter and Madera, that's just the first phase of the final initial segment. Good to clear that up! But Chrome AI strongly implies that trains won't actually run on the 119-mile segment until the full length of the 171-mile final initial segment is complete, apparently still in bureaucratic never-never land but expected to be finished sometime between 2030 and 2033.

A highly detailed version of the official plan is available at Wikipedia. That plan says there will be five stations on the 171-mile initial route, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings-Tulare, and Bakersfield. However, state law requires the project to provide revised business plans every even year. The 2026 plan is still in draft form, but according to the California Legislative Analyst's office, both the northern and southern ends of the initial segments will be at new locations:

South Merced. Northern terminus at a new location about 3.5 miles south of the downtown Merced location specified by SB 198. This station would not serve ACE and Gold Runner [conventional Amtrak and commuter rail], so high-speed rail would connect to them at the Madera station instead.

North Bakersfield. Southern terminus at a location on the outskirts of Bakersfield, about 6 miles north of the previously planned station.

The 2026 draft, which the legislative analyst's report implies, is so vaguely worded that it can't be definitely established whether or not the project intends to operate actual passenger-carrying trains on the 119-mile route between Madera and North Bakersfield. However, it's generally acknolwedged that the project is designed to operate trains at 220 mph over the overall Central Valley segment, which would put the journey from North Bakersfield to Fresno at about 30 minutes, allowing for acceleration and deceleration, more if there are intermediate stops.

Currently there's Amtrak conventional rail service between Wasco (roughly the projected "North Bakersfield" station) and Fresno that takes one hour and 27 minutes, 7 daily trains at a $20 fare. It's hard to tell who would benefit from a 30-minute trip at considerably higher fare. The demographics of this whole area are agricultural, not business-class travelers.

There's an entirely separate problem, though, which is how even this reduced project will be funded. A vague plan has been mooted to raid local tax revenues from communities near stations on the theory that the high speed rail project will make them more prosperous and thus even grateful to have the state skim their property tax:

California city leaders are escalating opposition to the state's high-speed rail project amid fears the Golden State could tap local taxpayer funds to prop up the troubled rail system after nearly two decades of delays.

"This proposal in the 2026 Draft Business Plan is fiscally reckless, legally vulnerable, and fundamentally unfair to the communities expected to host High-Speed Rail facilities. It would weaken local governments, destabilize public services, and undermine constitutional protections that California voters have repeatedly affirmed. Simply put: the state cannot solve a state funding problem by raiding local tax bases," wrote Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer along with nine other mayors in the letter obtained by Fox News Digital.

. . . The suggested plan first appeared in the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s 2026 Draft Business Plan. The plan outlined a full Phase 1 buildout of the line was re-estimated to cost $231.3 billion, while the Authority’s optimized approach puts the initial Phase 1 investment at about $126.2 billion.

The proposed funding for the high-speed rail would not create a new tax, but redirect tax revenues near future High Speed Rail stations to the project, local outlet the Fresno Bee reported.

The problem has arisen in part from just the ballooning cost of the whole project, but also from the Trump 47 administration in 2025, which finally terminated about $5 billion in federal aid. The local mayors are calling the tax scheme "legally dubious", indicating that if it passes the legislature and gets a governor's signature, it will be challenged in court, which at minimum would cause severe delays in getting the money.

But this also suggests that the now-extreme cuts to the project, which would provide only very marginal improvement to Bakersfield-San Francisco journey time and would not replace conventional Amtrak service on the same route, would be insanely uneconomical. The only actal advantage would be to Gov Newsom, who'd be able to claim the high speed rail was "running".

It's hard not to think, though, that a major scandal will emerge over this project even before 2028.

Glenn Reynolds Vs Pope Leo On AI

The current focus on AI reminds me of the "Y2K Problem", now more than a quarter century behind us. According to Wikipedia,

The term Year 2000 problem, or simply Y2K, refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, e.g. 1985 as 85, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for computer-reliant industries.

In the years leading up to the turn of the millennium, the public gradually became aware of the "Y2K scare", and individual companies predicted the global damage caused by the bug would require anything between $400 billion and $600 billion to rectify. A lack of clarity regarding the potential dangers of the bug led some to stock up on food, water, and firearms, purchase backup generators, and withdraw large sums of money in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.

In fact, the problem was much smaller than anicipated, and it had been solved as a practical matter some years before 2000, because computers had been assigning credit card expiration dates, payment schedules, and similar post-Y2K events well before Y2K arrived without any problem. Nevertheless, it was a big chance for IT directors to grandstand on mahogany row by requiring the whole IT department to show up for work on New Year's Eve "just in case", although if anything had in fact gone haywire, there wouldn't have been anything people at the IT department level could have done to fix it.

For the computer-illiterate, AI is the new Y2K. A good example has been intellectual welterweight and prominent libertarian Glenn Reynolds, who argued in his 2006 An Army of Davids that "the kids are all right". According to Chrome AI mode,

Rather than being passive consumers of media, Reynolds argued that young people use cheap, powerful consumer electronics and the internet to become active creators. They possess the skills to mix music, edit video, write software, and publish content that previously required corporate backing.

Historically, traditional institutions—like major record labels, publishing houses, and mainstream media—acted as absolute gatekeepers. Reynolds noted that younger generations instinctively use decentralized networks to share their work, build audiences, and establish careers entirely on their own terms.

But 20 years later, in his new book, Seductive AI, the great man now apparently sees the toads in the garden:

In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explores how AI need only take advantage of innate human characteristics – exactly as we programmed it to do – to wreak havoc on society as the most subtle of overlords: anticipating our needs, pleasuring us with tailored “sex bots,” isolating us through convenience, and ultimately thinking for us. Eventually, we may not be able to do – nor even imagine doing – anything without AI. To avoid this trap, we must understand what AI is doing to us, even as it does things for us.

In other words, AI is just really good pornography. You got trouble, folks, right here in River City, trouble with a capital "T". And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for p -- well, that doesn't scan, but you get the point. We've gotta regulate the "P", and the Professor's here to show us how to do it! I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Glenn Reynolds is a prominent libertarian. What would be his position on regulating pornography?" It answered,

As a prominent libertarian, transhumanist, and constitutional law professor, Glenn Reynolds (founder of the influential blog Instapundit) would fundamentally oppose broad government regulation or censorship of pornography involving consenting adults.

. . . He would view modern regulatory efforts—such as mandatory digital identity checks or age-verification laws for adult websites—with deep skepticism, viewing them as a slippery slope toward broader government surveillance and an erosion of online anonymity.

Except if AI is involved, we won't be able to control ourselves or something. Just yesterday, the great man linked this on Instapundit:

New [UK] research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. . . . The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times.

Oh, no! One in five boys aged 12-16 admits encountering this new age P! We've gotta keep boys in this age group from doing more of this! How can we do it? Well, mandatory digital identity checks would be a good first step!

But leaving Glenn Reynolds aside, I was hesitant to start looking at Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitans, On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Especially with AI in the subtitle, I was wondering if we'd get the same sort of hand wringing -- but just scanning the table of contents, I found a surprisingly good sign: Under Chapter Three, Underlying narratives: transhumanism and posthumanism:

115. In an attempt to shed light on the cultural assumptions accompanying the ongoing digital revolution, I would now like to turn our attention to certain currents of thought that interpret progress as surpassing the human condition, and which are often grouped under the labels of transhumanism and posthumanism. These perspectives form the ideological background present in some centers of technological power and occupy the collective imagination in a simplified form, especially in the media and on social networks. They tend to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an “enhanced human being” or “human-machine hybrid.”

. . . 117. From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.

. . . 118. Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.

This is serious stuff, although it isn't directly related to AI. In fact, AI is just a small part of the general cultural trends Leo takes up, as is transhumanism. On one hand, it reflects the concerns Reynolds raises:

100. . . . The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. . . . The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking.

But regulation isn't going to fix this, it involves recognizing what advice, empathy, friendship, and love really are. This has to be fostered within the cuiture. Giving someone like Glenn Reynolds, whose values are truly warped, regulatory control over anything is never going to solve that sort of problem. I suspect that the overall posture of the encyclical makes this plain.

I find this really encouraging, but I've just started to take a detailed look at the encyclical.

UFOs Again

An intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine.

A massive national security issue if indeed that is our submarine being monitored.

UFO Dump #2 pic.twitter.com/o5XOo4vNEJ

— Brian Gamble (@briangamble_v1) May 22, 2026

So the Trump administration has released a second tranche of alleged UAP files, which do nothing but raise the same questions people have had since the flying saucer craze of the 1940s: Why Are There No High-Quality UFO Photos Despite Frequent Sightings? Or put another way, why are the photos we see such cheesy fakes?

Take the example in the tweet above, a video which the poster claims to be "an intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine." My own reaction was that, at least with my eyes, I couldn't see a swarm of anything. But the comments raise even more questions:

Not a US sub.

U.S. sub? LMAO🤣

Accordoing to Chrome AI mode (which still hasn't tried to flatter me, chat me up, or otherwise seduce me, contra Glenn Reynolds),

A modern U.S. Navy submarine looks like a massive, matte-black steel cigar, ranging from 370 to 560 feet in length. It features a single cylindrical hull, a raised bridge-like structure (the "sail") on top, and an aerodynamic cross-section. Only about 10% of the vessel sits above the water's surface.

The "sub" in the tweet looks like something out of World War II. Other comments say the "swarm" is most likely seagulls, although I can't see anything but the U-boat itself. According to CBS News,

The 51 videos included in the second release include the type of grainy infrared footage captured by military cameras and sensors that has become familiar over the past several years.

In the description accompanying the videos, the Pentagon noted that the footage was requested by House lawmakers in March. The videos were found by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, the military office responsible for investigating UAP encounters. The Pentagon noted that "[m]any of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody," and the descriptions note when and where they were likely taken.

One notable video appears to show the moment a fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in 2023, a high-profile incident that came after a Chinese spy balloon traversed the U.S., leading to heightened fears of UAPs. Later reports indicated that the object might have been a balloon operated by a hobbyist group.

According to DefenseScoop,

“My initial reactions were positive and pleasantly surprised. I thought some of the videos contained truly anomalous phenomena,” said retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, a former oceanographer of the Navy, pointing to footage of right-angle turns and formation flying craft.

. . . “The fact that this was the first time that an administration openly admitted that UAP files have been shielded from the public was promising. However, the ambiguity of the video content in particular is concerning as no metadata was included,” he said. “Therefore, it is impossible to conclude that any of the objects were truly anomalous.”

The bottom line is that people who were already on the UAP bandwagon see the release of the files as "encouraging" and "promising", but even they are conceding that so far, there's been no big revelation. Among the skeptics, there have been no conversions, but people keep asking why all we ever see is fuzzy, grainy photos that could be anything:

Seriously, I've been following this subject for most of my adult life. One of my biggest gripes about this topic is that literally EVERY single video that might show an alien is just potato quality, and you cant make hardly anything out. How is there not ANY clear, 4k quality pics? Even the videos released by governments and militaries are dog shit. How can this be?

I think this question is rising to the level of Fermi's paradox: if by the Darwinian paradigm, there are X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and thus life could have evolved on a bodacious number of them, why aren't we seeing evidence of alien life all the time? And if in fact there are all these UAPs that carry evidence of alien life, why are there no good pictures?

One possible answer has always been that the government is covering the good evidence up. But now, Trump has ordered the government to release everything, and so far, it's just the usual grainy photos and hokey fakes. One answer, of course, is it's like the Epstein files, Trump will just talk a good game, but the real stuff will still never be released. The people who believe in space aliens will likely keep on thinking that way.

The California High Speed Rail Fraud Ecosystem

Gavin Newsom, who's term limited as California governor and leaves office on January 4, 2027, is clearly gearing up to run for president in 2028. Apparently he's waking up to what will be a major vulnerability when he starts his campaign, the California High Speed Rail Project:

California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians.

The extent of the betrayal is only slowly coming to light, in part because legacy media reporters simply can't get their heads around an enterprise this size, and in part because they enable the whole fraud-based ecosystem. Independent analyst-journalists like Christopher Rufo and Nick Shirley have been working on the fringes of medical and welfare fraud in places like Minnesota and Los Angeles, but the level of high speed rail goes beyond immigrant entrepreneurs and extends to respectable consulting firms, labor unions, and the political establishments of both parties.

The link above from 2023 gives a bare-bones sketch of the project's history:

In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.

But now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile—a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Or more. Or perhaps ever.

The shortening of the proposed route, originally meant to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, was a result of Newsom's first campaign for governor in 2018. Originally, he was a strong supporter as San Francisco mayor, but as opposition to the project grew -- the 2018 election came just two years before the system was supposed to be complete, but there had been minimal progress on basic construction -- he became vague on what he'd do, and following his election, he announced the project would be shortened to a "first phase" connecting Merced to Bakersfield in the hot, hardscrabble Central Valley. The link above concludes,

There is no path to completion for the fantasy rail system that was falsely sold to voters 15 years ago. Finishing the Bakersfield-Merced route, which will cost in excess of $35 billion, and which won’t be operative for ten years [2033], doesn’t come close to penciling out. The only reasonable decision is to end a project that should never have begun.

But that was in 2023. Now, just the Bakersfield-Merced phase is looking more and more dubious:

According to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office reviewing the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s Draft 2026 Business Plan, Gavin Newsom’s bullet train project may not even reach downtown Merced or downtown Bakersfield. The report says the northern end would stop roughly 3.5 miles south of downtown Merced, while the southern end would land about six miles north of the previously planned Bakersfield station.

That is not a punchline. That is the plan.

And remember, this is already the scaled-down version.

The under-construction photo at the top of this post was one I took in 2023 near Shafter, a little farther north than the route is now projected to end, six miles from Bakersfield. You can see what the country looks like in the area, and you can see what a thrill it will be to catch a limo to downtown Bakersfield from the station. But it gets worse:

The Trump administration has cut off all communication and cooperation with the California High-Speed Rail Authority — including freezing all environmental review, engineering and safety work dating back to last year — which the state says is putting the already embattled project at risk of further delays and cost increases.

“This disengagement by the [Federal Railroad Administration] represents an unprecedented federal government action to cripple the advancement of a project it has helped fund,” the Authority wrote in its project update report released Wednesday.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office report says 144 of the planned 162 miles could now operate on a single track. In real-world terms, trains traveling in opposite directions may [not "may", "will"] have to wait for one another at sidings rather than running continuously on dual tracks.

California’s “world-class” bullet train is starting to sound like a one-lane country road with better branding.

The report also notes that the stations themselves are being simplified into “at-grade stations with single-side platforms” — bureaucratic language for another downgrade.

Why? Because the costs have gotten so absurd that Sacramento is now trying to cheapen the project enough to keep pretending it is still viable.

. . . That is not a cost overrun. That is a civic humiliation.

It goes without saying that both Trump administrations have seen the project as a waste of federal funds. As of 2019,

The Trump administration has cut off all communication and cooperation with the California High-Speed Rail Authority — including freezing all environmental review, engineering and safety work dating back to last year — which the state says is putting the already embattled project at risk of further delays and cost increases.

“This disengagement by the [Federal Railroad Administration] represents an unprecedented federal government action to cripple the advancement of a project it has helped fund,” the Authority wrote in its project update report released Wednesday.

The Biden administration reversed course:

The Biden administration late on Thursday restored a $929 million grant for California's high-speed rail that then-President Donald Trump revoked in 2019.

Trump had pulled funding for a high-speed train project in the state hobbled by extensive delays and rising costs that he dubbed a "disaster." Trump repeatedly clashed as president with California on a number of policy fronts, prompting the state to file more than 100 lawsuits against the Republican Trump administration.

But the second Trump administration has continued the policies of the first. According to Chrome AI mode,

As of late 2025 and early 2026, the federal government has terminated major funding for the California High-Speed Rail project.

• In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) pulled approximately $4 billion in federal grants for the project.
• In February 2026, Congress formally rescinded an additional $928 million for the project in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026.
• California dropped its lawsuit against the federal government in December 2025 regarding the terminated $4 billion, opting to move forward without federal support.

But the idea of finishing anything at all without federal money looks, as various links have pointed out, more and more like fantasy. But this brings us to Gavin Newsom's electoral dilemma: to be any sort of contender in 2028, he has to put the high speed rail project out of the picture as an issue:

Three months ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an extraordinary achievement. Standing on the site of a new railyard, with trains all around him, Newsom proudly explained that the state’s high-speed rail project had a new marshaling facility to support the transition to busily laying track.

. . . Two weeks ago, talking to Bill Maher, Newsom defended the high-speed rail project with these words: “We’re actually laying track.” The railhead is the signal that a new phase has arrived: There’s a construction yard full of material, with trains to move it. It’s the really-making-stuff moment, the time for active, provable success. There’s a place where you can go look at all the iron that’s moving into place.

There’s nothing there. There are rail lines, but they run into an empty and unpeopled yard next to a bunch of dirt. There are no construction materials. There are no construction workers. There are no warehouses. They ran a bunch of trains in, posed in front of them, and then returned the site to its normal empty condition. Nothing is happening there. Nothing.

I walked the site. I walked up and down the tracks, worried that I was missing something. I drove up to Wasco, then back, up and down dirt roads along the tracks — old tracks, for BNSF freight trains.

. . . The railyard where Gavin Newsom declared “real progress” while standing next to train cars is the center of no construction activity at all. I walked around the fence and stood on the tracks today in the empty yard. I was alone.

Not only that, in the video, he now refers to a "119-mile first phase", when up to now, for instance via Chrome AI mode, the "first phase" has been generally understood to be 171 miles from Bakersfield to Merced. Under the Legislative Analyst report linked above, it is thought now to be slightly shortened to 162 miles, allowing for stations well outside Bakersfield and Merced, but at least nominally connecting them -- but now, without explanation, Newsom has it down to 119 miles.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "If I travel 119 miles on Highway 99 north of Bakersfield, where will I be?" The short answer is Fresno, or as Bakersfielders call it, "the big 'No". It sounds like there's been a big reduction of the first phase, and it should probably be called Bakersfield-Fresno. Amtrak, by the way, has already had conventional trains on this route since the 1970s, and has already ordered new equipment to operate on it, presumably for the next 20 years or more.

This is a big story. Sounds like Amtrak doesn't expect high speed trains to replace anything on its own Central Valley route for decades to come. They probably have good inside info. Will Nick Shirley or Christopher Rufo follow up, let along legacy media? Somebody needs to be asking Gavin Newsom serious questions.

The Spencer Pratt Campaign Won't Go Away

I keep wanting to dismiss the Spencer Pratt campaign, but it's been attracting serious attention from as far away as Australia, as the clip embedded above shows. Yesterday, Trump gave him a quasi-endorsement:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday before boarding Air Force One, the president of the United States and former host of “The Apprentice” declared that Spencer Pratt – the villain of MTV’s “The Hills” and current candidate for mayor of America’s second-largest city – is “a big MAGA person” whom he’d “like to see do well.”

Just like that, Pratt’s insurgent meme-filled campaign for Los Angeles mayor, which is giving incumbent Mayor Karen Bass a run for her money in California’s sprawling deep-blue metropolis, took yet another unpredictable turn.

Pratt, a 42-year-old reality TV star who launched his candidacy in January after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the devastating 2025 wildfires, is running as an independent, building his campaign around voter fury at incumbent Bass and her handling of the disaster’s aftermath. He has worked carefully to cast himself as a nonpartisan outsider – “I represent all of Los Angeles,” he has said – even as MAGA-aligned personalities have applauded his combative social-media driven rise.

The same link at Real Clear Politics -- the site that touts its reputation by averaging garbage-in-garbage-out polling to come up with meaningless numbers -- concludes that Trump's endorsement is "a kiss of death":

The city Pratt is running to lead is not fertile ground for Trump’s blessing. Los Angeles County broke for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election by 65% to 32%. The city has not elected a Republican mayor in nearly three decades. And only 18% of registered city voters are Republicans.

Against that backdrop, veteran Democratic strategists were quick to render their verdict.

“A Trump endorsement only helps with Republicans,” Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio told RealClearPolitics. “In Los Angeles, it’s a kiss of death. Pratt might get protest votes in June from Democrats. But when push comes to shove, Los Angeles, with its heavily Latino and black populations and deep blue Democratic base, isn’t going to elect a mayor who is embraced by Trump.”

“And you can be sure that Mayor Bass will do everything she can to remind voters that they are MAGA twins,” he added.

Bass’ campaign didn’t wait long to make exactly that point. Within hours of Trump’s comments, a campaign Bass went on offense.

“No surprises here — both Trump and Pratt want ICE to invade our city and kidnap our neighbors,” she tweeted.

The Pratt campaign was already anticipating this line of attack:

Best ad....so far.

I'm not MAGA or anything..... https://t.co/w5HQtdvXIQ

— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) May 20, 2026

The odd thing is that the Real Clear Politics story at the link above quotes only Democrat strategists. Another story at the LA Times quotes Republicans:

“He’s an outsider candidate. He’s a celebrity candidate. He’s very clever, very strategic, and very skilled at social media,” said Republican strategist Kevin Spillane. “There aren’t many candidates that I’ve seen that are that skilled in a long time.”

Pratt regularly refers to Mayor Karen Bass, now seeking a second term, as trash, swapping her last name out for basura, Spanish for garbage. He has described supporters of Bass as “Bassholes” and backers of another mayoral contender, Councilmember Nithya Raman, as “Ramaniacs.”

. . . “He’s being brash, confrontational, sensational and operating beyond political norms — all things that Trump has done and continues to do,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant.

“That’s why I think there’s potential for him to unlock a constituency that wasn’t going to vote for a Rick Caruso,” he said, referring to the developer who lost to Bass in 2022.

(By the way, the Bass-Bassura pun went completely over my head in this post two weeks ago.) But are the Democrat strategists who say Trump's almost-endorsement is "a kiss of death" missing something?

Normally U.S. presidents approaching the midway point of their second term are beginning to experience the effects of declining political capital as lame ducks. But not Donald Trump, who continues to wield the power of election endorsements with unparalleled success.

America’s 47th president kept his impressive 2026 primary winning streak rolling Tuesday night, with more than three dozen Republicans winning outright or advancing to a runoff in states like Georgia, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

But the night’s biggest prize for Trump was the ousting of one-time ally Rep. Thomas Massie, who was defeated by Trump-backed rival Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL and Kentucky farmer, in one of the most expensive congressional races in American history.

The one certain thing about Pratt at the moment is that he's getting a great deal of attention. This has got to count for something, if not in the LA mayoral election, at least in his future prospects for whatever. He's getting all this attention for a reason.

The Homeless Economy

Mayor Karen Bass has turned Los Angeles into a magnet for the street homeless. The numbers are shocking:

• 64% are from outside the City of LA
• 40% are from outside California
• 6% are from outside the United States pic.twitter.com/4HHsSQM2Xw

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) May 19, 2026

Christopher Rufo's reporting on the Haitian migrant problems in Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA for City Journal had an impact on the 2024 election. In those pieces, he showed the economic interdependency of NGOs, landlords, sweatshop employeers, car dealers, and others in making money out of resettling Haitian migrants in "temporary protected status". Such programs have major impacts on native-born members of surrounding communities, including landlords who evict longtime tenants to get higher rents from overcrowded units rented to migrants, for instance.

Rufo is now starting to take a similar approach in a piece posted on his website: More Than Half of L.A.'s Street Homeless Are Not From L.A.:

Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions in city and county spending, L.A.’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs, and feces. City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly, are these people coming from?

There is a reason for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corporation reported that 41 percent of the street homeless surveyed across three Los Angeles neighborhoods—Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row—were “last housed” somewhere other than L.A. County.

In other words, even if Los Angeles has some type of "affordable housing shortage" or other conditions that put people on the street, why would people nevertheless seek out LA as a place to live? There must be many places that have equivalent good weather but where housing might be more easily available. Something about LA is serving as a magnet for the potentially homeless over and above locations in, say, Arizona, Texas, or Florida.

Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that out-of-town homeless are flooding L.A. is a “myth.” In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location data. In 2025, RAND removed the metric from the organization’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”

We asked LAHSA and RAND why they buried this data. LAHSA said it stopped publishing previous-location figures because of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the data to the annex “due to a need to save costs on publishing,” and confirmed that the data would remain there in the group’s upcoming report.

Another reason might be that the massive migration of homeless people to Los Angeles violates progressive pieties—and these groups would rather suppress those data than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA said it stopped publishing results for the previous-location question “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” but noted that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)

The usual leftist explanation for homelessness is that there's a "shortage of affordable housing", although in recent years there's also a tacit acknowledgement that many homeless are unable to sustain a life pattern that enables them to afford housing at any price due to mental illness or addiction.

For years, Los Angeles’s homelessness policy has been rooted in the idea that the condition is a housing problem. The city and county have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “housing first” and “harm reduction” programming—in a nutshell, providing housing and drug paraphernalia instead of mandating treatment—while failing reliably to punish quality-of-life crimes, such as public camping, drug consumption, and petty theft.

. . . The implications of our survey are clear: just building housing won’t solve Los Angeles’s homelessness problem. The wrong kind of housing program might even make it worse. Giving more homeless people a permanent home, with no strings attached, simply inspires nonresidents to come here.

The real way to solve Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis is to reverse the polarity of the magnet: enforce drug and camping laws, mandate treatment, and insist on clean and orderly streets. The only alternative is lawlessness—the end result of an approach that has turned the City of Angels into an open-air homeless encampment.

Unfortunately, at least in this relatively short piece, Rufo doesn't go into the broader economic environment homelessness creates. But James O'Keefe covers just one part of the larger ecosystem in The New York Post:

In Skid Row, I was personally on the ground in disguise while wearing an old LA Raiders hat and a Mother Mary hoodie with ripped up pants. Being there showed me how far our society has fallen.

Needles, dead animals, rotten food, and people sleeping on the streets have made parts of LA look like a city that has completely succumbed to hell.

On top of all of that, criminals were taking advantage of the homeless by selling votes for a few dollars. Reports over the years had claimed that election fraud is going on in California. But we showed — for the first time ever — not circumstantial evidence, but real, live exchanges of cash for votes. Darkness, overshadowing democracy, for a mere $2 a voter.

Exactly how this scheme works is covered in a recent federal indictment:

Federal officials have charged a Marina del Rey woman with paying individuals to register to vote, including homeless residents of L.A.’s infamous Skid Row.

In a press release issued Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice said Brenda Lee “Anika” Brown Armstrong is charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote.

The 64-year-old has already agreed to plead guilty.

According to the DOJ, which cited her plea agreement, Armstrong periodically worked as a “petition circulator” for roughly two decades.

“In that role, she was paid by individuals and entities – known as ‘coordinators’ – to collect voter signatures on official petitions that qualify initiatives, referendums and recalls for California state ballots,” the DOJ said.

Upon gathering enough signatures, Armstrong would return the petitions to the “coordinators,” who then paid her a set amount for each signature, although officials said it varies depending on the specific ballot initiative. She “endeavored” to ensure the signatories were registered voters because the people who paid her only gave her money for signatures attributable to registered voters, according to federal officials.

. . . Skid Row was a convenient place for Armstrong to collect signatures because of its high concentration of people in a relatively small area who were willing to sign petitions in exchange for payment,” the DOJ said, adding that overall, Armstrong would give individuals $2 or $3 in cash to “induce them” to sign her petitions. “Many of Skid Row’s homeless population were not registered to vote [and] some homeless people did not have an address to put on the forms … On several occasions, Armstrong provided a homeless individual with her own former address in Los Angeles so they had something to write on the registration form.”

But this is just one racket within the overall homeless ecosystem. Organized retail theft can involve homeless people who in effect have a "job" shoplifting from low-level retail stores and turning their hauls over to coordinators who pay them. Another highly lucrative activity, equivalent to the NGOs that resettle migrants, is the homeless non-profit racket, which Spencer Pratt is attempting to expose in his mayoral campaign:

Spencer Pratt just NAILED the homeless grift in LA 🔥
“Homeless ‘nonprofit’ execs are raking in over $1 million a year on the homeless problem — guarantees the problem is NEVER solved.”
Drive around LA. More tents, more death, more money for the suits.
6 people are dying EVERY… https://t.co/sJyikmCkzC

— Lillian L. Carranza (Retired)🇺🇸 (@LAPDCARRANZA) May 19, 2026

However, as I've been pointing out, even if Pratt winds up in the top two after the June 2 primary, his chances in the November election are a long shot -- although the national effect of his campaign, which is Quixotic at best on the local level, may succeed in elevating the issue as a national priority. But whoever wins the executive local elections in California, whether for city or state government, will face leftist supermajorities in city councils and the state legislature.

The only real progress will have to be made via federal anti-fraud envforcement, as we see above with a homeless vote fraudster's guilty plea.

Dershowitz vs Turley On The New York Times's "Dog Libel"

Via The Times of Israel:

A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times.

The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere.

Elsewhere,

The article drew widespread reactions around the world, including protests and calls to cancel subscriptions. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for libel against the State of Israel. Israeli officials and the Israel Prison Service have completely denied the claims, and Netanyahu called them baseless.

Alan Dershowitz gave a summary of the legal issues in the YouTube interview embedded above. At 3:40

In those countries that allow nations and groups to bring lawsuits for defamation, it seems to me that it's a very, very strong case. Not in the United States, Israel can't bring a lawsuit. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can't bring a lawsuit. Only individuals or corporations, etc, can be defamed. But there's no doubt in my mind that defamation has occurred, and under the law of probably Great Britain, Canada, maybe Australia, maybe Israel, these claims can be tested in a court of law. So, no, not in the United States, but yes, in other states that permit defamation actions for hate speech.

. . . [In London], there used to be what was called "tourism defamation", that is, people would purposely sue in London, even though they didn't have any connections to London. The courts are very concerned there about that. The problem with Israel, of course, is that you can bring lawsuits in Israel, and you can win, but you're going to collect almost nothing. So the issue with Israel is to bring the lawsuit and get a determination. Now, it won't have the same credibility that a lawsuit in another country might have, and they won't collect a lot of money, but the issue is not collecting a lot of money from the New York Times, it's discrediting it.

. . . it's getting discovery, and sitting down with the lawyers from the New York Times,and with Kristof and others, and putting them under deposition, and questioning them about who their sources are.

Jonathan Turley suggests we don't know enough yet about the lawsuit:

The Israelis allege that the column was intentionally posted ahead of the release of an independent Israeli report that found Hamas had systematically used sexual violence in the onslaught of October 7, 2023.

It is unclear whether the lawsuit will be filed on behalf of individuals, groups, or the nation as a whole. Regardless of the framing, the defamation action could allow Israel to delve into the paper’s journalistic practices and alleged bias.

Under the higher “actual malice standard,” Israeli counsel would likely need to prove that Kristof and the Times acted with knowledge of the allegation’s falsity or in reckless disregard of the truth.

. . . The newspaper has been repeatedly called out for slanted and sometimes false reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. For example, after Israel attacked Gaza in response to the October 7th massacre, the Times reported on an alleged Israeli strike that destroyed part of the Al-Ahli hospital. The Times seemed to rush to get the allegation into print, with little supporting evidence.

The story was based on sources associated with the terrorist group Hamas, which is notorious for disseminating propaganda and false stories. It took a week before the Times retracted the claim. (It turned out to be a misfired Palestinian rocket that hit a parking lot).

. . . The Times has had to sever ties with antisemitic writers, or stringers, including one who said “the Jews are sons of the dogs, and I am in favor of killing them and burning them like Hitler did to them.”

These past controversies are potentially admissible in a defamation trial to show malice and a history of reckless reporting about Israel.

So far, the Times stands by the story. At the second link above,

New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said the legal threat was part of "a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative." She added that "any such legal claim would be without merit." Another Times spokesman, Charlie Stadtlander, defended the reporting, saying the testimonies were corroborated where possible with other witnesses and subjected to rigorous fact-checking against human rights research and testimony presented at the United Nations.

To judge from Dershowitz's interview, no matter where the lawsuit is filed, the aim is to discredit the Times once and for all. But the challenge may not be just legal. The story here continues,

Despite the official backing given to the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, many newsroom journalists have expressed significant distrust with the facts presented. According to an extensive report in Puck, later echoed by the New York Post, newsroom reporters suspect the sources behind the allegations would not have met their own professional standards.

A source at The New York Times told ynet: “We feel the opinion section is hurting the credibility of the entire brand and repeatedly lowering the professional standard for all of us.” The remarks join testimony from another journalist who told Puck, “I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.” Other reporters are frustrated by damage to the paper’s reputation from decisions by a department they say is not subject to the same strict standards, and by opinion writers “invading” their areas of coverage.

The story gives another perspective on the chances of any lawsuit, brought either in the US or Israel:

But any legal action against The New York Times in the United States, which would most likely be heard in New York state, would face a significant hurdle that would make winning the case extremely difficult. The main obstacle is the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan, which sets a high bar for lawsuits involving public figures. Under that ruling, it is not enough to prove that Kristof’s column was offensive, distorted, hostile or even wrong. To survive dismissal, plaintiffs would have to prove that the newspaper or columnist acted with "actual malice" — publishing a false factual claim while knowing it was false, or consciously disregarding serious doubts about its truth.

In addition, U.S. federal free speech laws mean that even if Israel won a defamation case in an Israeli court, enforcing the judgment on American soil would be nearly impossible.

This legal complexity was reflected in Ariel Sharon’s lawsuit against Time magazine in the 1980s. A New York jury found at the time that the article was false and defamatory, but Sharon did not receive damages because he failed to prove actual malice or reckless disregard by the magazine, as required under the Sullivan standard.