The level of fraud in California under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom makes Minnesota’s scandals look like “child’s play,” a conservative activist explained on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” noting that at one point only two officials were tasked to root out scammers in the Golden State. 

“The scale of it in the state of California is just another level entirely,” Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of the first writers to shed light on the Minnesota Somali fraud problem, told “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine. 

Since Newsom was sworn in as governor in 2019, California has become  a “big fat target” for scammers, Rufo explained. 

“Individuals from all walks of life, all nationalities, even all parts of the country have recognized that the California government is essentially open to business for fraud schemes,” he told Devine. 

Rufo, a filmmaker and author, pointed out that “fraudsters stole approximately $32 billion from the state’s unemployment insurance program” during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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. 

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“[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.”