Staff Reports
I drove through Los Angeles in my mind after watching conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s latest post, and what he captured looks nothing like the sanitized sales pitch the left puts out for California. The video shows tent cities, trash-strewn sidewalks, and open drug use in parts of the city that once represented American success. Johnson called it a third-world hellscape and made the blunt argument that taxpayers deserve better than a mayor and governor who look the other way while streets collapse.
Johnson didn’t stop at shock value — he directly challenged the official narrative about how homelessness funds have been spent, pointing to a staggering $24 billion and vowing to follow the money and expose fraud. He announced a team of researchers and watchdogs headed to California to investigate what he calls the Homelessness Industrial Complex that profits from failure. This isn’t idle chest-thumping; it’s a coordinated effort to demand accountability for where taxpayer dollars actually went.
Unsurprisingly, Governor Gavin Newsom pushed back hard, accusing Johnson of spreading falsehoods and pointing to state data showing an estimated 9 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness in recent counts. The governor’s office claims those preliminary numbers show progress from the policies his administration has pursued, and they’re using those figures to rebuke critics who say the money was wasted. Voters should note, though, that press releases and our eyes on the ground are two different standards of proof.
When critics point out the mismatch between spin and reality, the usual playbook is to attack the messenger — and Newsom’s press office did just that with a tasteless social-media jab about “Grindr servers” aimed at Johnson. Instead of answering questions about outcomes and oversight, the response was a cheap personal swipe that only shows how out of touch Sacramento has become. Personal smears do not clean encampments or stop fentanyl from destroying lives, and the public should be furious that officials think mockery substitutes for solutions.
Let’s be blunt: Californians are paying sky-high taxes while watching their cities rot under policies prioritized for optics and donor networks instead of law and order. The homelessness industry has turned human suffering into a funding mechanism for consultants and contractors while families and small businesses shoulder the consequences. Conservatives have long warned that unchecked progressive policies — soft-on-crime, permissive encampment rules, and sprawling welfare bureaucracy without accountability — produce exactly the collapse residents are seeing.
Benny Johnson has promised to go to Los Angeles, sue when he believes defamation has occurred, and “blow the lid off” any corruption he finds; that promise should be met with support from anyone who believes in honest government. Taxpayers deserve audits, hard evidence, and prosecutions where fraud is proven, not press releases that paper over failure. If conservatives want results, we must demand transparency, insist on enforcement of laws, and vote out leaders who treat cities as political theater while neighborhoods are left to rot.
