After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Walz’s Odd China Connection, Legacy Media’s Demise, Fraud Across America, with Liz Collin and Luke Rosiak, PLUS Spencer Pratt Owns Opponents

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

Emily Jashinsky breaks down a series of bombshell reports on fraud allegations in states across America. She opens with Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak to discuss his exclusive reporting out of Ohio alleging a massive Medicaid fraud scam that has caught the attention of Vice President Vance. Rosiak and his team report that $1B+ may have been spent on dubious programs that essentially paid people to hang out with their own family members, and much more. Next Emily is joined by Liz Collin, Senior Reporter at Alpha News and Producer of the upcoming documentary, “Minnesota Mao.” They discuss Liz’s documentary that investigates the strange connection between Governor Tim Walz and China. Emily and Liz also discuss widespread allegations of fraud in Minnesota involving daycares, Senator Amy Klobuchar’s attempts to break from Walz, the commissioner Walz demoted ahead of a hearing on fraud and demands Congresswoman Ilhan Omar turn over records connected to the Feeding Our Future child nutrition fraud scandal. Emily and Liz also discuss the rise in independent journalism and how mainstream journalists give tips to Alpha News because they know their own stations won’t cover certain stories. Emily rounds out the show with a look at the L.A. Mayor debate, Spencer Pratt’s performance, why he just might win, and more…   PreBorn: Transform Mother’s Day for a woman in need by providing a life-saving ultrasound at https://preborn.com/Emily or by dialing #250 keyword BABY.   Beam: Visit https://shopbeam.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY to get our exclusive discount of up to 40% off.   Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/AFTERPARTY Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to another edition of After Party, everyone. We have a jam-packed show for you tonight. Two guests, we're going to start with Luke Roziak and then talk to Liz Collin, both of whom have done very important reporting on fraud. Liz in Minnesota, where there, we know, is plenty of fraud to be found. And Luke just now, just literally in the last couple of days, in Ohio, where he has some really, really important and influential reporting, the vice president himself has reacted to Luke's reporting, again, just in the last 48 hours on fraud, and particularly in the health care system. So like I said, we have a lot to get to tonight. I think we're also going to have time to react to what's happening literally as we are on air. The Los Angeles mayor debate, Spencer Pratt, right now is up against Nithia Raman and Karen Bass.

That is literally happening right now, and we've already pulled a clip to give you a flavor of exactly how that debate is going for the Dems and for Spencer Pratt. So please do subscribe. We really, really appreciate when you subscribe on the YouTube channel. It's just one of the best ways to help us keep doing our independent journalism. Thank you to everybody who's already done it. If you haven't subscribed over on the podcast feed, that's also very helpful, like, comment, review. We appreciate it so much. You give such good feedback. And I hope you know that I read just about every email I get. and I'm always paying attention to what all of you have to say about the show. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.

Like I said, big show, big jab-packed show to get to from Ohio to Minnesota to California. So I won't delay any more. We'll be back in just one moment with Luke Roziak. But first, Mother's Day, it's almost here. And it's one of the most beautiful moments of the year to share those life-changing news. all of that life-changing news. Maybe you have seen it. A family gathered around the table when someone stands up and says next year, there will be a brand new mom in our family. There's nothing like that. But for some women, of course, Mother's Day feels very different. And we want to think about those women

as well. We want to support those women as well. So instead of celebrating some of these women are carrying a secret, they're afraid, they're unsure, they're alone, and that's why preborn exists. because when a woman sees her baby on an ultrasound and here's that tiny heartbeat, it doubles the chance that she'll choose life. This is a real life or death question for women right now around the country. And this Mother's Day, you can be the reason a scared young woman becomes a confident mom. So amazing. Just $28 provides one ultrasound and that's less than a dollar a day.

And it could literally save a life. Think about it that way. or $140 reaches $5.40 $140, $5 mothers. Preborn empowers women to be mothers, and it's only the beginning because that moment also leads to real support down the line. Maternity care, baby clothes, diapers, counseling, and so much more.

And that is what we do together when we provide ultrasounds. I said this on Monday, but preborn has really been on my heart and mind lately. Just how grateful I am for the work that they do and how proud I am to be able to tell all of about the work that pre-born does. That's not in the script. It's genuinely from my heart because I really believe it. So to get involved, simply dial pound 250 and say the keyword, baby, that's pound 250, baby, or visit preborn.com slash Emily. That's preborn.com slash Emily. All right, we're joined now by Luke Rosiac. He is the Daily Wires investigative reporter. Has a huge story out, a series, actually, that just began. First part dropped yesterday.

second part today actually just hours ago. And it's on video too. So we're going to have a little bit of that. But first, Luke, welcome one of the greatest reporters of his generation. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks, Emily. It's been a long couple days.

I'm getting pretty tired, but I always have time for you. You're the best. Oh, right back at you. And by the way, this is a five-part series, right? And we're only two parts into it. Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh, it's already so bad. Okay.

Well, on that note, this was Luke's article from yesterday, F5. We could put it up on the screen. Daily Wire investigation reveals in the headline. One of the biggest government waste scandals hiding in plain sight. The subhead here is I've been investigating federal waste and fraud for 20 years. This is the biggest scandal I've ever found. Luke, that headline makes me feel old or the subheading makes me feel old. 20 years.

I remember when you were doing the Debbie Washington Schultz stuff. Has it really? You've been doing this for 20 years now. about. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, we want to get into your reporting. Your excellent reporting.

And because these stories are part of a series, I want to play this video that was just released hours ago from the second part of the series that was released today. Again, this is all interconnected. So it'll make sense to people once they kind of get a flavor of what you found on your reporting trip to Ohio. This is going to be S-18. Your parents raise you when you're young for free. When they get old, you help them because you love them, you know, right?

Well, the government is going to pay me to do it. People see that as little projects. I've noticed that you guys have gotten $10 billion in Medicaid. You're going to anything. What exactly goes into a home health care business? Oh. Home health. Home health.

Home health. Home health. I'm not asking about the industry. We don't need you guys. You guys are racist people. You're racist, Luke. Okay. So we're going to get more into every.

angle that we possibly can explore with us. But just tell us, you just heard the home health care buzzword there, and that's really what you're looking into. So tell us what you're investigating and what you found, just the kind of top line, big picture, what you found. It's basically Somalis getting paid to hang out with their own family. Wait, so it's Somalis again. We're in Ohio.

We're not in Minnesota. Yeah. And Columbus, Ohio is actually the second biggest population of Somalis after Minneapolis. list. And Doge released a big database and I went through the data. And I just had the data tell me where the sketchiest stuff was and it took me to Columbus. And that's when I found who was there while it turned out to be smallies as well. I didn't know who. Wait, so you didn't even know that while you were looking at basically the spreadsheets. You just saw what looked like ridiculous because you mentioned, I actually wrote this down. Federal spending on home health care doubled in Ohio in recent years.

And it looks like basically that happened post-COVID. So you're looking at these numbers. you go to Ohio and you realize it's a lot of people in the Smalley community. Exactly. So it wound up being kind of similar to the great work that Nick Shirley did. But then I also added in data analysis and really starting with those numbers, which we never really had before. It was a new thing that Doge and HHS released that shows who's getting paid by Medicaid, not the patients, but the companies that are profiting.

And we were able to see all these businesses and kind of look at a, you know, like some people claim. did Nick Shirley pick? Is this atypical? And the data gives us the broader sense of like, no, this is pretty typical. Like there's just literally just thousands of these kind of groups. And you can see them what they look like on the ground. And there's, you know, you pick one at random and you go there and you're likely going to find nobody is there.

And you look up who registered the corporation. It's likely going to be a Somali. And, you know, it turns out that like, yeah, even when you're outside of, of Minneapolis, if you pick one of these Medicaid expansion programs, they call a Medicaid waiver because it's not even medical care. It's for like doing chores

and cleaning your house. It's like a personal servant that they'll send you. And it's supposed to be for an old person that is not in great health, but they get the doctors to write that they're not in good health. And then their aid is not a nurse or anyone. It's their own relative. And so they wind up getting paid to take care of just to hang out with actually their

own family. And so just as you have them charging the government money for daycare to watch their own kids or their friends kids, they're actually literally just billing the government by the hour for hanging out in their own house with their own relatives, which is, of course, something that every decent human being has done for all of eternity without asking for money in exchange. Well, and people heard that in the clip we played. You can front. Maybe tell us a little bit of the confrontation in the clip that we watched in Columbus with that gentleman who confronts you actually implies that you're racist or basically doesn't imply, suggest that you're racist, Luke, for looking into this. You're in this back and forth.

And in your narration, you're like, well, these people are just getting paid. I mean, we can put this up on the screen. It's F6, the headline here, how the feds pay immigrants billions to hang out with their families. I mean, that's basically what we're looking at here as you're explaining. So Medicaid reimbursements by the state and the federal government are essentially going to, presumably not just immigrants, but apparently in big number, there's a concentration of this happening in an immigrant, Somali immigrant communities in Columbus, Ohio. Is this because of a COVID-era program? Is it because, like, what caused this big spike that you found? So it is a Medicaid waiver that started with home health care, which was the idea that if you were pretty sick, you know, you're eligible to go to a nursing home that might cost $100,000 a year.

Maybe we could send a nurse to your house like a couple times a week and check on you and that would be satisfactory and that would be cheaper for the government. So that made sense. And then they pushed it further and they said, well, what if you weren't that sick, but we could just like, send just like a regular person, not with any medical training, and they could just like cook and clean for you. Okay. And that would be cheaper. But where the math breaks down is that not a lot of people are going to pretend to be really sick so they can get into a to a nursing home. Like nobody really wants to go hang out with like a bowl of pudding and a bunch of 90-year-olds. But if you can actually just stay in your house and live a normal life and get free money for your

family, if a doctor says that you're old and frail, it turns out a lot of people then become old and frail and they find a doctor who's willing to say that they are. And so this program existed with increasingly lax boundaries, I guess, over the last, I don't know, it's been decades. But to directly answer your question, I think what changed is the Somalis. I mean, I think we had a program that was always kind of vulnerable to abuse and to fraud, but Americans, didn't tend to, they tended to be decent people for the most part. And the Somalis absolutely started exploiting this at scale. And it's not like, you mentioned like, you know, it's non-Somalis too probably. Like, I have to tell you, when I went to Columbus, I did not see, I saw maybe one,

maybe two Americans the entire time. It is any, you know, when people, it is absolutely a Somali problem. I mean, we shouldn't beat around the bush. It's shocking. It's all Somalis, and they get a million dollars a year, five million dollars a year, $10 million for running these companies that are middlemen, that then have a bunch of people hanging out with their families, and the companies bill Medicaid, and then they pay the people who are hanging out with the families, and they take a cut. So it's big money, and a lot of industry has left, Northeast Columbus,

which is where a lot of the immigrants live, because it's not worth working anymore. It's better to get paid by Medicaid. And so you drive down the street, there's all these vacant storefronts. And instead, what's come up into them is various schemes that bill Medicaid for very dubious services. One of the interesting things to me about the Twin Cities region fraud scandal was how many of the Somalis actually were American citizens who had been born here. I don't know if you ran into that. But I also think that's interesting because lest anybody try to slot this into some conventional wisdom, broader narrative about the right trying to build racial narratives out of something.

Actually, it was in the Minnesota reformer, Casey Magin, who worked for Tim Walz, the Walls administration in fraud, like actually worked on rooting out fraud for the Walls administration who wrote, like many, many months before the Shirley scandal broke, that members of the Somali American community brought some customs that don't really project well onto the American system of kind of tribal relations, clan relations, from Somalia. And that just kind of caused, they also kind of, as Magin wrote, abused, weaponized charges of racism to keep people from looking into this, which again, it sounds like you can kind of see this plane. playing out in broad daylight if you just scratch the surface of it. Yeah. And I mean, that guy hopefully will release the, well, so yeah, there's a lot there. The, I'm sorry, it's been a long day. I've done like nine media hits. Like every,

probably been like a long three days. Yeah, I think, you know, not only J.D. Vance, but like all the Republican candidates for statewide office have weighed in like a tenth of the Republican delegation in U.S. Congress. But, you know, ultimately what they're going to have to deal with is, like, a lot of Republicans are talking about, like, well, we're just going to crack down on fraud. The problem is when you see it, it's, there's an infinite amount. I mean, it's so many people. And if you can put Ahmed Ahmed in jail, then, you know, Ahmed Mohammed will just take his

place running a new LLC at the same address. Like, that's kind of by a problem. Literally names from your report, right? Like, those are two people that are in your report. Yeah. And like I have these gifts that you can see on one of the Daily Wire articles of the businesses. And it just lists the owners of the different Medicaid businesses. And there's not a single American on there.

To get back to your point, though, I mean, you know, basically what I did here is take the kind of work that Nick Shirley did that some on the left claim didn't have, you know, it was mostly video based. It didn't also have like a traditional investigative journalism component. And I did heavy duty data work. and then also like traditional like records work, like looking these people up in all the kind of public records that we use as reporters. So you look at the LLCs that they own, whether they have tax debts and liens against them, what kind of properties they own.

And then, of course, a voter registration. And that's where I did see, I agree with you. I mean, these are American citizens because they're registered to vote. Almost all of the business owners, the Medicaid business owners that I saw were registered to vote. And almost all of them were registered for the, Democratic Party. And, you know, I've seen some projections that the Democrats might actually win Ohio now. It's very close.

And so you can see how interjecting this pretty large crew of Somalis in there. And you see the voting patterns. It could swing the state and maybe it already has. But I don't think that any normal Democrat voter who saw what was going on and walked into any of these businesses would be like, okay with it or think this is normal. It's the kind of thing the government, only the government. only the government would be stupid enough to pay. And if there's no human interaction,

and you see a form and a machine just writes a check, okay, but like, if there's any human contact where you look someone in the eye and like, yeah, this is normal, like you would never think this is a good expenditure of money or these people are on the up and up. And to your point about the clan-based structures, I think that's part of why they were able to exploit it, because what you want is a doctor to be part of your ring

who's going to say that everybody is disabled. And then you want a bunch of, people who can get, you know, some old people that can get those disability letters. And then you need people to work for your business who claim to be going to visit their relatives in the clan, but who don't actually have to go. And that's how you get millions of dollars a year. And so you need a bunch of people who are all in on it and who are never going to snitch to the government.

And I think that's what we saw here is they live truly in a parallel society. I mean, this was essentially not America, even though I agree with you that I think some of them were probably born here. Yeah. Well, I think that's a really interesting component of this. And I want to put F11 up on the screen. This is Vice President Vance's reaction to the first part of your series. He said, these shocking allegations, if true, show why the fraud task force's work is so important, referring to the administration's task force that was recently created. He says, I'm directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to.

prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all for their payments as appropriate. And Luke, one of the big differences between your reporting and the video that Shirley did in Minneapolis is that actually there had been dozens of indictments by the time Nick Shirley went up to Minneapolis. And those provided a sort of roadmap for him to go in, knock on doors. And by that point, it had been so well known in the Twin Cities area, not nationally, though it should have been nationally known, but people knew about it in Minnesota. Tim Walls had already pivoted and said he was taking it very seriously. Other Democratic or DFL politicians had done the same thing.

So part of your report asks why this is happening in a red state, how this is happening in a red state. And I'm curious, Luke, what you've heard maybe from the vice president, further from the vice president or his office or even Ohio-based politicians. Obviously, J.D. is from Ohio. But, you know, the governor, state legislature, just in the last few days about potential criminal investigations. Well, an interesting contrast to what J.D. Vance said is the governor, Mike DeWine, after the first part of our five-part series came out, he said, the Daily Wire doesn't have any evidence of fraud. We're not going to do, the program is working as intended.

And again, literally four out, we haven't even presented what we found. I mean, it was just basically an introductory piece. So he was very quick to say nothing to see here. We're not going to look into anything. Republican governor. Yeah. But there's a green, there's an angle where what he's saying is like some of this is allowed. Like, and that's kind of the issue is like in the same way that, you know, the Somalis in Minneapolis, like most of them don't work.

So why does somebody have to watch their kids? Why do we have to pay for somebody to watch their kids? they're unemployed. Why don't they watch their own kids? It's kind of the same issue there where it's like, why would we pay people to, even in the scenario where it's not fraudulent, why is it permitted to do this hanging out with your own family and getting paid? And that's a waiver that goes beyond home health care to what they call personal services. I don't know why like Governor Kays, you know, DeWine and then Kaysich before him,

probably the same thing as Minneapolis. You have just a sense of a high trust society and people who are nice and the sense that people surely wouldn't charge the government for hanging out with their family unless they were in a really atypical and difficult situation. But with the Somalis, that's not the case. And I think they just overwhelm the system. And I don't know why DeWine hasn't changed course when it's become quite clear that it's going to destroy the state's budget.

I mean, Medicaid is like almost half of Ohio state budget. This is no small thing. So the transparency from Doge is great just to see who's getting paid because I think that will turn the tide that these programs shouldn't exist at all because some of that absolutely is permitted. Others is fraud. And in some of those fraud cases, it's difficult to prove the fraud because it's the nature of the program that's happening in people's private residences and it's hard to really prove

that you didn't go to somebody's house like a year. later. And I think that from a perspective of fraud prevention, I think it's intolerable that we have a program where if somebody were to defraud it, you couldn't prove it. Those are the kind of programs that just can't exist. We can't give out government money unless there's a way to say, like, if you steal, we're going to know it and we're going to put you in jail. And these programs basically are, if you do defraud it, you get away with it. And one of the other things that stands out in your story, I would imagine, is some of these pass-through entities could also be criminally liable. Like, just trying to think of what investigators might latch on to here.

I mean, Vice President Vance talking about getting the task force to look into this. And I'm sure, Luke, that more conservative legislators in Ohio are probably eager to look into it as well. I'd be shocked if Vivek Ramoswamy doesn't make this a campaign issue. Maybe he already hasn't. I missed it, Luke. But I would imagine they're going to start looking at some of these, right there, if I'm understanding correctly, there are entities that grew up to kind of take advantage of the system and funnel money in different directions. Is that the case? Well, so if I'm getting paid to take care of my mom or hang out with my mom, I can't get a check from Medicaid directly. The system isn't set up that way. I have to become an employee of a

company that then builds Medicaid, and they have that NPI number, they call it. And so the middleman are these companies that, you know, there's seven buildings that have 300 companies in them between the seven buildings billing a quarter billion dollars, just all owned by one landlord. That's how many companies there are just being the middlemen. And each of those has like an army of people like sitting at home with their relatives. So, you know, part of it is, so Vivek did respond to this reporting and he said he would. take a tough stance on fraud, which is fine. It's easy to say. It doesn't mean much. But he did allude to, I think, in a reasonably smart way, the other component. He said there's two kinds of fraud.

There's capital F fraud, which is it's against the law and you could go to jail for it. And then there's lowercase F fraud, which is anybody you saw that would just know that's not right. This shouldn't be happening. But it's not necessarily against the law or you wouldn't be able to prove it. It's against the law. And I think that's right. I mean, a lot of this is lowercase F fraud. I think that if politicians really want to save the budget and also save the economy and not just have ghost towns, because what's happened to Columbus is really bad, that all the stores close down because it's more lucrative to just get paid to watch your family. They need to rescind these waivers for personal services, and that could also be done by JD Vance in the Trump administration. I mean, these are federal waivers. The waiver, you know, the reason it's called waiver is Medicaid is not supposed to do this.

special permission to do something Medicaid was not designed for. And Medicaid is paid 70% by the feds. So it's really not fair to let some states like Ohio have these huge programs and then stick the feds with the bill. When if you live in another state, Medicaid is only for like real normal doctor's visits. So I think that's the move here is just rolling back some of the recent expansions to Medicaid that I think were kind of a stealth welfare, like a sort of a stealth reversion of the welfare reforms of the 90s, they started bringing it back, but they didn't call it welfare. It was with a wink and a nod. We call it Medicaid, but it really doesn't have much to do with health at all.

Luke Roziuk, we're only in part two of this five-part series, and it is so richly reported with so much information for people to chew on. I know you've had a very long few days. So thank you for staying up and briefing us here. Where can people find your work, Luke, and find this series? You can see the series at dailywire.com. It should be really prominent on the homepage. We spent like two months on this.

We're really proud of it. We invested a lot of resources in it. We want people to really appreciate it. So it should be easy to find there. And there's also a video, which you can see on X, my name, Luke Rosiak. And you should be able to find that at the bottom of the articles. as well. And, you know, keep checking back over the next few days. We're going to keep getting getting new articles. Some of it gets a little complicated. We kind of explained what's happening,

and now we're trying to show. It really is like, it sounds so crazy, but you don't have to take our word for it. We're going to keep showing you case studies of how crazy it really is. Yeah, and Luke is really good at making complicated things easy to follow and understand a breakdown, which is the mark of a great reporter. And you're certainly one of them, Luke. So thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you, you too, Emily. All right. That was fantastic. We will be back in just one moment with Liz Collin, another great reporter. On this same beat, we have a fraud special tonight.

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this is the time, get Dream, their best-selling sleep powder for up to 40% off. All right, I'm happy to be joined now by someone I've wanted to have on the show for a long time. Liz Collins, she's the senior reporter over at Alpha News,

also the producer of a new documentary called Minnesota Mao that will be out in just a few weeks. Liz, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Emily. Appreciate you asking me on and happy to be here. Of course.

Now, if people don't know your backstory, they have to. They must. Google Liz Collin and just learn about what's going on in Liz's life since 2020. You did a great episode with Tucker not long ago that covered a lot of this, Liz. But you've had a hell of a decade so far. How's everything going at Alpha News? Well, you know, never a dull moment here in Minnesota, Emily, first off. I was going to say if you Google me, you only believe about half of it.

It depends what the new results. point. I feel like, you know, on the day. But yeah, never, never a shortage of material. So much to talk about. I am from Minnesota. So that is kind of my background. You're from Wisconsin, right? I feel like, you know, we're neighbors. That's right. That's right. We are neighbors. People of Minnesota are just because people of Wisconsin. Yes. Very nice Midwestern people. And sometimes, like, it's taken advantage of, which you've reported on extensively. And just maybe we should give people a brief backgrounder. When the killing of George Floyd happened in Minneapolis, you went through hell because of your husband's involvement. You're a local reporter.

You've been a real shoe leather reporter for a long time. And you went through hell because your husband's involvement with the police department. And then you just started doing incredible reporting on what actually happened to George Floyd. and what actually is happening in Minnesota with all of the scandals surrounding high-profile politicians from Ilhan Omar to Tim Wolves. Is that roughly a good sort of summary

of what's going on, Liz? Yeah, yeah, that list seems to be getting longer in the political list, that's for sure. But yeah, it was a long-time news anchor and reporter at WCCO. That's the CBS affiliate in Minnesota, kind of the station I grew up watching and dreamed of working there someday myself.

And that's where I sort of watched all of this, unfold, not only as an anchor reporter, but also as the wife of a police officer. My husband at the time was serving the Minneapolis Police Department as the Federation President, so sort of the union president of the cops back then, back when they actually had many police officers serving on the force. But I was so bothered by the lies that not only the police department was telling it in the wake of this, but that the media helped perpetuate and decided that I really didn't want a part of the local media, I guess, per se anymore. And that's when I sort of left and

jumped over to Alpha News, just kind of a small little operation back then four years ago to join the ranks of independent media. That's what I was sort of watching and consuming at the time, because it just seemed that there was this lack of regard for any kind of truth in just local TV anymore. But I knew that the truth had to be told in some way, shape, or form about that George Floyd and what really took place that day. And I was able to do that through my book. They're lying, the media, the left, and the death of George Floyd. And then that led to the fall of Minneapolis, which is our documentary that's been out now for a couple years that I encourage people to watch. And here we are to talk about our next documentary and fraud and all kinds of things that have

still been going on in this state, Emily. Yes. And, you know, I said the killing of George Floyd earlier in the segment, but the death of George Floyd really is a better way to put it. And you go through a lot of this in your documentary, the fall of Minneapolis, which I highly recommend. It is riveting. It is very well done. And speaking of your latest documentary, this is called Minnesota Mao.

It's going to be out in June. And I want to run a little teaser here. Let's just play S-13 from... It's also very odd. I think a lot of our viewers, because this is a conservative show, are familiar with the various oddities of Tim Wills. that they might, you know, come into this thinking of him, ironically, as being one of the weird people in our politics.

But it actually gets weirder. So let's roll the tape here. I lived in China. I've been there about 30 times. Tim was snapping up dozens of copies of Mao's little red book. It's not just a political treatise. It's the daily devotional of the Chinese Communist Party. The inscription on the inside is Mao's words, bring us joy. She's bringing us a politics of joy. They're trying to steal the joy from this country. Bringing back the joy. You said earlier that ICE agents were a modern-day Gestapo.

Would you like to recant that statement? When I said President Trump was using them as his modern-day Gestapo, Donald Trump's modern-day Gascoppo is scooping folks up off the streets. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota. For communism to work, you have to erase the country's identity and history, and that's what Mao did. Tim Walz is doing it here.

So Liz, to some people those cuts between the communist revolution, Mao's communist revolution in China and modern day Minnesota probably feel jarring. So bring us into the story of Tim Walls, who has been to China an astounding number of times. It is actually shocking how much time he has spent in China. I don't even know how you physically can make that many trips in that span of time. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in this documentary. Yeah, I think that I was right there along with what you're saying, you know, is there any sort of connection? You sort of hear these rumors and this was sort of made, you know,

out to be something when he kind of hits the national stage as the VP pick for Kamala Harris, of course. But when you really look at what has happened, this radical transformation in Minnesota that has taken place under the watch of Governor Walls, it really is incredible. The riots, the defund the police movement happening here in Minnesota. Some of the most strict draconian COVID measures put in place here. A political assassination, a Catholic school shooting, billions of dollars of fraud, these radical trans policies, an abortion policy similar to North Korea.

I could go on and on sort of this list. And what's interesting in this documentary, you're going to hear from some people that know of his trips to China firsthand, somebody that went along with him. And you can hear it there talking about sort of this, he kind of has this love of communism. And we've actually heard this from former students of his, from Mancato as well, that these were lessons in his classroom back then. And then when you look at what has transpired here in Minnesota, these ideologies that have taken hold and sort of this divisive nature that Wals has brought to the state, a new flag that was rammed through. The Christopher Columbus statue that was allowed to be toppled. The flag is so bizarre list. Exactly. We're both wearing the

color of the flag. But like that is really, really weird. How did that actually happen? Like so much happens here. A few people are making these decisions. They're not, you know, there's no voting. There's no sort of, we want to actually represent the entire state. It's basically like, you know, my way. And that's, and that's it. And I've never seen a governor, you know, we've even gone in a couple times to even try to track him down to find him. But just to almost shut out the media in so many ways. He's very particular about who he will even talk to. And we've actually been interviewing, it seems, more and more Democrats basically coming out against this guy also going, you know, something hasn't been right for quite some time. It's kind of why we see Senator Amy Klobuchar

now has taken over. He's said, obviously, that he's not running anymore, which was interesting. but she has also kept her distance from Governor Walls as well, and one has to wonder why. Yes, I actually wanted to ask you about that. So we have a clip here of Amy Klobuchar, obviously, as you mentioned, running for governor leaning into, as we've seen Tim Walls under fire tried to lean into, this idea that he was the man who investigated the fraud. It was, of course, the DOJ, but that he was the guy who was rounding up the criminals, taking care of this, rooting out the waste, fraud and abuse. Amy Klobuchar is really trying to get ahead of the issue. This is going to be Klobuchar on fraud. I think this video was literally just posted today. She's running for governor, S-17. You are right to be angry about the fraud.

It is unacceptable and it must end. It should never have happened to begin with. We must root out and stop the fraud and insist on accountability for those who stole taxpayer dollars. So let me tell you what I'm going to do and what I won't do. What I won't do is wait. On day one, I will begin a top-to-bottom audit of our state government. That audit will look at state agencies to identify waste, fraud, and abuse. But audits mean nothing without action, and I will work regularly with the legislative auditor

and empower agencies to stop fraud. Okay, Liz, give us your response. I can see. I was going to ask another question, but I can see your itching to respond to that. Please give us your response to Senator Amy Klobuchar. It's interesting, Emily, because obviously she's held a very powerful position in the Senate this entire time, but all of a sudden seems to deeply care. In fact, I've been in touch with many people who have made reports to her office and nothing has been done for years about this, you know, out in the open fraud that is plaguing the state. So interesting, though, that, she's making this a top priority. But again, I think it's not being ignored by Democrats at this point either. I was just going to go back to Minnesota Mild because I do want to wrap it up that it's out on June 4th.

There is a reason for that date, Emily, that is the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. It's actually when Tim and Gwen Walls were married. That's the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and why Tim picked that date. That is what Gwen has said in interviews. So I think it's going to be some bombshell stuff that comes out in the documentary that people have never heard before. Again, he says himself that he's traveled to China 20 or 30 times.

He's lost track. But just some information you've never heard. And it is available for free. MinnesotaMau.com is the website and also on our YouTube page at Alpha News as well. And this is 20 to 30 times since the early 1990s, if I'm remembering correctly, right? So we're talking almost once a year. Well, actually probably more than once a year. average because it probably stopped around what before he really was the governor.

It's probably around 2015, somewhere like that. Well, and you remember Vice President, now Vice President, J.D. Vance sort of put him on the spot during the debate, and he didn't really want to talk about those trips to China, did he? Well, he did years past. So many newspaper stories about him coming over with all kinds of souvenirs, talking about how great he was treated in China. Keep in mind also, he's a National Guard member at the time where he's going back and forth from China. Still a lot of questions. there, and I've spoke to people who have served with him. He basically, you know, drops out of his unit right before a deployment to Iraq and lied about the rank that he attained in the military.

So there's a lot to his past, and I do think that him sort of stepping on that national stage was enough to give him the exposure that he deserved, frankly, a long time ago. But the Minnesota media here is sort of, you know, the DFL, the Democratic Party, kind of the lap dogs for that party. But even that party doesn't seem to want to have much to do with them anymore, Emily. Which, again, is probably why it was easy for the Somali community to pull off fraud for such a long time before obviously caught up with them. I mean, we're talking so much. Like the level of fraud is so, so significant. It went on for many, many years and with a compliant media that doesn't ask as many tough questions as it probably should and is easily

responsive to weaponized charges of racism and the like. It was able to go on for such a long time, but it's very interesting to see Amy Klobuchar lean into it. It was interesting to see this response. I want to play this package from KSTP. This was from Monday on potential fraud in Minnesota daycares. This is S-16. I want to focus on those nine daycares rated by the feds. We have learned the state sent them $67 million in the last eight years. That's your tax dollars spend on this child care assistance program known as CCAP. There are no charges yet, so we don't know how much of that $67 million could be fraud. But what we do know may help us understand what investigators are looking for.

These nine providers went from collecting about $8 million in 2023 to more than $16 million in $203 to more than $16 million. 2025. That's more than double in just two years. But then look at this. The number of kids served remained relatively flat, a little fluctuation, but right about a thousand kids every single year. It was just because this turned into a special fraud edition of After Party, I have this quote from Luke Roziac, who was on right before you, who reported in the Daily Wire, quote, federal spending on home health care doubled in Ohio in the years after COVID. So he was also reporting on the Somali community in Ohio. But what I'm reading into these tea leaves between AB Clobetrar, Amy Clobetra, local media

latching onto this is that DFL Democrats have realized people are pissed. They are furious about what's happened. And that extends even to independence and Democrats. Oh, I think so. And, you know, it's interesting, too, that you're talking about it in the past tense. I will say that this is still ongoing. There's still a lot of work to go here. how high does this go? Who is involved? How long did these politicians know about all of this?

You know, what did they know? Still questions that need to be answered. But I will say, you know, they kind of work off the $9 billion total in Minnesota. I've heard as high as $20 billion. Really kind of centered on these 14 programs, one program they ended all together. These other 13, though, there's about 5,000 addresses associated with. with these 13 programs that they have to reapply. And I think it's like 40% of them have yet to reapply. Kind of it seems like admitting that, hey, there was all kinds of fraud going on. But I cannot tell you that just a number of interviews we've done over at Alpha News with,

you know, whistleblowers, whether they're state whistleblowers, county whistleblowers, people in neighborhoods that are just, you know, looking at their neighbors differently. They're tired of seeing the luxury cars in their neighborhood. and they're looking up these LLCs for themselves. What businesses are running next door? Oh, we have a transportation company. We have a home health care aid here that I wasn't aware of. And you can see for yourself on these websites how much of our money that they're all getting.

And they're pissed and rightfully so. Oh, it's crazy to just think about how DFL let this happen under their noses at a time when. And this has to bug you like nothing else, Liz. Correct me if I'm wrong. But this was a time when DFL in Minnesota was seen nationally as an example. And Wallace in particular, it's why he was actually picked for the ticket. They were seen nationally as an example of how to kind of lean into, for lack of a better word, wokeness while also retaining appeal among voters in the Midwest.

Now, of course, they're really just popular in the Twin Cities area. Duluth, Walls did okay up there. But outside of those areas, it's all all red when you look at districts and counties. So it is very interesting to see at the same time as now we look back on them being elevated as an example for national Democrats, what was happening under the surface. That's amazing. Yeah. And I mean, like anywhere, right, it's blue cities in red states. There's no real blue states. And I think that Minnesota is such a great example of that. But I talked about this radical ideology. And you saw that. And you still see it, quite frankly. Basically, this is all of my ex posts are usually like, hey, look at this training in Minnesota. look at what's going on in Minnesota schools, you know, just trying to get it out there. Because I don't really think a lot of people know what has been, you know, pushed down the throats of employees and our students and things along those lines.

And it will lead to, you know, national attention now, thankfully, and just some federal oversight. And I really think it did take the federal government to come in here. We were sort of hearing some rumblings, you know, with this Nick Shirley video and things that were happening that they were going to sort of bring in the full force of the federal government because they almost had to. Because, you know, you have an attorney general in Keith Ellison. He has really made it clear that he doesn't care about fraud.

He's fighting, you know, the Trump administration every day, how everybody lawsuits were and now up, you know, we're at here in Minnesota now. But you also have, you know, as you've talked about this weaponization of that word, racism and really saw that with the riots. And I think it's why the George Floyd riots happened. here, quite frankly, had nothing to do with racism, but you know, don't tell a lot of people on the left that. And we do have a population here that a lot of, you know, people were not comfortable speaking up, but I do see that that really has changed. And a lot of, again, you talk about people

are just turning into citizen journalists themselves and taking this information to the state or to federal authorities to get this fraud, especially to stop. Yeah, and let's dive into some of these daily news stories coming, stories coming out of Minnesota, many of which you're covering very closely. And Minnesota has been transformed over the last decade into this hub of national political relevance. And just yesterday, Tom Emmer, obviously Republican Congressman from Minnesota, posted Tim Walls, demoted DHS commissioner, Shireen Gandhi on the eve of her, quote, gauntlet fraud hearing. There's no doubt that this is a scapegoat move. after he ignored warnings of over $100 million in taxpayer fraud.

What a joke. What are you hiding? Timmy, Congressman Emmer wrote on X. And I was hoping Lizzie could help us understand a little bit of what's going on with this because I saw it all over Minnesota media while I was prepping for this. And what's interesting to me is that Walls is a lame duck. But he just went to Maine to campaign for Graham Platner, which I don't know how badly Platner actually wanted that to be honest. I know. He's clearly, Walls clearly wants to have national

influence going forward, even though he's stepping back right now, he clearly still has ambitions. You don't do that for the most part unless you have ambitions for the future. So is he really in trouble with this DHS story? You know, I think it just seems like, again, where there's smoke, there's fire, and there's been so much smoke for such a long period of time. And I will say that, you know, we've interviewed whistleblowers who have gone directly to Governor Walls and their emails, their phone calls have gone unanswered. These are people that basically were writing the checks for these programs saying, you know, this is fraudulent.

You need to put, you know, better guardrails in place. Somebody needs to stop this. I don't feel comfortable, you know, watching, you know, millions of dollars go, go out the door, go out to Somalia, frankly, that has been reported and well documented, I think, at this point. But to not take meetings with the folks that have reached out to him, that seems to be problematic. You know, we've heard him sort of try to tap dance around that issue. But you actually have an X account, which is interesting, run by several hundred state workers.

It got to this point, Emily, that they just decided to get together. And they blast out information constantly. And this Shringhandi situation is interesting because she's given sort of this promotion to head DHS, but has a long track record of ignoring fraud, according to these state workers herself. And then when she's supposed to go in front of the fraud committee to answer questions, there's this, you know, quick demotion. So she doesn't have to go and answer questions at this fraud committee's been meeting weekly at the state capital in St. Paul. And, you know, the person, you know, in charge of DHS, kind of with the power here, all of a sudden doesn't have to answer

questions. And that happens the day before. And that's what I'll just say to your viewers here. this isn't something like, you know, a bunch of people have been fired and no, not at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You're promoted in most cases or you, you know, go on to have a, you leave a state agency and then you have a great contract by the state waiting for you. So that's why I think that it's really the accountability question that people want, answered and they want to actually see some of, you know, see some accountability. I think more than anything else at this point. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And it's, it's just, I mean, such an interesting move for Walls, just to see Democrats continue to try to react to this in Minnesota.

It's, I interrupted you earlier just to ask about the flag. And you mentioned the Tiananmen Square wedding date with Walls. Some of these stories sound like right-wing fever dream, like concoctions. They sound insane. It sounds ridiculous. But about, they're like actually true. He's such a an untalented and strange politician. It's actually kind of amazing that he made it to the governor's office in Minnesota at all. You know, it's funny. I know you brought up the interview that I did with Tucker Carlson, which was a cool experience, but I did think that this is the first time, you know, when you're usually the reporter on the other side, you're asking the questions. And it was different. I'm talking for more than an hour. And I'm like, I literally sound crazy when I'm talking

about what I was gone. Like, Tucker thinks I'm actually nuts. He was touching his hair a lot. But I think when you do lay it out there, Emily, with all of these things that have happened in a short period of time. Again, we're not talking about like decades or anything. We're talking five, six years, frankly, where most of this has transpired. And these changes that will be lasting. And Walls, you know, brags about that. And there's been all kinds of rumors that he's not even staying in the state of Minnesota. Keep in mind, he doesn't own any real estate here.

He bragged about that during the campaign. and rumors that he could be going to South Dakota or Montana. I'm not sure if either of those states want him to be quite honest. I can see Montana with all of the wealth that's moved in, all of the left-winning wealth that's moved in. That's possible. Interesting. But I know that he had a hard time, for example, finding even hunting land over the deer opener.

I mean, I've been around this state for a while myself. So I think people are like, hey, let's call Liz, if we have something on Tim Walz, which I appreciate. But yeah, a lot of people have just, you know, at first it was sort of like this Mr. Nice guy. And, you know, over these last few years, they've been able to, you know, really have their eyes opened. Fascinating. Let's talk about Ilhan Omar as well because there's some actually very timely news about Ilhan Omar. As we're sitting here today, we can toss this Rich McHugh news nation headline up on the screen. Representative Omar faces deadline in Minnesota fraud probe. Now, Rich reported Minnesota lawmakers are

demanding Omar turnover records and communications tied to the feeding our future child nutrition fraud scandal at the Democratic congressman's field. After she failed to appear before a state oversight committee examining her possible connections to the case, they gave her a May 5th deadline to produce documents and answer questions in writing the committee chair, Kristen Robbins. She's a Republican who represents the Northwestern Twin Cities said Omar did not respond to the committee's invitation to testify and has so far failed to provide any documentation. Liz, is this much ado about nothing? Or is this a really kind of shocking refusal from a representative to comply with requests from state lawmakers in an obviously very important case? Yeah, talk about accountability here, Emily, but this is kind of more of the same, I will be honest, with the Congresswoman. I think this is sort of ongoing. but yeah, she just ghosted this committee altogether. But just to refresh the memory here,

she is the one that basically authored this meals program or was pushing for it. And this is where this feeding our future fraud took place. So this is a program that exploded back in 2020 during COVID. And there's been, I believe it's about 80 people now who have been convicted in this fraud. and I think it's about 90% of them are Somali, but she's hosting fundraisers at a restaurant

that the owner is caught up in this case. I mean, she's very close, took donations from some of the fraudsters, very close to this case and has yet to really answer any questions. And we've been over at Alpha News reporting on her for years, laying out all the evidence that she married her brother. There's a three-part series that dates back to 2019 on that, I know you'll find over at Alpha News. Questions about her even being a citizen of this country at all,

changing her birth date online because it wasn't matching the public story that she was telling. But she doesn't, she kind of seems to be one of these, she doesn't answer questions or if she does, she tries to belittle the person that is asking a good question from my experience, you know, covering the Congresswoman. But again, this has kind of been going on for years, but I will say that I've never seen sort of this, you know,

it's kind of like at a fever pitch now at this point, you know, where the fingers are pointing. And if, you know, perhaps there's some accountability, could it finally be close? You know, I'm about to finish the show talking about Spencer Prattles, and it makes me wonder in Minnesota, there were rumblings back in 2024 when Trump was really at the height of his appeal nationally.

Maybe he could flip Minutes. Minnesota, is he going to pull Minnesota along with him? Will the tale of his victory be long enough to finally pull in Minnesota for Republicans? And I don't think most people really believe that would be the case. But the point was just that Trump had created a new Republican Party. If you look at a state like Wisconsin with some real similarities to rural Minnesota, similar areas, neighboring counties in many cases. Obviously, he's very popular outside of the Twin Cities.

But I just am really curious after the brutal few years that Minnesota has had, particularly in the Twin Cities area, what happened with ICE over the last few months, which even, to be fair, some people on the right were really upset about how that was handled, how Prattie was handled, including me. But all that is to say, with Ilhan Omar being one of the strangest political stories, Tim Walls being one of the strangest political stories, the state being an obvious fiscal chaos, obvious chaos in general. role. Is there any, like people, if Dems are starting to talk about fraud, it suggests that Dem voters are mad about it. Has any of this helped Minnesota Republicans, the right in Minnesota? Is it ripe for some type of pushback? Is the state right? Maybe whether it's independent or Republican, something to emerge that finally kind of topples the one-party rule in Minnesota? You know, I will say that I'm really encouraged to see really great candidates, whether they're running for school board now, governor. I mean, you sort of name the office. A lot of people who are giving up

on successful careers to sort of jump in the ring. So I find that reassuring. They're kind of taking it upon themselves. Like, hey, if somebody else is going to do this, I'm going to. And so I'm inspired to see that. But I will give you just a quick point here, Emily, which I thought was interesting, that basically the home county of Governor Walls, where he was a teacher in Mancato, Blue Earth County, that county went for Trump, despite Walls being on the ticket. And that was a blue county for many election cycles. And so that was just in, in 2024. I think there are a lot of questions about our elections in Minnesota. Speaking of Minnesota Mao, that will be discussed in great detail in that documentary as well. So I'm a hopeful person,

Emily. So I think there, I think there is hope here in the land of Madden. it seems. We'd like to actually get out of the national news cycle and kind of, you know, go back to minding your own business. That would be nice. But until accountability comes, I don't, I don't see that happening. Yeah. You know, one place I think people probably are finding hope is actually what you've been doing on a local news basis. And, you know, both of us are like journalists. You're a real shoe leather journalist. You're doing this stuff every day. And I wonder if other people talk to you, other journalists around the country, just being galvanized. by this independent news model.

And maybe this isn't interesting to viewers who aren't journalists themselves. But I actually think it probably is because everybody gripes about, A, their local news or B, the death of their local news, even if it sucked and even if it felt like it was, you know, always biased in one direction or the other. So tell us a little bit of just like

what you've heard about that model, what you've heard from other people, and if it's making you hopeful too. Yeah, that's a good question. I need to be better at selling what we do over at LFRA. over at Elfinus because you're right, it is so true, and I really am reminded of that on a daily basis. I mean, we are still, you know, just kind of a little engine here in Minnesota, but I think we have more readers every day than the Star Tribune, which is Minnesota's largest newspaper.

We're a team of like six people, but we break by far more stories than any other media in Minnesota, and I think that's because we really do take that seriously. We are uncensored, and we were so afraid when I was working back in the corporate media landscape to cover so many stories. And actually, so many of the stories that I then took and jumped over and I was able to tell at Alpha News, probably within my first year, I was kind of sitting on so many, because I would see that pushback, you know, whether that was COVID vaccines or fraud or, you know, so many crime stories that they barely scratched the surface on. But I, you know, I, you know, You know, I have been galvanized by that, that people still do care about the truth.

And, you know, we were sort of raised in this generation that there's your truth and then there's my truth. And we have to get back to like, there is the truth. And that's really what we're, you know, committed to telling over at Alpha News. And again, where does everybody get their news now, you know, their phones? That's where that's where they are. And that's where independent media can be, thankfully, as well. And, you know, I just want to, before I let you go, make one quick point on that because I've had this in my notes to talk about on the show for a while.

There was a poll that came out not long ago. I'm just seeing if I can pull this up on my screen. But basically it was a poll that showed most people are now getting their news from social media, which is really interesting. It sounds totally obvious. You just mentioned it. We all kind of know it.

But what's interesting about that is it means you don't go looking for news. The news finds you. So even people who try to check out of the news, get it delivered. to them because of algorithms. The algorithm wants to keep you to stay on their app as long as possible to sell you as much ads,

take as much data as they possibly can from you. So one of the things that keeps people scrolling is news. It gets you hyped up. It gets you going. And that's actually kind of, it's sad in a way that we're addicted to the algorithms, but the silver lining of it is that it's a huge opportunity for people who, like you, leave the old media,

the legacy media, and can find an audience without, actually having all of the overhead that you saw because you worked with it for years. I mean, local news is much scrappier than mainstream news, but you're even scrappier now, and you're finding, like, you just mentioned, a bigger audience. That's remarkable. Yeah, and I will say that we get a lot of our tips, and I've always say this, people are surprised, but from local reporters that know that they can't touch something with a 10-foot pole. So isn't that interesting? That they're like, hey, we're going to send this over to Alpha News because, you know, they'll run it. And we've now

employ at Alpha News, people that I've worked with in the past. We're all journalists. You know, we're conservative media. We're fine saying that. I just wish the other stations in town would just say, hey, like, we're left-wing reporters. That's just who we are. It'd just be easier if they just label themselves that way, I guess.

But, you know, you even saw it with this horrific Savannah Hernandez case, right? She's beaten in front of this federal building in Minneapolis. The way the local media treated it, it was like, there's two sides of this, story and this alleged assault. And there's an assault caught on camera.

Like this is not, everything has just turned into, you know, these two sides. And, you know, then they interview a couple, like, lunatics who lie on camera and they put them on the news. And it's just makes me crazy. But, but as I said, kind of endless material, it seems like in Minnesota. But it's nice to actually not have to really, you know, watch what you say at work as much as I perhaps was back in my last days at WCCO. And just to put the exact numbers on it, this was an AP Nork survey that came out a couple of weeks

ago. Local news remains widely used and positively viewed. Adults 65 and older are more likely than some younger age groups to rely on local news outlets such as TV, radio, or newspapers. Well, teenagers, teens, age 13, 17 are more likely than older adults over 65 to get local news from local influencers or independent creators. Teens are also the only age group in which most get news from social media, at least daily, whereas adults 65 and older, and that's, I mean, elderly. We're not even talking about the mid-range there, overwhelmingly turned to TV. So a ton of power at places like Alpha News these days.

Liz, I follow your work really closely. I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. I'm so, so grateful to you for staying up and helping us understand what's happening. in your beautiful but crazy state. Oh, thank you, Emily. I'm very happy to be on. This was the first podcast. You said I could bring an adult beverage,

so I did bring this fancy water. Yes. There you go. I was like, guys, you're like, it's really loose, and I'm like, that's not really me, so I'll just bring my water. But it has a straw.

As long as it got a straw, I mean, it's all you can do because we won't let you get spotted cow in Minnesota, so you just have to drink water. So what else are you going to do? That is a good beer. I'm not going to lie. You guys got to figure it out in Wisconsin, no doubt.

That's for sure. Liz over at Alba News, go check out Minnesota Mow. It's going to be released on June 4th, and you can get great news every single day there. In the meantime, thank you so much, Liz. Thank you, Emily. Of course. All right, that was a treat. We are going to be right back in just one moment.

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Just head to cowboy colostrum.com slash afterparty and use code afterparty at checkout. That is 25% off when you use the code after party at cowboy colostrum.com slash after party. Easy to remember. All right, let's round out the show here with some reactions to Spencer Pratt's performance in the Los Angeles mayor debate, which is happening as we are speaking. right now out in LA to be clear because we've been on the air. I haven't had a chance to imbibe this entire debate and really get a sense of what happened. So that's a disclosure. I was able to catch a bit of it while we were prepping the show, literally in the moments before we went live this evening.

I was able to catch a bit of it. And Spencer Pratt had already had an opportunity to lay into his opponents. Now, I'll say quickly just from what I saw, and maybe you'll pick this up in the clip. You can definitely tell that Spencer Pratt is out of his element in a formal debate setting where there's a podium. You have traditional television cameras. Now, he's a creature of television. Obviously, he's famous for being the reality TV villain of the decade on the hills. But Spencer Pratt is now really comfortable in the influencer space, right? So the traditional media space, especially on a political debate stage, is clearly different. than what he's experienced or what he's really experienced with.

And you could tell that he was nervous. You could tell that he was out of his element. So that, again, is with the disclosure. I was only able to catch the beginning, really, of this debate. But he still, even with all of that, all of those nerves in the first few minutes, was able to land a couple of punches. And I did want to roll one of those punches for you because this is why we've been saying here for months, Spencer Pratt is a formidable candidate. Let's go ahead and roll this clip of him relaying into

councilmember Nitha Rahman. Say, councilwoman acts like she doesn't have any authority with this homelessness. She was the third most powerful person in city council. She runs the homeless housing thing. She acts like this is just Mayor Bass. First off, inside safe. I like to say inside safe makes all of us outside unsafe. The reality is no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth. They are on fentanyl. The DEA statistics says 93% of this is a drug addiction problem. Nithia, Councilwoman Robbins, plan for treatment first. I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of these people she's going to offer treatment for.

She's going to get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth. These ideas cost us over $400 million to house for $70,000, what did you say? 3,000 people for 400 million is an absolute failure for both of them. They're a team. So. Okay. She's going to get stabbed in the neck. Sad, but true, and perfectly packaged for virality, which is one of the reasons that, again, we've been saying here for a long time, Spencer Pratt is a formidable candidate in this race. He could be a Trump or he could be a Michael Schellenberger and no disrespect at all to Schellenberger. I've known for a long time.

But you may remember, he launched a real long-shot bid for California governor that got a ton of attention on social media. And then his effect didn't really, or his influence didn't really end up showing up in the polling kind of fizzled. But Spencer Pratt definitely feels different. I'm leaning towards the latter possibility, I'm sorry, the former possibility right now that he's more in the Trump vein than the Schellenberger vein because his command of the new media environment right now and his notoriety. as somebody who's totally not political. He does have a political science degree, but no offense to my mother, that's useless. I have a political science degree and, you know, she didn't want me to get a journalism degree because she said that would be useless. Both useless. Anyway, the Pratt that most people know is not a

political figure. He's not well known for his politics. What he's known is for his pathos, for first, of course, being a villain and leaning into it and coming from that real kind of second-tier era of reality television in the aughts after the first wave of real world and survivor and the like. It was really a very scripted show. But he then lost his home. I mean, he was the king of Snapchat for a while with his hummingbirds. That was probably like 10 years ago, if I'm remembering correct. It was like the DJ Khalid era of peak millennial, um, peak millennial cringe, I guess. It wasn't cringe at the time. Sorry, zoomers. It's, it's difficult for me to say that, but it's true. And then he lost his house in the

palisades fire and was totally gripping in his withering criticisms of the government in California and Los Angeles. They were cogent and smart on the money. They had the emotion and they had the substance to back them up. My mom just texted me, quote, hey, that is rude. Sorry, Mom. I already apologized. I guess I get a double apology in there. But Spencer Pratt was totally, totally able to make a really great case against the entrenched power of California Democrats in Los Angeles and in in Sacramento as well, including obviously Governor Gavin Newsom. So Pratt then launches this campaign for governor and takes these talents. I mean, he's releasing these AI ads that are just like capturing how a vast array of Californians

are utterly fed up with the way that one of the greatest cities in the world, with what it has turned into under Democratic leadership. And it's doing it just totally, totally tailor-made for virality and not only among politicos, right? If someone has a really great ad or someone has a really bad ad, like that Katie Porter ad that was a disaster the other day, where she talks about how, like, she references her get out of my shot line. That goes viral in political circles. That doesn't go viral with people whose algorithm. are not obsessive politics algorithms.

Pradzads are different. They have real breakthrough possibility. And on his charges against Nithio Rahman, this is really interesting because he just made the argument that Karen Bass has been making against Rahman. And he can make the same argument against Karen Bass, which is what Rahman is making against Karen Bass. So he's kind of pitting them against each other.

We talked on Monday show about how he is producing Karen Bass, turning her into a villain, because he knows how to do that. It's actually his background in television. He's seen that happen before and he's now doing it to Bass. But Ramen is easily cast in this way as well. Bass is trying to do it. Just last night, Bass and Rahman debated at a homeowner's forum.

And Bass was claiming that Rahman, who this is true, was voting against encampment removals, which Raman, who actually comes from DSA, Democratic Socials of America circles and has a fairly radical history. on these types of issues. That is true. Raman argues that they're ineffective, which may also be true, depending on how you do them.

But her sympathies, you can trace her history and really see where they lie. She is one of the people who made that incredible argument where catalytic converters were blamed. This was back in 2023

for car thefts. Blaming Toyota. Literally she name-checked Toyota or quote, whoever makes Prius. I think that was what she said verbatim back in 2023 for people's cars getting stolen. She was one of the people on the left who had the audacity to actually just be like,

this is, this is Toyota's fault. Like, hey, we actually have a problem here and it's with Toyota. We're really pinning any of the blame on Toyota for this. Just laughable. It infuriated people. She lives in like a $2 million house. It's worth like $1.9 million according to the New York Post or the California Post, I should say, in Silver Lake.

And again, this is somebody with a DSL. Democratic Socialists background and who has, to Pratt's point and to Bass's point, been basically in that strain of progressivism that pushed L.A. and California to the brink to begin with. And now, of course, people are trying to change. Newsom himself, we've seen this. But it's too late. I think it's really too late in the moment. minds of many voters. Now, it may be that one or both of them is able to get away with this. The primary is June 2nd. You have to, in California, as many of you know, hit that over 50% number to avoid a runoff. This is with three candidates likely to go to a runoff. But it really, I mean, people in California have been pushed to the very edge. And if you have somebody who enters the fray of three main candidates, two of the candidates are fighting each other with really good arguments, right? Because.

Rahman can turn around. She's city council member. She was on the committee. This is what Bass has been saying, the homeless committee for like two years. She was the head of it, I think. Again, an argument that Karen Bass has been making. Karen Basura, as Spencer Pratt calls her, if you are able to make that argument as Karen Bass and Raman is then able to turn it around and say, well, you were the mayor, which is exactly what Nithya Rahman has been saying. Who does that help? That helps Spencer Pratt, because they are both disqualifying themselves, they're both disqualifying each other, and therefore opening up this lane to, like,

in their criticisms of each other, they're opening up this lane for Spencer Pratt by undermining his arguments about both of them. The more that they're talking about this, the more those two are making Pratt's point about the other. So just the, like, political math here is really favorable to Pratt on that, question, at least advancing to a runoff, probably with Bass, but that's a really dangerous position

for people who are trying to stop Pratt to find themselves in. And I think it's genuinely kind of an interesting question of whether, you know, Spencer Pratt is a, like, what would he be like as mayor? I think that's genuinely an interesting question. But I think for many people in Los Angeles and California who are facing this question on the governor's side, it feels pretty obvious to them that literally anybody would be better. This is how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. People felt literally anybody would be better than Hillary Clinton than the kind of mascot of the Democratic Party that botched the recovery to the Great Recession and thrust the country into that place of chaos that people felt like we were in back in 2016. I mean, California feels like lab conditions for 2016 to be recreated in a Pratt

versus Bass runoff. And you could say the same dynamic would apply to Raman as well. I mean, it would be a little bit different. It would kind of more like Pratt versus Bernie, depending on what she does after the primary. But this is for Pratt a very, very favorable climate. And I'm curious when we log off to see if he kind of warmed up because you could, again, probably sense that he was a little nervous,

a little clumsy. But traditional debates, less important than they used to be. new media is much more important than it used to be, which is why in the, if you've missed some of our other segments on this, I always talk about how Pratt is the algorithmic social media-based epistemology candidate. This is a Neil Postman extension. He talked about the television-based epistemology. He didn't like that Ronald Reagan kind of embodied what had happened after the print-based era in American politics. And it's probably true. The print era was superior in many ways. We've entered an inferior era of politics, but that's what actually in some ways is going to be devastating

to legacy politicians who came up in the print and then the television era and now just don't have enough RIS to cut it in the algorithmic social media era because even if they have coaches who tell them how to be authentic, they can't come across as authentic, maybe especially when they have coaches who are trying to tell them to be authentic. They can't come across as authentic. Even with all the money in the world. They just can't do it, especially if they're juxtaposed with somebody who is doing it really well. So this is my pitch for why I think Pratt is a really serious candidate and why a lot of people are going to look at him and say, this is anybody, anybody, even the villain from the hills, even Spencer Pratt, homingbird king of Snapchat, is better than Karen Basura

or is better than Nithir Raman, because look at the state of our city. We have to try. something else. I will remind you one more time that is the exact dynamic, coupled with a real command for new media that thrust Trump to the head of the pack in the 2016 primary and then to winning the election in 2016. So Spencer Pratt, this guy's got some serious momentum and you know we'll be following the race going forward. So thank you very much for tuning in since the next edition of After Party, special fraud edition of After Party from Minnesota to Ohio to California, please do go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel, subscribe wherever you get your podcast, email me at Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. And if you want your question answered on this week's

happy hour, just try to get it in before Thursday afternoon when I record live, by the way, go through your questions without looking at them first. And they are up on the podcast feed by Friday afternoon. Those are podcast-only, audio-only edition. of After Party every Friday. So we will see you at After Party and then once again at Happy Hour and then once again here on regular live after party 9 p.m. Eastern Monday live be there. Have a great weekend, everyone.