Trump-endorsed Steve Hilton blows open California’s $400 billion fraud machine in gubernatorial bid



Between sky-high taxes, radical left-wing policies, and staggering levels of fraud, California has turned into such a nightmare that droves of people are leaving every year.

But one man believes he can save the Golden State from its downward trajectory: Steve Hilton.

The British-born conservative commentator is the former senior adviser to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, an ex-Fox News host of "The Next Revolution," a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a Republican candidate for California governor in 2026. Recently endorsed by President Trump, Hilton is leading several polls against a crowded field, including Democrats and fellow Republican Chad Bianco.

On a recent episode of “Rufo and Lomez,” he joined BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo to expose the depth of California’s depravity and share his plan for a statewide overhaul.

“California today is what you get when the Democrats get everything they want,” says Hilton.

The results of 16 years of unchallenged Democrat rule speak for themselves:

“We have now today in California the highest poverty rate in the country (tied with Louisiana), the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states, the highest cost of living. Everything is the most expensive here: gas, electric, groceries, housing costs — everything,” he lists.

“U.S. News and World Report ranked California 50th out of 50 states for opportunity; WalletHub ranked us as 50th out of 50 for affordability. Chief Executive Magazine [ranked] California 50th out of 50 states for business climate,” Hilton continues, noting that this is “not the end of the list.”

After years of paying “the highest taxes for the worst results,” a “real revolution” is beginning to catch fire, he says. Even though the thought of California — one of the deepest blue states on the map — being run by a Republican governor feels like a pipe dream to many, Hilton believes the state government’s failures are so catastrophic at this point that a red victory is now feasible.

“I really think that this year we could get a major upset and you'll see a Republican governor elected in November,” he says.

Rufo is thrilled at the prospect of a Republican governor in California for many reasons but especially when it comes to the shocking amount of fraud that’s been exposed under current Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Depending on how you calculate the numbers [and] which programs you include, at the very low end, we had something like $180 billion lost to fraud under Newsom. At the very high end, I think you had something like $400 billion lost under Newsom,” he says, referencing his recent City Journal reporting.

“The scale of these numbers is almost difficult to comprehend. Can you walk us through what you found and what you think the true extent of the fraud is now?” he asks.

Hilton, who launched the investigative initiative CAL DOGE (intentionally modeled after Elon Musk’s federal department), says that what his team has uncovered using just public records, audits, and whistleblower tips is already shocking.

He gives two examples.

“When cannabis was legalized in California through Proposition 64, they said the taxes will go towards substance abuse prevention. Well, we tracked the money down — $370 million of that parceled out in tiny grants to 500+ nonprofits,” says Hilton.

“And when you look at what they do by checking their websites and their annual reports, what do they do? Democrat political activity — registering voters, organizing in the community, all that kind of stuff.”

Hilton’s second example comes from California’s “climate fund.”

Since 2015, the state has allocated $100 million per year to installing solar panels on low-income apartment buildings. However, CAL DOGE found that the program's own official reports show that only $72 million was actually spent on installing solar panels.

“$928 million, again, goes to all these Democrat political organizations,” says Hilton.

“They take money from the taxpayer and say it's going for some nice purpose that you think is going to be good, and then it all gets parceled up going to this network of nonprofits that then do things that help the Democrat political machine ... and the scale of it is massive,” he adds, noting that CAL DOGE’s range for state fraud is between “$312 billion” and “$425 billion over five years.”

“How can we break that system?” Rufo asks.

To hear Hilton’s answer, watch the video above.

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Fertility has a silent assassin — and it’s everywhere



After a decades-long decline, America is now in the throes of the worst fertility crisis in our nation’s history. A record number of people are not having children.

The big question is why?

Certainly the answer is multifaceted, but there’s one undeniable driver behind America’s as well as nearly every other country’s declining birth rates, says Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies: the iPhone.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman speak with Stone about how our most pervasive technology is wrecking the world’s fertility numbers.


While there are many drivers behind globally declining birth rates — infertility issues, financial difficulties, a genuine desire to have fewer children, and even a desire to have no children at all — iPhones, says Stone, are “little sterilization boxes that we all carry in our pockets.”

But it’s not a literal sterilization — “The research suggests that the radiation from them is actually harmless,” Stone says — but rather a social sterilization.

“[Smartphones] change how we socialize together. ... Social media replaces in-person interaction; reading stuff online replaces in-person interaction, replaces intermediation in the physical world,” he explains.

“Increasingly, it's not just that people have fewer babies; they have fewer first kisses; they have fewer one-night stands; they have fewer dinner parties; they have fewer every kind of social interaction ... and so as social media and cell phones are just killing life together,” he adds.

This isn’t just speculation either. The data shows a major decline in face-to-face interaction starting in 2008 — just one year after the first iPhone hit the market.

Before 2008, fertility rates across the world would ebb and flow depending on a variety of circumstances, but following the invention of the iPhone, they’ve stayed consistently low, Stone explains.

The social isolation caused by the iPhone has resulted in a decline in marriage rates, which directly impacts birth rates.

Interestingly, statistics show that people who do marry young are having the amount of children they desire.

“There's no gap between desired fertility and actual fertility on average for people who marry before age 26,” says Stone.

Further, countries that have “religious prohibitions” on iPhone usage for extended periods of the day have also maintained higher birth rates.

“So Israel with Shabbat or Muslim countries, where we know from cellphone data everybody turns off their cell phone for 20 minutes five times a day ... still have high fertility,” says Stone.

iPhones, he explains, essentially turn off “the part of our brain that's supposed to know your tribe and recognize your tribe and really want to have sex with your tribe.”

Simultaneously, it supplies “an endless stream of porn” to keep people sexually satiated without producing children.

To hear more about the factors behind the world’s declining birth rate, watch the full interview above.

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Latest assassination attempt on Trump barely made headlines — desensitized America or wise media silence?



On Sunday, February 22, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, who authorities say breached the secure perimeter of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort armed with a shotgun and a gas can, was reportedly shot and killed by the United States Secret Service. President Trump was not at his Florida residence at the time of the incident.

Christopher Rufo, BlazeTV co-host of “Rufo & Lomez,” has been surprised by the lack of public outrage about this third assassination attempt on President Trump.

“What I found so fascinating is that this story, which in any other time period in American history would be a huge national story [and] dominate headlines, seemed to pass through the news without much of a blip,” says Rufo.

But this story should be of interest to everyone, he argues, not only because “anyone who is attempting an assassination against the president of the United States represents a fundamental threat to the political order,” but also because there seems to be a strange and dangerous pattern at play.

Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot President Trump in the ear at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally back in July 2024, and Austin Martin have some striking similarities, Rufo suggests.

Both were “bookish, young, white men, glasses, had some trouble, you know, fitting into the kind of high school social order. ... The reporting indicated that at least at some point in their recent past they were pro-Trump or pro-MAGA. Then they have, for whatever reason, some psychological break, and they end up trying to assassinate the president,” he explains.

“The evidence to me suggests that online radicalization is at least a significant part of this.”

But co-host Jonathan Keeperman thinks there’s another factor fueling the recent political violence: the “copycat effect.”

Once people “see someone doing something that is getting attention, the attention-seeking person then will just go copy that same behavior because what they actually want, what they're actually after, is that kind of attention,” he says.

“And so by ignoring these people, by pushing them out of the headlines, we're actually preventing more of this from happening in the future,” he suggests.

Keeperman also ponders the possibility that by trying to sleuth around and identify what’s fueling these acts of political violence we’re actually doing more harm than good.

“We're in a fallen world with fallen people, and they're lunatics, and they commit violence, and it's terrible, and it's tragic. But maybe, actually, our insistence that there's something more to mine from this ... or there's some meaning beyond just the fact that they're lunatics, is itself a kind of conspiratorial delusion that we're enacting in order to make sense of what is otherwise insensible,” he posits.

But Rufo isn’t convinced that attention-seeking or unpredictable lunacy is the root of the political violence we’re seeing. To hear his counterargument, watch the full episode above.

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Harmeet Dhillon is going to WAR against DEI



A major philosophical shift is under way inside the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — and much of it is thanks to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

Dhillon tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” how she’s moving the agency away from diversity, equity, and inclusion-driven enforcement and toward a return to colorblind equality under the law.

“You’re bringing a totally different theory of civil rights law to the Department of Justice,” Rufo tells Dhillon. “This can’t be easy.”

“It is a very daunting task and, frankly, when I raised my hand in response to the president’s request to do this job, I knew it was going to be one of the more difficult jobs here in the DOJ because historically the Civil Rights Division has been a place that doesn’t really change very much from administration to administration,” Dhillon says.


The reason, Dhillon explains, is that “the lawyers who choose to make their careers doing civil rights work typically, historically, have been from a leftist perspective.”

“And that isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, there was a point in time in our country when we passed a lot of these civil rights laws in the 1960s, where we had rampant discrimination against African-Americans and other people and even against women to a degree,” she tells Rufo and Lomez.

“But way past the time that many of these historical ills have been corrected by our society, with or without the intervention of the Civil Rights Division, people have viewed it as their mission to continue to push the boundaries further and further out to the left,” she says.

This has posed one of the biggest issues for Dhillon in her war against DEI.

“The truism from the Reagan era is that personnel is policy. And so one of the biggest challenges we had here was, how are we going to implement the president’s agenda with personnel who don’t want to do that,” she explains.

“I actually had ... a relatively smooth transition into our mission because early on ... I issued memos to all the different sections here in the Civil Rights Division ... letting them know that we are going to be changing our focus here to implementing the president’s agenda, consistent with the civil rights statutes in the Constitution,” she continues.

“And that simple step, sometimes just one or two paragraphs of a memo to a few dozen lawyers, caused more than half of them to quit right away,” she adds.

Then, when an early retirement program at the DOJ was implemented, another several dozen took advantage of the program and quit.

“We were down about two-thirds of the manpower here in the Civil Rights Division. And so, then the challenge became how to do the big job of rightsizing our civil rights agenda and making it consistent with the president’s agenda,” she explains.

While she admits that it was difficult at the outset, she’s “happy to say that we’ve gotten past all of that.”

“We’ve hired a bunch of great people, young and old, here in the Civil Rights Division, who are very willing to work with us in doing the work that you’ve seen in the headlines,” she adds.

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White culture exists — and America is losing it



Jeremy Carl, Trump-appointee and author of “The Unprotected Class,” faced a grilling at the United States Senate when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tore into his beliefs on “white identity.”

“You’re now retreating to ethnic identity. You don’t speak about ethnic identity. You speak about white identity. So tell me the values that stitch together white identity and that make it different than black identity,” Murphy asked.

“I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average. Foodways could often be different. Music could be different, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not in English this year,” Carl explained.

Murphy responded, “So our ability to access white churches or white food or white music is being erased?”


“I am concerned with the majority common American culture that we had for some time, that through particularly mass immigration, I think has become much more balkanized, and I think that weakens us,” Carl said.

BlazeTV host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman is of the mind that Carl is right.

“On second viewing, I mean, I watched this live, and by the way, in the context of this hour-long Senate hearing, he was just getting grilled from all directions ... he was being accused of anti-feminism, he was being accused by [Sen.] John Curtis of Utah [R] for not being, like, sufficiently loyal to Israel. And then there was this white thing,” Lomez tells BlazeTV co-host Christopher Rufo on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“And I think what we saw there was him a little bit stumbling through the answer, but it’s actually the right answer. I mean, he gives the right answer, the specific details,” Lomez continues.

Lomez points out that there are different parts of American culture, and different races have their own piece.

“I’m not saying this, by the way, just to please a liberal listener. It’s all true, OK? This is all deeply embedded in our culture and the common culture as well, but it is predominantly what we might call 'white,'” he explains.

“When you turn on Netflix or something, or like Hulu, or just turn on the TV, there’s BET. There’s Black Entertainment Channel, and there’s black stories to enjoy with your family on Hulu, and then there’s Asian stories, and you know, you get the whole diaspora of all these different groups,” he continues.

“There’s no white channel, there’s no white story section ... because ... that is the baseline culture that these other things are kind of orbiting around and existing within. And what Jeremy is suggesting here is that we are losing that common culture. We are losing that common white culture,” he adds.

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Christopher Rufo drops bombshell report on $26B ‘No White Men’ program — Trump SBA issues quick response



Last week, BlazeTV host and investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, alongside Manhattan Institute Director of Research Judge Glock, published a report titled “No White Men Need Apply,” which pulled back the curtain on the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program.

Despite functioning under the current Trump administration, Rufo and Glock discovered that the program has been awarding government contracts based on race, gender, and social disadvantage — a stark contradiction to the administration’s vows to abolish DEI.

“The Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program,” Rufo says, is “a $26 billion slush fund for government contracts that are available to every identity group except for one: white men.”

“We blew the whistle on this and made the case that this was a corrupt program” and “totally in violation of the president’s stated principles against DEI,” Rufo says.

The reaction from SBA and White House officials was surprisingly humble.

“I got a call from the SBA administrator, Kelly Loeffler. I got a call from a number of people at the White House, some of whom were a bit annoyed that we had brought this scandal to public attention, but all of whom recognized, ‘Yep, we’ve dropped the ball on this. It’s totally unjust. We’re going to take action,”’ Rufo recaps.

And they clearly meant it because just two days after their conversation, Loeffler posted the following announcement to X:

— (@)

Rufo says, “It’s not a perfect solution. I think the program should be abolished, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.”

But his co-host, Jonathan Keeperman, has questions.

“Is it the case that they’re not just abolishing this whole thing because, as Washington is, there’s just too many people who are sort of dependent on this, some of whom might even be Republicans or friendly to the administration?”

Are we playing the game of, “Look, we know this is bad, but these are our friends, and sometimes in politics, you just got to sort of weigh the cost of alienating people over here versus the cost of kind of just letting these not great things kind of continue because ... that’s just the friction of Washington, D.C.?” he asks.

“From my reporting on this, the White House had contemplated just unilaterally winding down the program, declaring it unconstitutional, and taking it to the courts,” Rufo says. “From what I heard from a number of people is that the White House lawyers, Department of Justice said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that. It’s a statutory program. You have to release regulations, go through public comment, do the whole song and dance.”’

“So actually, the action was stalled, from what I’ve been told, for a number of months in kind of legal limbo, and only because we published this story were they able to start getting that policy process moving again,” he contines.

However, there is also, he says, “an element of kind of long-standing corruption and complicity from Republicans” at play.

He gives the example of Alaska, which receives a disproportionate amount of the SBA’s 8(a) contract money, the majority of which is funneled into companies owned by Alaskan natives.

Many of these companies, however, subcontract the actual work to non-native (usually white-run) companies. To abolish the program would anger Alaska native groups, which are both politically and economically powerful in the state.

According to Rufo’s sources, Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), for example, has “made it known throughout the administration, ‘We need to keep this cash flowing,’ because he’s dependent.”

“Tribes are pretty powerful in a state like Alaska ... and other red states where there are big tribal populations. They have big lobbying operations. They have big political organizations, a network of businesses, casinos, constructions, contracting, etc.,” Rufo says, “and so there is an element of what I think is legal corruption — even in red states, even with Republican politicians — where they keep this disastrous program alive.”

Regardless, the Trump administration promised to uproot DEI, and Rufo intends to hold them to it.

“It’s been a year. You guys have to get rid of this,” he says.

Even though the SBA is now “letting white men into the program,” Rufo fears that “it will still heavily favor the other groups,” thus allowing the cancer that is DEI to live on.

“The only truly morally defensible position is to get rid of it. And so, I think they should blow it up. I think they should go nuclear,” he urges.

To hear more about Rufo’s investigation into SBA’s 8(a) program, watch the video above.

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'America demands assimilation': BlazeTV's Christopher Rufo and Bessent slam Somali welfare scam 'open secret' in Minnesota



BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo participated in a roundtable meeting on Friday led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to discuss the ongoing, rampant welfare fraud by Somalis living in Minnesota.

'Everyone should be outraged.'

The event was attended by journalists, lawmakers, and local business and nonprofit owners.

“The thing that I found astonishing about this fraud scheme is that it was an open secret for many of the people here in Minnesota,” Rufo stated.

“What I’d like to highlight is that this is a fraud story, but ... this is also an immigration story. It’s an assimilation story. It’s a cultural compatibility story,” Rufo continued. “The reality is that the latest numbers, it seems to be that the Somali community, which represents about 1% of Minnesota’s population, is perpetrating approximately 90% of the systemic fraud in this state.”

“I think America works when America demands assimilation. And Minnesota will work when it demands assimilation to the culture of good government,” Rufo added.

RELATED: Exclusive: Bessent tells Rufo — 'When the bear trap snaps,' Minnesota fraudsters and complicit officials will face justice

BlazeTV host Chris Rufo. Image source: Blaze Media

He called it a “tragedy” that Minnesota, which had previously been known as the United States’ good-government capital, has had its reputation "tarnished as the fraud capital."

“Everyone should be outraged," Rufo remarked.

Bessent announced during a Friday press conference that the Treasury Department was launching multiple initiatives to put an end to the fraud rings and hold perpetrators accountable. The new initiatives included investigations into money-service businesses, lowering the reporting threshold for overseas transfers to $3,000 in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, and a new IRS task force assigned to probe COVID-era fraud, among several other steps.

RELATED: ‘Financial calamity’: Bessent blasts Minnesota Democrats’ massive fraud fiasco, launching sweeping interventions

Image source: Blaze Media

During the roundtable, Bessent revealed that there are also plans to provide incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with information.

"If these fraudsters want to turn on each other, we welcome that,” he said. “We will be offering cash rewards to whistleblowers to turn in their fellow conmen and women.”

Bessent stated that the fraud “cover-up” nearly enabled Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) to become vice president.

“What a tragedy it would have been for the American people for someone with no integrity, who was complicit and perhaps corrupt, to assume the office of the vice president,” he added.

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Exclusive: Bessent tells Rufo — 'When the bear trap snaps,' Minnesota fraudsters and complicit officials will face justice



While fraud rings in Minnesota's Somali community have been under federal investigation for years, it was investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo’s reporting that brought the billion-dollar scandals to national attention. Back in November 2025, Rufo published a report titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” in which he and co-author Ryan Thorpe alleged that billions of taxpayer funds were being stolen through schemes in Minneapolis’ Somali community and that millions of those funds were being funneled to the Al-Shabaab terror group in Somalia.

Rufo's reporting sparked massive federal action, including revoking Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, surging Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, freezing child-care funds, and ramping up prosecutions. Most notably, it led Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to visit Minnesota in January 2026 and launch major FinCEN probes into hawala businesses, IRS audits, and enhanced transfer reporting.

In this exclusive BlazeTV interview with Rufo, Bessent shares what his team’s investigations have revealed about Minnesota’s Somali fraud operations and what steps the Treasury is taking to ensure it stops.

Bessent says his team’s investigations confirmed that the fraud schemes were “bigger than anyone thought” and that money — either excess government-issued funds or stolen funds — are indeed being sent illegally out of the country.

One positive result of the investigations into Minnesota’s fraud rings, however, is that they will provide a “model” for future investigations in the other 49 states.

“Just because of the population sizes — California, Illinois, New York — that what's going on [in Minnesota] is a microcosm of what's going on there. And it's like someone on the panel said today: Benefits have been turned into businesses. It is a cottage industry of teaching people how to form multiple LLCs, how to game the system, how to move money around,” says Bessent, pledging to “follow the money” and explore “recoveries” for cheated Americans.

Rufo calls these predominantly Somali-orchestrated fraud rings Minnesota’s “open secret.” Fraudsters were successful largely because they knew that the cultural standard of “Minnesota nice” and politicians’ “fear of being called racist” would result in the turning of blind eyes everywhere.

“What do you think the right attitude should be as you look at these frauds moving forward?” he asks.

“Clearly the governor's office does not want to do investigations. So we just want the facts. We want to see where they lead, and we want to put the bad guys in jail,” says Bessent.

Further Minnesota’s soft-on-crime policies that “incentivize” criminality need to be addressed. “You could steal hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, and under the Minnesota laws, you might not even get jail time. You might get a series of paroles,” Bessent adds.

“We have the ability to bring in IRS enforcement, and they don't monkey around. So the incentive is going to be to stop this.”

Rufo then posed the question that conservatives nationwide are eagerly awaiting an answer to: Will we finally see any big names face justice?

“From [Gov. Tim Walz] on down appears to be at a minimum to have turned a blind eye. There are rumors circulating around this building right now that in fact some have been complicit in these schemes. Is that something your office is looking into?” he asks.

“That's part of following the money. There are evidently some disturbing tapes of AG Ellison in meetings with people who donated to him calling for political favors to stop the investigations. So we'll see,” says Bessent.

“And Chris, I can guarantee you when the bear trap snaps, we're going to get these folks.”

To hear the rest of Rufo’s exclusive interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, watch the video above.

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‘Faces of meth’: How Antifa radicalizes its foot soldiers



Antifa first rose to mainstream prominence during the summer riots of 2020. While how the group managed to recruit so many young people has remained a mystery to most Americans, domestic security expert Kyle Shideler knows its methods well.

“So as to the psychological perspective, you know, you talk about those mug shots. There’s almost, like, if you look at, over the course of 2020, there’s almost like a ‘faces of meth’ campaign,” domestic security expert Kyle Shideler tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“You see them at their first arrest, and they’re kind of fresh-faced and relatively normal-looking, and you see them in the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the end of it, you know, five years later, they’re unrecognizable. Clearly hard living, drugs, homelessness, and the like,” he continues.


“This is part of that affinity-group structure is to suck people in so that the group becomes their only social outlet. … So they get these masses of people out into the streets, and then the goal is to try to get them to engage in some criminal act, right, to get them to step over the line and then bring them further into the group,” he explains.

When they successfully get these college students to commit even just a small crime that could land them in jail, that’s when they organize their "jail support."

“You pay their bail. You tell them how much you care about them and how the movement’s going to take care of them. They get out of jail, and now they’re, you know, more tightly bound to the group. And that’s what we saw all through 2020,” Schideler says.

“And that’s what these things are really for,” he explains. “The large-scale mass-movement protests, from the point of view of Antifa, it's to slowly weed through and bring people further and further along into radicalization to be willing to do more and more radical things.”

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We used to need guts to sin. Now we just need wi-fi.



Once upon a time, before the digital age swept us up in a current of global access, vices like gambling, pornography, and marijuana were kept in check with what BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman argue was healthy friction.

It’s what made Mr. Johnson blush when he skulked up to the checkout counter at the local video rental with an X-rated videotape sandwiched between two rom-coms. It’s what forced hopeful gamblers to sneak into illegal card rooms at the back of sketchy bars, pockets stuffed with ATM cash withdrawn in small increments to avoid spousal skepticism. It’s what necessitated dark parking lot meetups, secret car compartments, and stashes of air fresheners and breath mints.

But today, none of those physical and social barriers exist. Want to watch an adult film? Jump online; there are millions to choose from. Interested in placing a bet? Easy: Open an app and blow $10,000 on a random ping-pong match without ever leaving the comfort of your bed. Out of weed in a state that hasn’t legalized it? No problem; there are hundreds of dispensaries that will illegally ship right to your front door.

The glowing rectangle that lives in our pocket has pulverized every obstacle that once kept vices reined in.

Keeperman laments the death of “the gray market,” where “public shame and censure” were a real obstacle for vice-seekers but not so large an obstacle that they barred them completely from indulging.

“I think that balance is sort of ideal,” he tells Rufo.

“People, unfortunately, without any of these barriers to entry, they go down these rabbit holes; they start cultivating these bad behaviors, these addictions, and it ruins their lives. And it ruins the lives of the people around them, and it's horrible for society.”

He remembers working at his town’s video rental shop as a teenager and the “cycle of shame” that commenced every time a local would sheepishly duck out of the curtained room at the back of the store with “Debbie Does Dallas” tucked covertly under his arm.

“It was like, ‘All right, man, like, cool. You're embarrassed; I'm embarrassed to be doing this.’ ... But it was good. That's how it should be,” he reminisces.

This system of shame and risk also benefited kids. Keeperman recalls the notorious male student who stole Playboy magazines from his dad’s secret stash and smuggled them to school in his backpack so he could charge his fellow delinquents $5 for a week's rental.

“It’s shameful, and if the vice principal catches you, you're screwed, man. You're in the doghouse. ... You might get suspended or get these demerits or whatever, and your mom's going to be mad at you,” he laughs.

But in all seriousness, these were real barriers that kept a lot of kids from engaging in pornography. But today, there’s no need for magazines or smuggling. All kids need to do is run a quick Google search alone in their bedrooms, and they’ll be inundated with graphic content from hundreds of sites. Addiction is all but guaranteed.

Keeperman says that while he takes all necessary precautions to prevent his children from accessing graphic content on their devices, he knows there’s only so much he can do.

“My kid's going to have a public life. He's going to have a social life that extends beyond the boundaries that we can draw for him as parents. And I can't control what the kid next door does. You just can't. And it's just too easy. It's too accessible,” he says.

Rufo says the answer to this problem of a barrier-less world is to re-create the barriers in the digital sphere.

“You have to have a digital version of the back room and the curtain, meaning you have to have ID verification, age verification,” he says.

To hear more of his theory, watch the episode above.

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