BENSON BYTE: Miranda Devine Breaks Down Shocking New Reports Around California Fraud

Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Have you ever stopped and thought about what's actually powering your day, the coffee you made this morning, the drive you took to get here, even the device you're listening on it? I'm Tanner Faust, and that's exactly the kind of thing we're going to talk about on the energy tailgate, a podcast from Chevron. I'll be your host inviting guests to discuss big energy topics and what they mean for everyday life, all from the tailgate of our truck. This is the energy tailgate. Instagram teen accounts automatic protections for teens. Instagram teen accounts have built-in content settings and limits for who can contact teens. Plus, teens under 16 can't change these default safety settings without parental approval. so parents can help teens connect safely. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see. Learn more at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Now it's time for another Guy Benson, Guy Benson Fight, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit Guy Benson.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Right now, we have a wonderful guest on the line. Miranda Devine from the New York Post, also from Podforce One. Miranda, thanks for joining us. Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you, Tom. Listen, whenever you come on, I love just kind of opening up the New York Post. I go to all your articles, and, you know, it's just, we can just go right down the line here. But on Podforce One, you talked to Chris Rufo, and it was very interesting talking about the corruption situation in California. It's probably worse than Minnesota. You know, Minnesota and Maine are the two big ones that I keep looking at, but you basically say it's even worse in California, the fraud that's gone on. Yeah, this is Chris Rufo actually broke the story about the Minnesota scandals with welfare fraud, but he's since, he's a fantastic investigative reporter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he since turned his gaze to California, where, of course, far bigger state. California is a Democrat dominant for...

you know, decades. And he says that California, the level of fraud under Gavin Newsom makes Minnesota's scandals look like child's play. He just says it's a different level. It's billions, tens of billions of dollars, and it's all types. You know, in Minnesota, it seems that the fraud game has been wrapped up by Somalis. But in California, it's everybody. You know, it's, he said, it's Romanians, it's Armenians, it's Nigerians. It's a lot of, I asked him why so many people, foreigners do this. And he said, often in third world countries, watering the government is just a way of life. It's kind of something everybody does because if you don't screw the government, the government's going to screw you. There's no real feeling of reciprocity or any of the niceties, the rule of law, that we have here. It's just seen that if there is a spigot of government money, it's yours for the taking. And it's worked for Democrats in these states because, as Chris Rufo, but also as Dr. Oz told me a while ago, quite eye-opening. illuminating why Democrats like Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom allow this fraud to continue under their noses, it's because they benefit from it. In one sense, they benefit because they're keeping happy a constituency of people who are highly organized and can get out the vote for them or do whatever they want. Also, they have these fake... sort of shadow workforces that are supposed to be doing, you know, adult daycare or child daycare. We saw in Somali, the Somalis in Minnesota who are doing like the leering daycare center. That is, has an army of fake staff looking after those non-existent clients. And they all then belong to a labor union. They get signed up. And those unions, then they've patted out their books with this money. They get dues from these fake employees. And then they remit part of that to the Democratic Party to their favoured candidates. And so that's how the money tree goes around. And the people who are hurt, as JD Vance said, are the American taxpayers who abide by the rules. those Americans who have paid into the system and have not benefited from it. And then when it comes time when they're in their hour of need, when they're old and they need Medicare or they need Medicaid, it's not there. There's not the resources there because it's all been plundered. Yeah, and a lot of this money, I'm assuming, because I don't know the details of it as far as looking at it as an accountant or a ledger, but I'm assuming that a lot of this money and maybe even the lion's share of it is not coming from state coffers, it's coming from reimbursement from the federal government, am I right?

Exactly. And that's exactly right. So it's sort of free money to the states. You know, the federal government just, you know, 90% of the welfare payments say come from the federal government. And then the federal government has outsourced the fraud detection to the states. assuming that they are going to act in good faith and caretakes that money as if it were their own. But they just look at it as free money that's no strings attached. We'll just use it for these slush funds for our constituents who help us remain in power forever in these blue cities. You know what's interesting about this is that when a lot of these issues, let's say the child care. let's say the home health care for elderly patients, when these kind of things were proposed, they were the kind of things that made me think that they were good and I was going to support them because right-thinking people, conservative people, they don't like the idea of the elderly being, you know, shuffled off to these large... homes that are run by these big conglomerates. And when they sold us these programs, the child care, the elderly care, they said, listen, it's better for individuals and families to care for a loved one and then get reimbursed instead of being part of this big system. And that's the kind of thing that a conservative like me said, you know what, that's better. Grandma, you know, instead of sending her to the old age home, maybe we can leave her at home. and we can care for her ourselves and then get reimbursed. It's kind of conservatives would love this idea. And that's why it's such a shame that it's been so abused by the left. It is. And theoretically, it's a great idea in a perfect society where everyone was honest. It would work like a dream, but it doesn't work when you have so many people in your country that just want to rip you off. And that's what we've done. And unfortunately, we've imported a lot of these people. A lot of them are illegal migrants, criminal gangs. They just see American taxpayers as an easy mark. Globally, it's known that if you come to a country like America or a country like Australia has got exactly the same problem. It's just they're stupid, these silly Americans and these silly Australians. They trust people not to rip them off. But unfortunately, I think what we have learned, and I think it's a lesson conservatives need to really take on board, which is that wherever there is a gushing torrent of taxpayer cash, there are going to be frauds as we saw it during COVID. Anywhere there is free government money. then there are going to be people who are going to take the lion's share of it. It's not going to go to the people in need. And what more perfect example of that, but what people are calling the homeless industrial complex. You know, L.A., I don't think any city has spent as much money as L.A. has on homelessness. But New York and the de Blasier, remember it was a billion dollars that his wife was supposed to be using on homes.

Homelessness just gets worse the more money that's poured into it because none of it goes to help homeless who are homeless not because they're unhoused or don't have somewhere to live. It's because they have drug addiction problems and they're mentally ill. And what they need is targeted help for those problems, which would allow them to live a life of dignity instead of living in squalor on the streets, which nobody wants. And we should not be inflicting on the most vulnerable among us, but there are people who play on the homeless. They use them as their mechanism to extract huge amounts of taxpayer cash and go and buy themselves Mercedes and live high on the hog. Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FN Radio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order to order. Please drink responsibly. Yeah, I'm glad you're giving credit to Christopher Rufo. And also, I've noticed that people like Chris Rufo and say Nick Shirley. There are a lot of people in the media, and I'm not just talking about left-wing people who don't like the stories that they're covering, but generally just people in establishment media. They don't like these guys because they're out there. I think there's a little bit of, oh, these guys are embarrassing us. They're out there hammering away doing the stories that we should have been covering. Do you get that? Absolutely. They're the gate crashes at the party. I mean, look at Nick Shirley. What a brilliant young man. He's... got the ability to, in just short videos, go and beard the lion in the den. I mean, he was the one that knocked on the doors of these fake daycare centers in Minneapolis and proved that they were just fronts. There's something about seeing it live with someone you trust, which is Nick Shirley, young man. going up and knocking on the doors and seeing that there are no children there. You see it with your own eyes and that cements the whole scam in your head rather than having sort of a very dense, very important but dense print product. And I mean, I say that as an old newspaper. hand from way back but you know we have to voucher the reality of modern communications and increasingly it's people talented people like nick shirley who are able to translate those heavy stories into easily digestible sound bites that people can take away and then take action on because i think he's had a huge impact because he popularized and sort of spread the word across and sort of under the noses of the establishment media. You never see the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN cover any of these stories. Fox News Digital does and does a great job. They've uncovered a lot of the sort of who's funding these Antifa protests, that sort of thing. We do the same at the New York Post. But we are not.

We are not seen as being part of the in-crowd, part of the establishment. We're sort of the... the unwashed that you keep outside the gate. The Washington Press Corps, they know who they trust, they trust each other, not to embarrass each other, and they just try to ignore what we've done instead of being proper journalists and saying, wow, look at this great story. Nick Shirley and Chris Rufo have uncovered, we're going to go with all the resources of the New York Times Newsroom and really dig down and make something happen out of this change. this unfairness that's going on in the country, which ultimately is good for, you know, the most vulnerable who the left pretend they care about. And of course, we know they don't because they never, ever expose the fraud or the corruption. Yeah, I'm going to read your headline from your May 17th article, Anthony Fauci can't escape his original COVID lie. Just the first sentence, Dr. Anthony Fauci deserves to be indicted, but he probably won't be. It's interesting, isn't it? Because the president really found a way to get people around him, to go after people like James Comey. But he really hasn't done that with Anthony Fauci. Why do you think that is? Look, I mean, all these things are like, you know, what is it, drilling through hard boards. It takes a lot of time. There's a lot of obstruction. I think Rand Paul is doing a great job in the Senate. He's, I think, laying a trap for Anthony Fauci. Remember, Anthony Fauci got a pardon from Joe Biden on his last day in office. As he walked out the door, he gave Anthony Fauci a... blanket preemptive pardon so that he couldn't be charged federally for all sorts of things. I mean, his former right-hand man, a guy called David Morins, has just been indicted on conspiracy and records destruction charges because he allegedly schemes to cover up Anthony Fauci's role in funding the gain of function research on BAP viruses. at the Wuhan lab in China where it all began. And so that's, you know, Anthony Fauci is safe from those kind of charges, but there was talk that he could be brought up as perjury charges for a couple of his testimonies to Congress. But again, one of them is now Statute Limited, Time Bard, and the other one, again, he's protected by Joe Biden. But I think Rand Paul, you can see just quietly from the breadcrumbs, he's just bringing people in like the CIA whistleblower the other day, David Moran's just got indicted. You know, he's just picking around the pieces around Anthony Fauci to create a net. And then he will invite Anthony Fauci in and he will ask him the same questions.

that he was asked before and allegedly lied about, and then he can be done for perjury. Now, probably what Anthony Fauci will say is he'll plead the fifth, because even though he can't really plead the fifth on things that he's pardoned for, anything from January 2025 he can be indicted for. So he will probably plead the fifth, but at the very least, forcing him to do that, shows the American people what a fraud he is and really shows his culpability. I think, you know, if even the least that can be done is that his reputation as St. Anthony Fauci, who saved us from COVID, rather than just an inveterate liar, power hungry, recklessly going and backdoor funding. the Wuhan lab for that very dangerous Frankenstein research on bat coronaviruses via this cutout EcoHealth Alliance, his friend Peter Dazzick. So I think more people need to know about that. We have the building blocks. The evidence shows that that happened. But unfortunately, more than half the country doesn't know and thinks that Anthony Fauci is still a hero. He just got given like... you know, best scientist of the year from some outfit. He's touring the country. It's still selling his book. He gets invited to do commencement speeches. It's really quite obscene. Yeah. It is amazing. It's an information war, and hopefully that's why I want him to be indicted. It's not anything personal. I just want the word to get out. And so, like you said, so that half the country realizes what happened. Miranda Devine, we got a run. It was so great to talk to you. Always love it. You too, Tom. Thanks very much. That was yet another Guy Benson bite. For full episodes of Guy Benson, go to Guy Benson.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to this show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your prime membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.