California Insider

Shen Yun is an American performing arts company that sells out venues worldwide. Before shows, bomb threats come in. Theaters get swept. Tour buses need overnight security to prevent sabotage. Incidents have been reported across the United States, including California. The question is why what investigators describe as a foreign government campaign keeps reaching an American company on American soil.

A separate but related track runs through federal court. A California-based Chinese agent was caught by the FBI attempting to bribe IRS officials into revoking Shen Yun’s nonprofit status. Investigators say that the case is one documented node in a campaign our guests describe as escalating.

Steve Lance, executive producer at Sincere Pictures, and Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Info Center, join Levi’s son Lucas, a principal dancer with Shen Yun, and musician Rachel Chen to walk through what the investigation found and what the documentary “Unbroken” documents in full.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California residents watched election night results flip over the days that followed. Why does that keep happening?

The shift doesn’t happen the same way everywhere. It happens in California in ways that are specific, legal, and largely invisible to the people watching the results come in.

Mike Gatto is a former California state assemblymember who voted against ballot harvesting when the law was first proposed. He joins the show to explain what’s actually driving California’s post-election shifts, and why the trust problem may be harder to fix than the fraud question.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Across California, homelessness among older adults is rising, and it increasingly includes seniors who don't fit the public image of who becomes homeless. Some are losing housing for the first time late in life, after decades of steady work and stable housing.

A citizen petition is trying to put a sweeping property tax exemption for homeowners age 60 and older on the statewide ballot, while San Diego County has tested a much smaller rental subsidy aimed at the same problem locally. One reaches for a sweeping fix, the other for something narrower, and neither has been tried at full scale yet.

Rishi Kumar, a Silicon Valley tech executive and former Saratoga City Council member, is leading the signature drive for the statewide petition. San Diego County Supervisor Joel Anderson helped advance the county's rental subsidy pilot for older adults at risk of homelessness. Both explain what is pushing these seniors toward homelessness, and how hard either fix is to deliver.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Long COVID patients in California are waiting up to six months to see a specialist, if they can find one still accepting new patients. Clinics across the state are full. This is despite a 2024 state law.

In September 2024, Bill AB 3119 cleared both chambers of the California Legislature without a single dissenting vote and was signed into law.

This law requires the Medical Board of California, the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, the Board of Registered Nursing, and the Physician Assistant Board to consider including, in their continuing education requirements for the licensees specified above, a course on infection-associated chronic conditions, including, but not limited to, long COVID.

The California Medical Board has not publicly discussed the issue since the bill was enacted into law.

Its position: Each physician should choose the continuing education appropriate to their patients. For patients who cannot work, cannot sleep, and cannot find a trained provider, that position has a cost.

In this episode, we sit down with Susanna Zaraysky, the California resident who pushed AB 3119 through the Legislature after spending months unable to find a doctor trained to treat her. We also discuss with Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of Medicine at UCSF, what it would take to close the treatment gap.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Eviction cases in Los Angeles are now arriving in court with motions written by AI. In some cases, tentative rulings have also come back citing cases that don’t exist, errors that federal courts are now sanctioning on a near-weekly basis.

Beyond the courtroom, Measure ULA has collected close to a billion dollars over its first two and a half years, and attorney Avi Sinai says the eviction defense funding it provides is reaching a wider range of tenants than many would expect.

Sinai, who represents landlords across Los Angeles, explains what it looks like when AI-written filings and AI-assisted rulings show up in the same case, and where the mansion tax money is actually landing once a case reaches court.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California's two major refineries closed within the past year. The state now imports twice the gasoline it did before. No replacement supplier has been identified. The modeling that would show the full impact of that gap has not been made public.

The supply chain California now depends on runs through foreign refineries that are themselves struggling to source crude through a Strait of Hormuz operating at less than half its normal capacity. Prices at the pump have already risen more than a dollar per gallon, and wholesale costs have climbed faster still. The next wave has not reached the street yet.

C.J. Nord, Founder of Supply Chains for Good, and Skip York, Senior Vice President and Chief Energy Strategist at Turner, Mason & Company and Nonresident Fellow at the Baker Institute, have been watching this from inside the supply chain.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California’s housing costs are more than double the national average, and the inventory of homes people can actually afford to buy keeps shrinking. Hundreds of laws have been passed. The entry-level home has largely ceased to exist. So what actually changed?

The redevelopment system California dissolved over a decade ago did more than move money. It created a framework for local collaboration, predictable financing, and anti-displacement protections built up over 60 years. What replaced it, Patterson argued, was built on different assumptions entirely.

Tia Patterson, president and CEO of the California Community Reinvestment Corporation, joined the show to explain what the conversation about California housing keeps missing.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Over the past decade, California's K–12 enrollment has fallen by hundreds of thousands of students. Less than half of those still in the system can read at grade level. If fewer students are in the system and outcomes are not moving, what is the money doing?

Gloria Romero, a former California state senator and longtime education reform advocate, joins the show to walk through how the state funds its schools and why the outcomes have been so difficult to move.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

Trucking companies that have served the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for decades are closing. Family-owned operations that built their businesses one truck at a time are being squeezed by compressed freight rates and high diesel costs, and some in the industry say compliance has become a cost that not everyone is paying.

What is happening to the companies that tried to follow the rules is a different story from the one playing out in public.

Robert Loya, chief executive officer of the Harbor Trucking Association and a 30-year industry veteran, joined the show to walk through how California’s regulatory environment is playing out for the trucking companies that serve the ports, and what he believes is coming next.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California's women's prisons house just under 4,000 people, and since the state's Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act (SB 132) took effect, 48 men have transferred into those facilities, a policy decision that is now the subject of a federal investigation.

A criminal case out of Madera County is moving through the courts, and women who have raised concerns about their housing conditions have faced institutional consequences. What did the transfer criteria actually require?

Amie Ichikawa, executive director of Woman II Woman, joins the show to walk through the transfer criteria, the committee process, and what the women inside can and cannot say.

*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.