➡ The speaker discusses the issue of disinformation and bias in news reporting, highlighting the lack of transparency and accountability in certain organizations. They also criticize the misuse of funds raised for disaster relief, pointing out the lack of progress in rebuilding efforts. The speaker further criticizes the bureaucracy and red tape that hinders construction in progressive states, especially after disasters. Lastly, they express their interest in exposing wasteful spending of public money and the spread of ‘wokeness’ on college campuses.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is Judicial Watch. Welcome to Judicial Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch Podcast, where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information the old legacy media really does not want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today, we’re very fortunate to have joining us John Levine. He is a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon. John, welcome to Judicial Watch. Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure to be here. John, you’ve written a fantastic story just a couple of days back that talks about a big Hollywood celebrity star-studded sort of fundraising event that raised a ton of money.

And then you kind of explained where that money went. Why don’t you give our viewers and listeners a taste of your reporting? Right. Well, so we all remember the California wildfires at the beginning of this year. It was a terrible tragedy. Much of, you know, California burned down, and there were several different locations. It was the worst fires in that state’s history. And celebrities, you know, God bless them. They organized a big benefit concert called Fire Aid and raised $100 million. And, you know, everyone was performing. There are a lot of celebrities you’ve heard of, like Lady Gaga and all the rest.

And $100 million is raised. And then they say a month later, we’re going to make sure this money is spent equitably. And the second you you read the word equitably, I know, OK, but all your alarms go off. Yeah, I have. There’s a few words when progressives use them. Equity, equitable equity is one of them. Right. And I’m like, all right. I don’t normally associate Lady Gaga with equity either. Some of that. There had been some there were some bubbling up on social media that this money was being wasted, but no one really had done a deep dive into it.

And Fire Aid lists all of the organizations that they give that they’re giving the money to on their website. Now, to be clear, Fire Aid doesn’t directly give money to impacted people to victims of the fire. They give it to 160 different nonprofits, most of them based in California to distribute to people in California. And again, when I hear we’re giving the money to California nonprofits plus equity, I, you know, I know there’s there’s there’s there’s going to be something under that rock. So they’re looking looking at all the nonprofits, 160 of them on their website.

One. So this is a big fundraising concert. Right. It’s at the end of January. It’s Lady Gaga you mentioned in passing, but there’s other stars. Yeah, many names. Billy Eilish was there. Many people were there. And the hundred billion that’s raised at this concert event or connected to it in some way goes to this umbrella group, which is Fire Aid. And so they got the hundred million and then they turned around and distributed it out using the magic word equitably, whatever that means, to these hundred and sixty other smaller groups. Who are some of the cast of characters in that lineup? You say equitably, whatever that means, but we do know what equitably means.

Equitably means that certain rate there’s going to be racial preferences in the distribution of funds. And when I asked Fire Aid, I said, you know, can you tell me if these funds are going to be spent in a race neutral way would not answer it. And it’s very clear why they wouldn’t answer it because you saw money given to nonprofits that explicitly say no white people should apply, that the grant money is explicitly for black and brown Californians. And if you are white, you cannot apply to to receive money. That’s pretty outrageous.

So multiple nonprofits, multiple, multiple nonprofits said white people should not apply. That’s correct. Okay, so that’s that’s their criteria, at least for some of them. And by the way, there were at least three nonprofits that primarily work with illegal aliens living in California. These aren’t even US citizens. So they’re here illegally breaking our laws. And they’re receiving Fire Aid money when, you know, they should be receiving the summons from ICE. They’re getting this money that was dedicated for actual victims of the fire. So they at least three different nonprofits primarily did illegal aliens.

So in your experience, can any business, can any organization dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars or even a million dollars, can they go around and explicitly decline or refuse to engage with persons of different races? It seems illegal, right? Like, I was always grow up, treat everybody equally, you know, not skin color. And there’s anti discrimination laws that we’re all familiar with. It’s illegal to discriminate based on the color of your skin and your race or ethnicity. This is basic America 101 stuff. And yet, many nonprofits and this is really the underpinnings of the concept of equity, which is that it’s okay to discriminate against quote unquote privileged groups in favor of historically underrepresented groups, that’s the underlying philosophy.

So that’s why these California nonprofits have no shame at all saying this money is exclusively for black and brown people. So you’ve done doing that. It’s part of their ideology. You’ve done some tremendous and very detailed reporting on this. And you’ve asked them for comment, and they either don’t respond to they give you their double talk back. Yeah, is there any other criticism? Is anybody else stepped up on this and really put them under the magnifying glass and said, Hey, what the hell are you doing? I don’t I mean, fire rate says that they have gotten outside counsel called a law firm called Latham and Watkins to do an outside review of how the money was spent.

And they will that that review is still underway. And I don’t know, maybe Latham and Watkins will find stuff. But I’m very suspicious of these outside reviews, because at the end of the day, who’s paying Latham and Watkins? Right. And then and then how do you claw back the money, right? Right. Because he gave it away to is going to say, Hey, wait a minute, but it’s September, we already gave the money to, you know, our designated suffering person. And it’s actually even in addition to everything we just said, the racially motivated giving and the illegal aliens, there were also there was also money given to nonprofits that have nothing to do with fire aid.

There was a there was money given to a fund, a nonprofit based in Tennessee that’s dedicated to mental health for musicians. And when I clicked on the website for the nonprofit, the page link was dead. So the fire aid link to this nonprofit was a dead link. And then I went to the I found an archive version of the link. So when it was live, and there was nothing even there for how to actually get they weren’t providing any services, the only thing on the live link was just links to other nonprofits that provided services.

So it sounds like a real racket that they ran this event to gin up a bunch of money, and kind of laundered it through and gave it to their, you know, their buddies. Anyone listening, I beg you, it was such a terrible tragedy in California, and Americans are such generous and open hearted people give money directly to impacted people, do not throw it into these nonprofits and these these scam charities where 95% is going to be spent on galas and salaries and overheads, and maybe a couple of pennies go to the intended recipient, if you’re lucky, and maybe a couple of pennies will be going to the musicians with mental health issues in Tennessee.

So give directly to impacted people, because you see this time and time again, and California nonprofits are basically a byword for waste at this point. I mean, they have they spend billions of dollars on homeless nonprofits and all these other things, and you go to that state, and there’s 10 cities everywhere, right? So it’s just don’t give your money to those. It kind of reminds me the racket that the Biden administration ran getting out of office with the green new scam, you know, pumping billions of dollars out the door, you know, to very questionable, in some cases, you know, organizations that didn’t exist a week ago, and suddenly, they’re on the receiving end of, you know, a grant free money.

And right, a lot of this is cronyism and progress, and it’s to progressive wishlist priorities. There was one nonprofit, I think it was called the California Native Vote Project, you have to double check the name. And their whole thing is getting Native Americans voter turnout for Native Americans. What does this have to do with anything? So you talked to Fireade, you gave them a list of questions? I said what I was going to report, and they gave me a sort of boilerplate statement, and they have a statement on their website already, sort of, they just don’t answer it.

They just, it’s double talk, as you said. They call it disinformation. Does anybody respond substantively? Did anybody come back? I have not gotten a single substantive response. And unfortunately, the way the media environment is today, a group like Fireade can simply say this is disinformation, this is right-wing disinformation, and I didn’t do any rocket science. Anyone can go to the links that I went to on their website, but people will just, Fireade says it’s disinformation, and oh, the free beacon, we can’t trust them, and they’re in a, they’re in like a, the Fireade people, and the people that are donating in this whole ecosystem, they’re in like a Bermuda news triangle, where New York Times, CNN, NPR, and nothing can penetrate.

Right, right. It’s in, unless those entities can cover it. That’s my term, Bermuda news triangle. It’s too dense, nothing can penetrate it. Right. You know, I’ve seen it. I have seen it in my family when I go to have, you know, a family holiday and everyone’s together, and I can, I can tell very quickly who’s in the triangle. Everyone goes quiet when you walk up and say hi, right? Yeah, exactly. It happened a lot in my life. Well, you’re at home at Judicial Watch. Thank you. Thank you. I am a great fan of Judicial Watch.

You do very, very important work, and I love what you guys do to keep doing it. So, let me try a thought experiment with you, given your experience as a journalist, as a reporter for the free beacon. If you inverted all these sort of qualifiers to get money, if you had a website up that said, we only are looking to service the white community, or we only will give money to Polish American Catholics in Chicago, what would the reaction be? Do we even need to finish that sentence? Come on. And by the way, the reaction would be outraged and it would be completely justified.

For a good reason. I’m not advocating it. I’m saying on the basis of race and ethnicity is wrong. Right. Right. That is exactly right. But just when you invert the equation, it becomes so painfully obvious. Right. Somehow they run the equation the other direction. And it’s, you know, goodness and light and pure thought and all these other. Right. And if you say this to them, they’ll do the equity people, they’ll respond with some, you know, thesis, college thesis about well, you know, historically disproportionately unrepresented groups and systemic problems, systemic problems and, and, you know, slavery happened.

And it’s like, it’s it’s all it’s a lot of very academic sounding psycho babble for why we should not treat people equally. Right. It’s wrong. And it was wrong when when white people in America did it to other races in the in the 19th century. And it’s wrong now. The as John Roberts famously said, the answer to racism is not more racism on the other side. Exactly. It’s not like racism is some equation you have to balance. Okay. There was there was two parts racism from the whites. So now we need two parts racism from the black.

It’s ridiculous. So on the I want to go back to the actual sort of structure or program that fire aid purports to be conducting. Did they have any kind of like goals or objectives? Did they have a timeline? I mean, normally, if you’ve raised a lot of money for a purpose, you would say, these are our three objectives. And we hope that within six months, we will have achieved a and within a year we will have achieved B. Are there any kind of measurements any kind of extremely nebulous. And, you know, the term, the term I think we would use is key performance indicators.

And there aren’t any key performance indicators. It’s it’s and that’s why you can give money to the Musicians Mental Health Fund of Tennessee, with their non working website, with the website doesn’t work, because there’s no there’s no guidelines. It’s just it’s give to what feels good. And I don’t know this to be true. But it wouldn’t shock me if there was a lot of cronyism. And there was a lot of like, hey, my friend is the producer for Lady Gaga, and she, you know, works at her sister, I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s a lot of that going on, because these groups are just so extraneous to the mission.

And if you talk to people in California, the overwhelming thing you will hear is how they haven’t seen any money. I cannot find the bottom line, right? I mean, that’s right. How many homes have been rebuilt? How many how many homes have been rebuilt? It’s a number very close to zero. And we’re like more than six months out now. And where are people living? It’s a crazy situation. And it’s so sad, because there was so much money available. So much money was raised. And it’s just, it is itself now on fire.

And you talk about, you know, absolute premium real estate, right? It’s like the best of the best, the whole Malibu area, and other portions, other neighborhoods around that, that burned. I mean, it’s like the probably some of the most expensive zip codes in the country, right? That’s a whole other fight that’s gonna be that’s about to happen too, is what will the rebuilding look like? Because you have a you have a Democratic City Council and a Democratic mayor that kind of hated the old palisades and a lot of these neighborhoods, and they won’t rezone them.

And they were not going to let you build back the home you had before. And it’s going to be multifamily homes. And it’s going to be a lot of, you know, public housing. And there’s a lot of different visions for what these neighborhoods will look like. They’re going to be made more green. That’s another term like equity. When I see we’re going to make things greener. I know it’s that just means that means everyone’s mouth. Yeah, the paper, that’s the housing equivalent of a paper straw. That’s gonna Trump, Trump went out there and hold that press conference that was highly entertaining.

Because he was sitting there with the mayor. And the local folks were saying, well, we don’t have a problem getting environmental permits. And Trump said, well, EPA will give you whatever you want. I order it effective now done. And they all turned on Mayor Bass. You’re the problem. Your administration will give us building permits, code waivers and all these other kinds. It’s a million different. I mean, I’m from New York City originally. So I see this there, too. It costs a million dollars to dig a hole. And it takes a year to get the approvals.

Right. You know, that, that’s a bad system, even when things are working great. Yeah, I’m a New Yorker as well. So usually takes a couple a couple of envelopes. Smooth process. You know, in New York, I lived, I lived on the Upper East Side, the Upper East Side waited for the Second Avenue subway for 100 years. And that is not an exaggeration before it was finally built. And we’re talking about three stops. It wasn’t like so. Yeah, this is it’s it’s very, very difficult to do any kind of construction in these deep progressive states, particularly when you have a catastrophe like this, which calls for just immediate, quick, rapid stuff.

And and they’re they’re mired in the same old thinking, the same old red tape. I’m sure there’s some zoning board with a bunch of, you know, retired nudneks with nothing else to do holding everything up. And it’s sad because people need to live somewhere. And I don’t know how people are surviving out there. Like their homes are burned down and gone. Right. Right. Well, listen, John, what other big stories are you working on? Or what kind of projects should our viewers and listeners be looking for coming from you? Well, you know, I always like writing about money that’s wasted.

It’s it’s it’s very especially public money that’s wasted. We’re in recess here. Yes, I’ll be busy the rest of my life on that. Obviously, in recess here in DC, where I am, but when Congress comes back to work, I always like to keep an eye on them. And, you know, anything, college campuses, wokeness, you know, I’m a scourge of woke. And, you know, if anyone listening to this podcast has tips, they should email me at Levine at free beacon.com. I take all tips. That’s great. We’re going to put your email, a link to this story that we’ve been talking about.

And what’s your social media presence? How come at Levine, Jonathan, Levine, like Adam Levine, Jonathan, well, J-O-N-A-T-H-A. Great. We’ll link that into the story notes as well. John, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate your excellent reporting and for filling in some of the blanks. And I think that our viewers and listeners will really they’ll be both amazed, but also highly irritated at the details of your excellent reporting on this issue. I think very few of your viewers, however, will be surprised. None. They’ll be zero, zero surprise. All right.

John, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I’m Chris Farrell Judicial Watch. [tr:trw].

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