California Insider

The pistachios on supermarket shelves around the world most likely came from California’s Central Valley, where roughly two-thirds of the global supply now grows. The crop has no native history in the state, and most Californians drive past these orchards every day without knowing what they are or how they got there. The industry’s current chapter is stranger than its rise. Even with worldwide dem...

California’s wine industry is already under pressure, and in Santa Barbara County, wineries now face another cost. Since April 2025, businesses that sell wine directly to customers have been required to pay a 1 percent fee on those sales. The fee funds a private trade association that wineries are also required to join, with no option under the current county rule to opt out of either the payment...

California voters will decide this November whether to impose a one-time wealth tax on the state’s roughly 200 billionaires, a measure pitched by supporters as narrow and temporary. But some high-net-worth Californians are not waiting to see whether it passes. Several prominent founders and investors have already moved, reduced California ties, or shifted assets ahead of the proposal’s Jan. 1 resi...

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 so...

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 f...

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 Di...

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...

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...

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 oper...

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, pre...

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 i...

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...

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 h...

Catalina Island’s deer have been part of the island long enough that most residents have never known it without them. The Catalina Island Conservancy, which manages most of the island’s land, says the deer are non-native and are damaging the habitat that native species depend on. Their position is that removing every deer from the island is the only way to restore it. Not everyone agrees that zero...

Los Angeles property owners have until June 2 to vote on an assessment that would nearly quadruple what they currently pay for streetlights, a decision cities across California are increasingly facing. As the ballot goes out, the city council is simultaneously advancing a proposal that would change how street-level enforcement works across LA neighborhoods. How well do we understand the full pictu...

Eileen Wang's guilty plea reads like a local story. The mayor of Arcadia agreed to her federal charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent for China. Joshua Philipp, senior journalist for The Epoch Times, said it is something else. One visible point in a pattern of China's influence that has been running at scale for decades. Philipp has covered federal investigations into CCP operations across...

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was designed to give people with disabilities equal access to public life. In California, home to more ADA lawsuits than any other state, a legal loophole has turned that law into a settlement machine, targeting small businesses, many already in compliance. While the cost to businesses is real, the benefit to people with disabilities is far less clear. Who...

Is California’s mail ballot system as exposed as critics suggest, or is the real story more complicated than what either side suggests? Every election cycle, the same concerns resurface: ballots getting lost, signatures going unchecked, and results taking weeks to finalize. But the operational reality inside a county registrar’s office tells a different story. In this episode, Orange County Regist...

California cities are weighing taxes on non-primary homes to address housing shortages and mounting budget deficits. San Diego’s Measure A is one of them, with a vote coming this June and a $121 million deficit driving the conversation. What does the measure actually require of homeowners, and what happens after it passes? In this episode, Shane Harris, CEO and founder of S Harris Communications,...

The avocado most people buy at the grocery store was born in a Southern California backyard a hundred years ago. The industry that grew around it may not survive there much longer. California avocados are losing ground to imports from Michoacán, Mexico, where cartel organizations have moved beyond extorting farmers to seizing their land outright. For California growers already competing against lo...

A transplant surgeon in China can source a matching heart in two weeks. In ethical medicine, how is that possible? Jan Jekielek, senior editor at Epoch Times and author of a recent bestseller on the subject, walks through what researchers, whistleblower testimony, and peer-reviewed literature have collectively documented about China's transplant system and its relationship with Western medical ins...

The conflict in Iran reads very differently up close than it does from a distance. For most people watching from the outside, the story is incomplete. “California Insider” host Siyamak Khorrami grew up in Iran and has direct contact with people there right now. What emerges is a portrait of a country where the tension between the government and the people it governs has been building for decades....

California’s ballot is filling up with new tax measures this year, and many voters won’t know what they’re agreeing to until after they’ve voted. Some of these measures are framed as temporary or targeted, but the legal fine print tells a different story. When a ballot measure promises to fund a specific cause, how do you know the money goes there? In this episode, Matt Klink, president of Klink C...

Paid signature gatherers are operating inside homeless encampments in San Francisco to collect ballot petition signatures for California’s November 2026 propositions. Video evidence captured on the street shows signers being offered payment and instructed by gatherers to use other people’s names and addresses, and the operation was still running the next day at a different location. When something...

A large share of police calls in Los Angeles can be traced back to homelessness, at a time when departments are already short on officers. Behind each call is a mix of mental health crises, addiction, and conditions that rarely change after a single intervention. Why do so many people return to the same situation, even after contact with outside services? In this episode, LAPD Commander Blake Chow...