Politics

L.A. Got Billions For “Homeless Initiative”; Where Did The Money Go?

Published

9 years ago

January 19, 2018

(Via The Daily Wire)

Just before 5 a.m. on Wednesday, December 6, flames raced up the hills adjacent to Los Angeles’ 405 freeway, shutting down one of the nation’s largest traffic arteries, destroying and damaging 18 homes, and scorching 422 acres.

Americans were awed by the fire-and-brimstone videos that morning commuters posted on social media. Angelenos were stunned by the smoke clouds pouring into the skies above their city.

Six days later, the Los Angeles Fire Department announced that the blaze was sparked by an illegal cooking fire at a homeless encampment next to the 405, in the ritzy neighborhood of Bel-Air.

The revelation brought increased attention to what city and county officials acknowledge is a homelessness crisis, and what Mayor Eric Garcetti called the “moral issue of our time” in his April 2017 State of the City address.

The figures are grim: According to the official Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, done every January by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), in 2017, on any given night, there were 57,794 people experiencing homelessness, 42,828 of whom, 74%, were unsheltered.

That total number was 23% higher than 2016’s count, which itself saw a 6% jump from 2015. In those two years, the percentage of the total homeless population unsheltered on any given night was 74% and 70%, respectively.

Unsheltered, as in sleeping in tents, on sidewalks, beneath highway overpasses, and anywhere else that may provide some respite from the elements. Even in Los Angeles, nighttime temperatures routinely drop into the 40s and 50s.

As the nation’s second largest city, and one with a pleasant climate, it’s no surprise that L.A. has the second largest homeless population, behind New York City. Or that L.A. has a higher percentage of unsheltered people who are homeless than nearly any other city in the country.

But three-quarters?

In New York, according to a 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on any given night that January, 96% of the city’s 70,685 homeless were sheltered.

Why the stark difference?

The answer is simple: As much money as L.A. spends on homelessness, policymakers have no intention of providing enough homeless shelters to put a roof over homeless people’s heads. That means it has no mechanism to increase capacity when homelessness spikes, as it has in recent years in large part due to skyrocketing rents and a low vacancy rate.

A Los Angeles Times review of federal data found that while the nation’s 402 “homeless service areas” have about three beds for every four homeless people, L.A. has only one for every four, one of the nation’s lowest ratios.

Neither the city nor county builds or operates shelters, with few exceptions. Instead, private charities raise funds to operate shelters, and contractors bid for a shrinking pie of local and federal funds.

But the cost of running publicly-funded shelters has steadily increased, due in part to the county’s requirement that they provide more services than just shelter, including case management and rapid transition into permanent housing.

Peter Lynn, LAHSA’s executive director, told the paper that there were zero bidders last year for the agency’s shelter funds.

The result? In 2017 LAHSA counted 16,600 shelter beds. But removing beds that are only available seasonally, ones not available for drop-ins, and the cash payments for motels and rent that are counted as beds, there are only about 5,000 “on a moment’s notice, year-round” shelter beds available for over 57,000 homeless people. And while the latter figure keeps growing, the former keeps shrinking. There are fewer and fewer beds available for more and more homeless people.

This has caused not only a crisis for the homeless, but for the city as a whole.

Homeless encampments and tent cities have spread beyond their usual location in Skid Row, an area of downtown that Angelenos and their government have long accepted as a homeless neighborhood.

A shocking video posted online last month showed footage of Skid Row on Christmas Day captured by a car’s dash cam. As the Daily Mail described it, “Rubbish bags piled up by the pavements and littered across streets. Tents erected in clusters where people have camped down for the night. Dozens of directionless residents congregating by the roadside and wandering into the road.”

But a drive through neighborhoods like Westlake, Hollywood, or Venice will also reveal areas — sometimes spanning entire city blocks — of shopping carts packed with clothing, rows of tents, and other makeshift shelters. Homeowners, business owners, and pedestrians in L.A. are left to deal with the various forms of disorder that inevitably follow.

A ‘FEMA-LIKE’ CRISIS

Conditions at homeless encampments have become so unsanitary that the city has installed toilets, handwashing facilities, and mobile showers at some sites. In September, county officials even declared an outbreak of Hepatitis A, a liver disease contracted through close person-to-person contact or in places contaminated with feces.

LAHSA’s 2017 homeless count showed that from the year prior, the number of tents and makeshift shelters jumped from 4,797 to 5,858 on any given night, a 22% increase. A Los Angeles Times report from June 2017 said L.A. public works crews have cleaned “16,500 homeless encampments since 2015, removing more than 3,000 tons of trash,” part of a $14 million cleanup effort.

A $14 million cleanup effort not designed to move homeless people into shelters or remove encampments, but to remove trash from the streets. Trash including litter, feces, drug paraphernalia, and weapons. Some cleanup sites are so hazardous that biowaste personnel spray the area with disinfectant.

After the crews disappear, the encampments often reappear in the same spot or set up shop nearby.

Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission, told me Los Angeles should view its homeless problem as a “FEMA-like, Red-Cross-like crisis” that the city needs to address by providing more emergency shelters.

The Union Rescue Mission, located in Skid Row, is Los Angeles’s oldest, and one of the country’s largest rescue missions. It provides emergency services like shelter and meals, health clinics, therapy, job training, and Christian ministry.

They house over 900 men, women, and children every night, and serve over 3,000 meals every day. Their mode of operation is to help someone change their life, then help them hold down a job, then help them find a permanent place to live.

Right outside the mission’s entrance is a small tent-city, with homeless encampments lining the sidewalks for several blocks and homeless people wandering the streets. It’s a tragic sight to behold, just blocks from the downtown financial district, L.A. Live, and Staples Center.

Bales is diplomatic in his criticism of how Los Angeles has (or has not) handled its unsheltered homeless crisis, but he’s very clear.

“It is a no-brainer that we should provide space for everybody in need,” Bales said. “Leaving someone on the street for one night could alter their lives in a very negative way.”

Leaving someone on the street for one night could alter their lives in a very negative way.

-REV. ANDY BALES, CEO OF THE UNION RESCUE MISSION

Bales proposes that the city builds or funds a sufficient number of shelters and beds to house all of Los Angeles’ unsheltered homeless people, similar to New York City’s approach.

Failure to do so, he said, will all but consign many of Los Angeles’ temporarily homeless to the ranks of the chronically homeless.

By the time a man or a woman or an entire family gets to Union Rescue Mission, Bales said, they’ve gone through hell. Skyrocketing rent or a job loss pushed them out of their apartment. They ran out of cash staying in a hotel. They wore out their welcome sleeping at a friend’s or relative’s. They slept in their car until it broke down. They stayed on the streets until it broke them.

“By the time you’ve endured any one of those issues and you’ve spent time on the streets you are going to have mental health issues,” Bales said. Many of the people experiencing homelessness, he added, become drug addicts on the streets. It’s a form of self-medication to escape the reality of their despair.

Bales says many people experiencing homelessness in L.A. would “just need a short stay somewhere, and they can pull it back together in 60 days to 180 days to even a year.” But that timeline can get longer and longer for anyone who spends one night, one week, one month, or one year on the streets.

“They are going to be tomorrow’s chronically homeless adults,” Bales said.

HOW DID THINGS GET THIS BAD?

In retrospect, Los Angeles’s crisis seems all but inevitable, given its high cost of living, its decision to not provide enough shelters, and the city’s de facto acceptance of homeless encampments.

Encampments in Skid Row and beyond only became a recurring problem in recent years, but it stems from L.A.’s 2007 settlement with the ACLU.

The civil liberties group sued L.A. for arresting people who sleep on sidewalks, which is illegal according to section 41.18(d) of L.A.’s municipal code.

After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Los Angeles’s enforcement unconstitutional, the city settled with the ACLU, agreeing to not enforce the law between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m until another 1,250 permanent housing units were constructed.

That number was reached in 2015, but the city still doesn’t enforce the sidewalk law between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., and routinely not between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. either. Even if it did, though, without enough shelters, enforcing the law would just mean turning Los Angeles’s jails into unofficial homeless shelters, which, to a certain extent, they already are.

For at least three years, there have been innumerable speeches, committee hearings, and photo-ops from the city’s and county’s politicians — the Mayor, the City Council, and the powerful County Board of Supervisors.

See Mayor Garcetti’s groundbreaking of a new publicly funded housing development that will provide 122 new units of what officials say will be permanent housing.

Or Councilman Gil Cedillo’s excursion with a local eyewitness news team to Elysian Park, home to several homeless encampments.

Or Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’s op-ed in the Huffington Post, in which he calls on Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency for California’s homeless, who are “living in unspeakable conditions and under peril of illness, violence and death.”

“Leaving people unsheltered is costly to taxpayers, impacting law enforcement, health services, property values, and more,” Ridley-Thomas wrote.

With the exception of LAHSA and the office of Mayor Garcetti, no city or county officials — including every member of the City Council’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee — provided an interview or comment for this story, despite repeated requests.

Tom Waldman, LAHSA’s Director of Communications, said solving the homelessness crisis is “at the top of everybody’s list.”

“I don’t know that they can do anything that they’re not currently doing,” he said of policymakers. LAHSA is the largest local provider of homeless services, and carries out the policies implemented by voters, the City Council, and the County Board of Supervisors.

“Seeing a reduction in numbers [of homeless] is our goal,” Waldman said. “We have the resources in place to … achieve the results that people are going to expect.”

Los Angeles’s homeless budget ballooned from $18 million in fiscal year 2015-2016 to $138 million in fiscal year 2016-2017 to $180 million in fiscal year 2017-2018 — a 900% increase in two years, but still a fraction of the New York Department of Homeless Services budget of $1.4 billion.

In that same period, the number of homeless on any given night in Los Angeles went from 44,359 (31,025 unsheltered) to 46,874 (34,701 unsheltered) to 57,794 (42,828) — a 30% overall increase and a 38% increase in the unsheltered population. The sheltered population actually dipped 9% from 2015 to 2016 but, encouragingly, jumped 23% from 2016 to 2017.

HOUSING FIRST

Beginning last year, a portion of Los Angeles’s homeless budget for the next decade or so will include significant amounts of funding from two ballot propositions that voters approved, both of which are centrally focused on building permanent housing and providing homeless services.

As Waldman said, describing Los Angeles’s official position, “The best way to attack homelessness is to get people into permanent housing.”

Measure H, which passed with 69% approval, authorized a 0.25% sales tax over 10 years to “fund mental health, substance abuse treatment, health care, education, job training, rental subsidies, emergency and affordable housing, transportation, outreach, prevention, and supportive services.”

The tax should raise over $350 million annually, and the funds will comply with the L.A. County Homeless Initiative’s “Approved Strategies to Combat Homelessness.” The 130-page booklet outlines 47 strategies, one of which is to “enhance the emergency shelter system.”

Measure HHH, which passed with 77% approval, authorized the city to issue $1.2 billion in bonds ($1.9 billion with interest), mostly to build about 10,000 permanent housing units for low-income and chronically homeless people.

But as city controller Ron Galperin wrote in a September report, it will take years for Measure H and Measure HHH to have their full impact, and the permanent housing “won’t in and of themselves be sufficient to house all of our residents experiencing homelessness.”

In an August interview with sports commentator Bill Simmons, Mayor Garcetti said traffic and homelessness — L.A. leads the nation in both — are his “top two priorities” and “crowns we can lose.”

But can we?

Are the large, complex, long-term programs policymakers favor, like H and HHH, the most effective way to end the unsheltered homelessness crisis?

The “housing first” philosophy that L.A. practices may be laudable, but will it be effective? This approach premises that ending homelessness begins with providing permanent housing, whether someone’s homelessness is the result of something temporary — an illness or lost job — or something chronic and recurring, like substance abuse or a mental illness.

“Housing first” is increasingly popular nationwide. It’s even the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) official policy, championed by Secretary Ben Carson.

While proponents say “housing first” has proven to be the most effective way to end chronic homelessness, the results don’t paint such a simple picture.

Even Utah, the poster state for the movement’s stated success in reducing chronic homelessness to at or near “functional zero,” has been criticized for overstating its accomplishments, in part by using very technical terms like “chronic homelessness” and “functional zero.”

The working definition of “chronically homeless,” HUD’s definition, is to be homeless for a year or more, or to have at least four homeless episodes within three years. But the chronically homeless make up a small percentage of the homeless population in Utah, and under 25% nationwide.

“Functional zero” in the context of chronic homelessness is when at least as many chronically homeless people are being placed in homes as there are new chronically homeless people. So a city can reach functional zero chronic homelessness but still have thousands of people living on the streets.

Andy Bales says housing first advocates have done a good job “marketing” Utah’s stated success story, but that the idea that the state has solved homelessness is an “absolute lie.”

“They absolutely altered the facts and they went around the country saying, ‘Look how we solved it,’” Bales said. “If you don’t believe me just go visit Salt Lake City on the streets and you will see that that was absolutely marketing.”

“Since we made the change to housing first, people around the country say we’ve reduced homelessness. I don’t see that at all,” Bales said.

He doesn’t reject “housing first,” but says it’s not the right solution for many homeless people. And it’s the wrong one when it crowds out resources for emergency shelters. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, has slashed funding for homeless shelters.

But those shelters, as Bales pointed out to the Los Angeles Times, “put a roof over people’s heads while they wait for the housing to be built.”

They think, ‘Well we got a plan and that plan will eventually address it and that’s okay.’ That’s not okay.

-REV. ANDY BALES, CEO OF THE UNION RESCUE MISSION

That will take years in Los Angeles, and still won’t come close to housing the city’s unsheltered population.

The City Council is exploring a plan to temporarily house about 67 people in three trailers on city-owned downtown lots. But the trailers won’t be ready until the summer, and they will cost $2.3 million in the first year, and $1.3 million annually after that. The cost of $19,402 per person is more expensive than annual median rent in many L.A. neighborhoods.

Anna Bahr, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, said Los Angeles is “moving as quickly as possible to simultaneously build permanent supportive housing and create emergency shelters that house homeless Angelenos while they wait for new apartments to open up.”

“The shelters the City is focused on are specifically designed to serve as bridges to permanent supportive housing. The shelter opening on Lot 5 is supplied with intensive case management services — ranging from mental health to drug and alcohol treatment — that will help homeless Angelenos stabilize and move into permanent homes as quickly as possible,” Bahr wrote in an email to The Daily Wire.

Nevertheless, as evidenced by their actions, Los Angeles’s elected officials are not going to be able to solve the unsheltered homelessness crisis in the foreseeable future.

As the head of the L.A. County Homeless Initiative, Phil Ansell, told the Los Angeles Times in September, “The simplistic response of saying, ‘Why don’t we put 47,000 people into shelter?’ — we’re not going to do that.”

That decision, though, means that Los Angeles may spend well over $1 billion in the coming years to solve homelessness, but that the crisis of tens of thousands of people living on the streets every night may remain a crisis.

“They think, ‘Well we got a plan and that plan will eventually address it and that’s okay,’ ” Bales said. “That’s not okay.”

Politics

Online Provocateurs Try to Sabotage America First, Nick Fuentes, & the Groypers

Published

6 days ago

August 2, 2026

Pepe Jones

There’s a familiar pattern on the online right. Someone builds something real over years — an audience, a coherent worldview, a network of young people who actually show up, a brand that survives deplatforming and institutional hostility — and then a new wave of operators appears to declare it illegitimate. They didn’t organize the events, endure the bans, cultivate the base, or hold the line when it was costly. They simply want the throne, or at least the right to tear it down for engagement.

That’s the story with the latest round of attacks on Nick Fuentes and the Groypers.

Fuentes did not inherit a ready-made audience or a friendly institutional lane. He built America First the hard way: livestreams that were repeatedly banned, campus activism that forced conversations the mainstream right preferred to avoid, a persistent focus on immigration, foreign policy realism, and cultural continuity that resonated with a generation of young men who felt the older conservative institutions had failed them. The “Groyper” label stuck because it described a real, identifiable cohort that kept showing up — at events, online, and increasingly in the pipelines of young Republican staffers and campus organizations. Even hostile outlets now admit the influence is measurable enough to worry about.

Building and maintaining that requires consistency under pressure. It requires continuing after payment processors cut you off, platforms exile you, and former allies distance themselves the moment the heat rises. It requires producing content night after night while the same critics who call it a “cult of personality” or “just streaming for donations” produce little of comparable durability themselves.

Contrast that with the new critics. Many of the loudest voices attacking Fuentes right now never constructed a parallel youth movement. They did not spend years turning online discontent into organized pressure. Some are lifestyle influencers or late arrivals who discovered the America First energy after it had already been cultivated, then decided the man who did the cultivation is the problem. Others are established conservative media figures who spent years ignoring or dismissing the concerns that Fuentes amplified, only to pivot into anti-Groyper moralizing once the numbers became impossible to ignore. Still others are former adjacent figures whose main contribution has been internal drama, fed accusations, and calls for people to abandon the only sustained effort in that space.

The charge that Groypers “haven’t earned the right to a movement” is particularly rich coming from people who have earned even less. A movement is not measured solely by formal PAC filings or official party titles. It is measured by whether people keep showing up, whether the ideas spread into institutions that once excluded them, and whether the core message survives repeated attempts to isolate it. By those standards, the record is clear: the people now declaring the project dead or illegitimate are usually the ones who never built a comparable alternative. They critique the architecture while offering no blueprint of their own.

What many of these attacks actually reveal is resentment at the existence of an independent pole. Fuentes and the Groypers represent a faction that cannot be fully managed by the usual donor class, media gatekeepers, or careerist influencers. That independence is treated as the real offense. If the movement can be framed as pure grift, pure online toxicity, or pure personality cult, then the hard work of building it can be dismissed and the energy redirected toward safer, more controllable channels — or simply dissipated through endless internecine fights.

Sabotage does not always look like open opposition from the left. Sometimes it looks like people on the same side of the broader cultural fight deciding that the one person who actually constructed durable infrastructure must be brought down so that no one else can claim leadership without their permission. The result is predictable: energy that could go into organizing, messaging, and institutional pressure is instead spent on purity spirals, fed-jacketing, and performative denunciations.

None of this requires treating Fuentes as above criticism. No political figure is. Tactical disagreements, questions about tone, or debates over prioritization are legitimate. What is not legitimate is the posture that says the only people allowed to speak about the future of the right are those who never did the unglamorous work of building an actual base that persists beyond a news cycle. The people who spent years creating something durable have more claim to it than the people who arrived later to declare it worthless.

Movements are not granted by committee or by the approval of competing influencers. They are earned by the people who show up when it is hard, keep producing when the platforms turn hostile, and refuse to dissolve when the internal knives come out. The new online critics have not done that work. They have not maintained anything comparable. Their primary contribution, in too many cases, is the attempt to dethrone the people who did.

That is not leadership. It is freeloading on someone else’s foundation while trying to knock the walls down.

Iowa

Zach Lahn’s Win is a Populist Blueprint for America First Republicans

Published

1 week ago

August 1, 2026

Pepe Jones

In early June 2026, a sixth-generation Iowa farmer and political newcomer named Zach Lahn did something most consultants said was impossible. He defeated a sitting congressman, Randy Feenstra, who carried President Trump’s endorsement, in the Republican primary for governor. Lahn won a narrow but decisive victory in a crowded five-candidate field, capturing roughly 38% of the vote to Feenstra’s 37%. The establishment was outspent in key ways, outworked on the ground, and ultimately rejected by voters who wanted something different.

Lahn ran explicitly as an “Iowa First” candidate. That slogan is not marketing fluff. It is the state-level application of the same principle that animates the national America First movement: the people who live in a place, work its land, raise its families, and bear the consequences of policy should come before corporate cartels, out-of-state investors, foreign interests, and the permanent political class.

The populist core of the campaign

Lahn’s platform centered on concrete grievances that ordinary Iowans feel every day. Iowa has some of the world’s best farmland, yet family farms have been disappearing by the thousands. More than a quarter of Iowa land is controlled by out-of-state and foreign owners. A handful of companies dominate inputs. Cancer rates in the state rank among the highest and fastest-rising in the nation, a crisis Lahn and many farmers attribute in part to the chemical and industrial agricultural system. Young people continue to leave. Communities hollow out.

Lahn’s response was blunt: break up the monopolies, keep Iowa land in Iowa hands, prioritize family farms over Big Ag, demand accountability from corporations that treat farmers and families as numbers rather than neighbors, and make the state healthy again through cleaner food, water, and medicine. He accepted the first endorsement from RFK Jr.’s MAHA Action PAC and framed the fight as one against a rigged system that benefits special interests over the people who actually live there.

In his victory speech he drove the point home: nobody thought it could be done. They were outspent, opposed by the establishment, told to wait their turn. The people of Iowa answered that the state does not belong to the lobbyists, special interests, and corporate giants. It belongs to them.

This is textbook populism. It is not left-wing redistribution or right-wing nostalgia. It is the insistence that concentrated power—whether corporate, bureaucratic, or globalist—has extracted too much value from the productive majority, and that the remedy is to restore sovereignty to the people who actually inhabit the place.

America First is the governing principle

“Iowa First” is simply America First applied to a state. The same logic scales. A nation that refuses to put its own citizens, workers, borders, industries, and cultural inheritance first will eventually cease to function as a coherent nation. The alternative—treating the country as an open platform for capital, labor, and ideology from anywhere—has produced precisely the hollowed-out communities, eroded trust, and elite detachment that voters are rejecting.

Lahn’s win shows the political potency of this approach even inside a party that already claims the Trump mantle. Trump’s endorsement of Feenstra was not enough to overcome a candidate who spoke more directly to local economic pain, health concerns, and cultural continuity. Voters rewarded the candidate who treated the soil, the water, the family farm, and the next generation as inheritance rather than commodities. That is the same instinct that fuels resistance to open borders, endless foreign wars that drain American blood and treasure, trade policies that gut domestic industry, and institutional capture by interests that view Americans as interchangeable units.

The uniparty dynamic Lahn criticized—career politicians on both sides who protect the same corporate and institutional arrangements—exists nationally. When voters sense that the system is designed to extract from them rather than serve them, they look for candidates willing to say the system itself is the problem. Lahn did that on the issues that matter most to rural and working people in his state. The same dynamic operates everywhere elites have insulated themselves from the consequences of their own policies.

Why this is the way forward

America First is not a slogan. It is a recognition of political reality. Nations that refuse to prioritize their own people eventually lose the capacity to provide security, prosperity, or continuity. Local versions of the same principle—Iowa First, Texas First, whatever the place—are how the larger project becomes durable. They rebuild the habits of stewardship and mutual obligation that abstract globalism dissolves.

Lahn’s narrow upset will not decide the November general election by itself. But it already demonstrated something important: when a candidate speaks clearly about protecting the productive base of a community from concentrated power, and does so without apology, voters respond. The political class can be beaten. Special interests can be named. The people who actually live in a place can still assert that the place belongs to them.

That is populism at its best. And it is why America First is not a temporary mood. It is the only coherent response to a system that has spent decades treating the American people as an afterthought. Iowa just offered another data point. The pattern is becoming hard to miss.

Iowa

Randy Feenstra Built on Kim Reynolds’ Betrayal of Steve King: The Artificial Replacement Who Ousted a Conservative Warrior

Published

2 months ago

May 30, 2026

Pepe Jones

In the summer of 2020, Iowa’s 4th Congressional District witnessed one of the most brazen establishment takeovers in recent Republican politics. Nine-term Congressman Steve King—the fiery, unapologetic voice of rural conservatism, border security, and Western civilization—was unceremoniously dumped by his own party. In his place? State Senator Randy Feenstra, a polished, establishment-backed challenger who cruised to victory in the June 2 primary with 45.5% of the vote to King’s 35.8%.

This wasn’t a grassroots revolt. It was a calculated betrayal orchestrated by the very insiders King had helped elevate—including Governor Kim Reynolds, whom he had proudly endorsed and supported just years earlier.

The Endorsement: King Lifts Reynolds When She Needed Him Most

Flash back to 2017-2018. Kim Reynolds was running for a full term as governor after ascending from lieutenant governor. Steve King didn’t just back her—he went all-in. Reynolds named King a statewide campaign co-chair and proudly touted his endorsement. In a November 2017 press release, she gushed: “Congressman Steve King is a strong defender of freedom and our conservative values. He’s independent, principled, and is fighting the good fight in Washington, D.C. You never have to question where he stands.”

King delivered for Reynolds in the heavily conservative 4th District. She rode that support to victory in 2018. Their alliance was public, mutual, and mutually beneficial—classic Republican teamwork, or so it seemed.

The Betrayal: Reynolds Stabs King in the Back

Fast forward to January 2019. After years of King being smeared by the media for his blunt defense of immigration enforcement and cultural issues, House Republican leadership stripped him of his committee assignments over remarks questioning why “white nationalist” had become a slur. King’s enemies pounced. Enter Randy Feenstra, who announced his primary challenge against the incumbent.

Governor Kim Reynolds? She didn’t lift a finger to defend the man who had co-chaired her campaign. Instead, she publicly washed her hands of him. In an interview with WHO-TV, Reynolds declared she would “stay out of the primary” but pointedly noted King’s surprisingly close 2018 re-election as a “wakeup call.” Translation: She wasn’t backing King over Feenstra.

Prominent Iowa Republicans like Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst followed suit and stayed neutral—abandoning the pattern of past support for King. Meanwhile, Feenstra raked in cash from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Right to Life, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and other establishment heavyweights. He painted King as “caustic” and ineffective, precisely the line the D.C. and Des Moines insiders wanted to hear.

Steve King, the guy who had carried water for the party through thick and thin, was left twisting in the wind. The same Reynolds who once called him a “strong defender of conservative values” now stood aside while the machine dismantled him.

Feenstra: The Artificial Candidate

Randy Feenstra didn’t storm onto the scene as a populist firebrand with grassroots rage behind him. He was the safe, scripted alternative. A state senator from Hull whose district overlapped King’s, Feenstra resigned a powerful Ways & Means committee chairmanship to run full-time—signaling deep establishment buy-in. He outraised King dramatically and dominated his home turf, but the broader narrative was clear: this was the party clearing out the “problematic” incumbent for someone who wouldn’t rock the boat or make national headlines for the wrong reasons.

Feenstra’s campaign pitch boiled down to “effectiveness” over principle. He criticized King’s rhetoric while promising results—code for “we’ll keep the seat Republican without the drama.” National GOP groups poured in to protect the safe red district from any general-election risk. King, stripped of power in Washington, was portrayed as the reason the district lacked a “seat at the table.”

The voters in the primary bought it. Feenstra won. King was out. The establishment had its man.

Why This Still Matters: The Pattern of Artificial Republicans

This wasn’t about ideology—Feenstra and King both cast conservative votes. It was about control. Steve King represented the raw, unfiltered voice of the heartland that made the Republican Party a fighting force. The insiders—Reynolds, the Chamber, the national PACs—wanted someone more manageable. Someone who wouldn’t embarrass them on cable news. Someone “artificial”: manufactured by money, party machinery, and calculated neutrality from the very people King had once helped.

Fast-forward to today, and the irony is thick. Feenstra is now running for governor in 2026, positioning himself as the heir to the Reynolds legacy. Meanwhile, Steve King—still influential in conservative circles—has thrown his support behind a challenger attacking Feenstra as the ultimate establishment candidate.

The 2020 primary wasn’t a rejection of conservatism. It was the establishment’s successful coup against one of its own most outspoken warriors. Randy Feenstra didn’t earn that seat through pure populist fire—he was handed it after the party betrayed the man who had helped build their machine.

Iowa conservatives should never forget: when the insiders decide you’re too loud, too principled, or too effective at exposing the real threats facing America, they’ll find a “cleaner” replacement. Steve King learned that the hard way. The rest of us should learn from it before the same machine installs more artificial candidates across the country.