November 12, 2026

Photo credit: Dennis Menendez

In 1995, California Governor Gavin Newsom founded PlumpJack Estate Winery in Oakville. Ten years later, the winery acquired a 54-acre property. Then in 2012, it purchased the Odette Estate Winery. Four years later, it bought Ladera Vineyards. And in 2022, it bought Oso Vineyard, bringing its total holdings to more than 400 acres.

“Newsom did not divest his financial stake in PlumpJack when he was elected governor,” Christopher Rufo, Ryan Thorpe, and Kenneth Schrupp write in a new investigation. “Between 2019 and 2024, tax returns for him and his wife show at least $11 million in income, most of it coming from wineries, restaurants, and other investments.”

What’s more, Newsom’s business appears to have relied on illegal labor.

Rufo, Thorpe, and Schrupp conducted interviews and dug through federal labor reports, court documents, and oversight records for all the details, which you can read here.

Set in Moscow in 1938, Ben Shapiro’s new film, Confession, follows a professor, Alexei, sent to Lubyanka Prison. His interrogator, Vladimir, tries to get him to confess that he knew his priest was involved with “counterrevolutionary activity.”

“The result is a thoughtful, absorbing film that takes deep moral questions seriously,” Rob Henderson writes. “At its center is a troubling question: What does a regime gain when its victim agrees to call himself guilty?”

That’s exactly what Communist regimes were all about: the goal wasn’t just to establish guilt, but whatever “truth” the leaders were after. They “pursued confessions even from the obviously innocent,” Henderson observes.

Read his review.