September 3, 2026

Photo credit: Photo by Joe Doll/City Journal

HeroCare, a California-based medical supply company, collected less than $8,000 from Medicaid in 2020. By 2024, the company’s Medicaid revenues had exploded to over $18 million. How did HeroCare grow so quickly?

Christopher Rufo, Maddie Rowley, and the City Journal California team wanted to know the answer. They visited HeroCare’s listed addresses, reviewed the company’s Medicaid billing, and spoke to fraud experts, who said that HeroCare’s billing patterns raised serious questions.

“HeroCare appears to have earned most of its Medicaid revenue between 2020 and 2024 from a handful of basic plastic commodities,” they write. “How did the company sell enough plastic tubes to support a $40 million empire?”

Read the full investigation here.

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) have been around for years. Typically mounted on utility poles or police cars, they scan license plates to create time-stamped data points. The license plates can then be cross-referenced in real time with “hot lists” to alert law enforcement of drivers with warrants and stolen vehicles.

Unfortunately, some officers have abused the technology, using it to monitor romantic interests, for instance. This behavior, and concerns over privacy and surveillance, have led to more than 200 communities vowing to cancel or not renew their ALPR contracts.

“But police already have access to a multitude of other types of data and recorded material: from closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage to vast networks of both public and private surveillance cameras,” John Shjarback writes. “Singling out ALPRs as Big Brother makes little sense.” Because ALPRs can make policing more efficient, he argues, banning them completely is unwise.

Read more.

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the threat posed by Islamist terror remains formidable. The Taliban rules Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has reportedly reestablished its terrorist training camp at Tarnak Farm. JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate, threatens to overrun Mali. Al-Shabaab is undermining stability in Somalia. The Islamic State wages violence across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Why is the jihadi terrorist movement so resilient?

Ideology, for one thing. “Both al-Qaeda and ISIS draw from the same intellectual tradition, rooted in the conviction that Muslims are under siege from foreign infidels, corrupt apostate regimes, and a Western liberal order fundamentally hostile to Islam,” Bruce Hoffman writes.

And the groups have proved adaptable. When al-Qaeda’s leadership was destroyed after 9/11, its members divided authority to different franchises in the region. For instance, it didn’t take long for AQAP, its affiliate in Yemen, to replace it as the most serious terrorist threat to the U.S., with ISIS emerging less than a decade later. “This decentralized structure has enabled both groups to absorb repeated military setbacks while continuing to marshal fighters and resources to prosecute the war that [Osama] bin Laden declared 30 years ago,” Hoffman observes.

Read more.

American politics has become deeply fragmented. The digital age has seen a collapse of trust in institutions and weakened the authority of those who helped establish a cultural consensus. Information has splintered, with reality itself becoming increasingly contested.

“Conflict today is less about programs or ideologies than imposing one constructed world on reality and discrediting rival ones,” Martin Gurri writes. “It is a clash of competing certainties, a rhetorical war of quasi-religious conviction, waged with unusual intensity by people whose identities are bound up with the outcome.”

Read more about how these constructed worlds have shaped our politics.