The Wonderful Conspiracy feat Yasha Levine & Rowan Wernham (E283)
Conspiracy theories about weather control and the California Drought don't hold a candle to the grim reality: a cabal of wealthy farmers controlling California's water and committing ecocide. We speak to Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham about their upcoming documentary, Pistachio Wars, a damning exposé of The Wonderful Company and the billionaire couple behind it: Lynda & Stewart Resnick.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA
Pistachio Wars: https://www.gofundme.com/f/pistachio-wars-pay-for-stock-footage / https://filmfreeway.com/pistachiowars / https://x.com/pistachiowars
Yasha Levine on Substack: http://yasha.substack.com
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 283, The Wonderful Conspiracy.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky and Julian Field.
One of the trickiest things about conspiracy theories is that they often occupy the space of very real conspiracies.
Which tend to be more mundane and related to the consolidation of power and capital.
In that vein, this week we're diving into territory that'll be familiar to anyone who's seen the Hollywood classic Chinatown.
A handful of backroom dealers controlling California's water.
And I'll probably find an opportunity to say, forget it, Jake.
It's wonderful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll figure it out.
I guess I just did.
Yeah.
Forget it, Yosh.
It's Chinatown.
You can actually say it's a wonderful town, I think.
Because they do have a town, you know?
Oh, yes, that's true.
Yeah, that is true.
And actually, I don't want to forget this.
I want to remember it because that maybe we'll learn something.
That's that's great, Jake.
Yeah, I think that at that point, no one will even recognize the original line.
So you've done your work here.
Our guests are Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham, the duo behind the upcoming documentary Pistachio Wars.
Welcome to the podcast, fellas.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, a pleasure.
It was a pleasure to watch the movie.
It's really well put together and we're looking forward to a wider release.
We'll get into that later.
But to get us started, I wanted to read a 2015 Guardian article about conspiracy theories concerning California's recurring droughts.
Drought blamers.
California conspiracists see government's hand in arid climate.
A lack of rain is way too simple an explanation for these conspiracy theorists.
It's why it hasn't rained much in four years that matters.
The U.S.
government is geoengineering the California climate.
To most Californians, the state's four-year drought is not all that mysterious.
It just hasn't rained in a very long time.
Then there are those for whom that's way too simple an explanation.
Last week a crowd of several hundred turned out in Redding in Northern California to hear grave warnings from a solar power contractor named Dane Wigington that the weather has been taken over by government geoengineers spraying our skies with toxic chemicals in a doomed attempt to slow down global warming.
In April, an essay published under the name State of the Nation argued that the drought was not only artificially created, it was in fact a stepping stone in the U.S.
military-industrial complex's master grand plan to take over the planet and achieve, quote, total control of all of Earth's resources.
The country's leading conspirator, radio host Alex Jones, has jumped on the bandwagon, as has Natural News, a website known for its campaigns against public vaccination programs.
Quite why the U.S.
government would want to fry California to a crisp is a matter of some confusion and debate.
But the longer the drought goes on, it is already the longest of the modern era, the more currency the fringe theories appear to be gaining.
There is no natural weather at this point, Wingington's website asserts.
The climate engineers decide when it'll rain or snow, where, how much, and how toxic the rain or snow will be.
There will be drought or heat.
The conspiracists are in no doubt.
The government is spraying chemicals and artificially holding back weather patterns off the California coast to keep the rain away.
They are doing this with planes.
Wingington likes to show audience footage of thick contrails spewing into the sky, evidence he calls undeniable.
But they may also have operated in the past from a military installation in Alaska, now closed, called the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP.
HAARP has been a focus of conspiracy theorists for years and was previously blamed for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, even though its mandate, while it was operating, was to find clear communication routes through the ionosphere and had nothing to do with climate.
Mainstream scientists and environmental activists listen to these theories in despair.
You want to pull your eyes out because these people are so fucking stupid!
David Allgood, political director of the California League of Conservation Voters, told The Guardian,
"The only agenda here is the agenda of the oil and coal companies. Exxon knew back in the 1970s
that their products were destroying the planet, and instead of doing something about it, they
decided to bribe the government. If people want to see conspiracies, it's not the government
causing them. It's the fossil fuel industry." So I thought this was an interesting article
because, you know, obviously it shows how some of the thinking in conspiracy theorist circles
misses the point.
But it's also interesting because in your movie you talk a little bit about the drought and how it is treated entirely as a kind of natural phenomenon, when in actuality, despite the lack of rain, very often the water is being rerouted by these interests, these like big consolidated farming companies.
So we're We're not here to really focus on oil companies, villainous as they are, but we will obviously touch on them just because of the amazing new way they found to water their plants with, you know, oil runoff.
But yeah, we're here to talk about a cabal of farmers.
So, Yasha Rowan, can you tell us a bit about what led you to state in your documentary, a small group of powerful families have seized control of California's water supply?
We stated this in our documentary because it's true.
And it's really a, you know, it's not even a, I mean, I don't know anyone, I think any, any historians that study the history of California agriculture or really California history in the way that things developed here, it's sort of been a fundamental truth of history here on the West Coast.
I mean, not just California, but most of the Southwestern and Southwestern states is that agricultural interests were the first to really dominate
the political space.
And other political interests, you know, the most recent Silicon Valley and tech
and things like that and aerospace and after the world, during World War II and
afterwards, they came to come to the forefront. So tech is like associated with,
you know, California in a big way. Hollywood also associated with California in a big way.
But farmers and really large scale farmers, we're not talking about kind of like the farmers of the Midwest, you know, that really were like family farmers that settled the land.
Of course, these farmers don't exist anymore in America, really.
It's a very niche thing.
But even in the 19th century, there were no real small farmers in California because the nature of the land, the fact that it required you to move water around required a lot of capital.
And so it was very quickly dominated by these large landowners.
And so these big farmers, it's a cabal.
It's been a cabal from the beginning because they've run the state.
And so nothing's really changed on that.
It's just California became much more developed and other industries kind of plugged in and it became a much more diverse economy.
But that core group of, you know, agricultural interests is still the oldest.
I'd say it's the oldest business group in California.
And today it's the most overlooked.
I think it's the most ignored.
No one really... I mean, people know that California, you know, produces a lot of agricultural products.
You know, you see them on shelves around the country and around the world.
But no one really thinks about them as being a really powerful political force in the state.
And they like to keep it that way, generally.
I mean, most of them.
I mean, the subject of our film, or one of the main subjects of our film, The Wonderful Company and The couple, you know, the very loving couple that's behind this company, they're different.
They're a lot more public facing.
They're a lot more showy, glitzy.
But generally speaking, farmers don't like to be in the limelight.
They like to operate in, you know, just behind closed doors.
And so California is really, yeah.
So that's why we said it, because it's a fundamental fact.
It's a fundamental political reality in California.
Very few people know about it.
Yeah, I mean, there was a time when we were going to publish an article that said there was no drought in California, you know, with a provocative title.
And you'll get farm lobby groups that'll say that the drought in California is man-made for different reasons, and they'll say it's about water allocation, and they'll say it's because the water is being diverted to help some little fish, you know, That are going to go extinct in the San Francisco Bay, whereas if we were going to say something like that, we would probably say it's because California's water system is a very highly developed, high-tech system.
Most of the water, almost all of the rivers, are captured and run into dams, and then the water from those dams is distributed through the state and managed like a commodity.
The decisions around who gets water are political, basically, and economic.
Obviously, yeah, there was not very much rain falling out of the sky, but For most people in California, they might have their gardens, but their water comes from the tap, it comes from the system, and they're in competition with farmers.
It's roughly 80% of the state's developed water that goes to farmers and around 20% to residents.
And you can argue about what privatized means, whether it's utilized by private companies
or controlled by private companies.
But obviously the overwhelming majority of water is privatized.
It's controlled by private interests.
And I mean, water politics in California are difficult because you start talking about it
and people's eyes glaze over, which is kind of why we had to put this Iran thing
in the documentary, but it's important.
Because you guys are both in California and Los Angeles.
And, you know, you I don't know if you have this in your homes, but I'm sure you have low flush toilets or low flush shower heads.
I'm not just low volume shower heads.
You know, there's I grew up in California and I've seen firsthand, you know, all the different initiatives that the state rolls out to try to limit urban water use.
Right.
And these things are all good.
You know, you don't want to just be draining water down the toilet for no reason.
But, you know, to put into perspective, you know, why to put the sort of the stranglehold that agriculture has on the political system and the water system.
Rowan mentioned this 80 percent as a number of the total amount of water that's used.
You know, 80% of it is used by agriculture.
So if there's some kind of, you know, cosmic, you know, ray goes by tomorrow or a comet flies by tomorrow and all human beings disappear, right?
But farms remain, you'll only achieve a 20% reduction in water use.
Maximum, maximum.
So, I mean, that number is actually disputed.
Some say it's 85, 90%.
I mean, it just depends how you calculate it.
But so I'm saying that as a maximum of all human, you know, Urban, suburban, human activity ceases tomorrow, you will achieve overall a 20% reduction in water use.
So when you're talking about, you know, these initiatives of saving water, you know, it's basically a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
And not a bad thing because we're talking about still huge amounts of water, but what no one talks about is what is the other 80% being used for?
what kind of things are being grown with that water?
Because that water, when it's taking out of the natural ecosystems, and because rivers are dammed,
all major rivers in California are dammed, most of them have several dams on them,
and so you're destroying ecosystems, you're destroying natural life,
you're altering the environment, you're sort of doing terraforming on a kind of a mass,
you know, on a statewide level.
You know, you can see the stuff from space.
So if this was done, it's what, when people think of, oh, we're gonna have to terraform Mars to live there,
I mean, this is the kind of scale of terraforming that's happened and happening in California.
And so you're destroying life, you know, to grow something.
And what is this thing that's being grown?
And that's the central question, right?
When we did this documentary, we look at the crops that are being grown and they are generally, for the most part now, the big crops that dominate the market are boutique, like luxury crops that are mainly grown for export.
And the thing that's grown is sort of determined by, not even by market forces, but by essentially by these two billionaires who decided that like, this is a great market.
Let's develop it.
Let's make money off of it.
Let's push it on people because no one even eats these You know, pistachios are one of the major crops that consume all this water.
So they're creating markets, growing things that people don't even want to eat.
And then, you know, launching these massive marketing campaigns, you know, essentially corporate propaganda to get you to eat the things that you didn't even want to eat, you know, so they could make money so that they can keep taking the water.
So the whole, you know, we all need to eat, obviously, and there's always a trade off, but what that water is used for to grow and who it enriches and what it kills, right?
That's a conversation or that's even a topic that's, you know, way off.
It's hard to even have it with people because people can't even fathom even having this conversation because no one thinks they have even the power to, you know, I don't know, who am I to say what's grown or whatever.
When you see the people lobbying around farm water, they always have pictures of vegetables, you know, lettuce and tomato.
The things we desperately need to put on the table to keep the children healthy and feed our families and whatever.
But, you know, the company at the center of our film, The Wonderful Company, you've got these two people, Stuart and Linda Resnick, that kind of rolled into farming in the 70s from, you know, previously having an odd background, you know, in marketing and, you know, like a security business, Teleflora sort of selling trinkets.
They bought up some farms and kind of accidentally ended up with Pomegranates, pistachios, some citrus crops, some almonds, and because marketing was Linda Resnick's speciality, they put a huge amount of money into starting to launch these brands.
Palm Wonderful was the first one with the palm juice, and then Wonderful Pistachios was probably the biggest hit.
Like Yasha said, there wasn't a huge pistachio market in the US before.
They were there, but they were on the edges.
Then they launched them with Super Bowl commercials, and you've got Gangnam Style, you've got Stephen Colbert, you've got the Prancercise Lady, And so what that enabled them to do, they essentially created the market and they created a monopoly position for themselves in the market.
So they had like, I think at least two thirds, maybe as much as 80% of the American market is processed, at least by them.
Yeah.
Like when I was a kid, like pistachios were only something that were found in like a bowl on like my softest side table, you know, it was like, Oh, what is this like strange nut that like my, you know, my grandparents eat?
There was no, there was no kind of like sort of like hip consciousness like about pistachios until those commercials came along.
Yeah, I know.
Now you can't walk into the bodega, you know, without seeing a huge display.
Yeah.
So I definitely want to get into Stuart and Linda Resnick, but just I want to give people a sense of scale here.
I mean, California has the largest system of aqueducts and privately owned water banks in the world, right?
Yep.
And the pistachio fields currently are 10 times the size of Manhattan.
Yep.
So pistachios are not classically something that there's a lot of demand for in the United States.
So could you tell us a little bit about America's relationship with the pistachio and how this kind of pistachio empire was created?
Yeah, it has an actually very interesting origin story that's an unexpected one.
Traditionally, you know, the cultures that have eaten pistachios, you know, they're frequently Eastern cultures, Middle Eastern cultures.
And traditionally, Iran was the pretty much, I think, you know, Turkey grew some pistachios, depending on the climate, different countries grew, but Iran was essentially the sole supplier of pistachios to the world, you know?
And so what happened was when the Iranian revolution happened, there was some friction between Iran and the U.S.
for the U.S.' 's involvement in Iran's domestic affairs and essentially, you know, overthrowing Iran's democratically elected government.
All that led to the U.S.
embassy sort of being taken over.
Hostages being taken in Iran, American hostages being taken in Iran.
That triggered by the Carter administration, the first sanctions, the first round of sanctions against Iran.
And that moment was the birth of the American pistachio industry.
Because suddenly, you know, there was a small market for pistachios in America, right?
Suddenly its main supplier, its only supplier, was cut off.
And so there was some pistachios grown in California, but that was when enterprising farmers began to see that they have And in here and that they have, you know, essentially an open market right now.
And so that was the birth of the pistachio industry.
And not long afterwards, the Resnick's came along and again, they saw an opening there.
They saw a market.
They saw a crop that could be expanded, could be marketed, could be sold.
And they really took it to the next level.
But the origin of pistachios in America, being grown in America, it goes back to America's meddling in Iran.
And yeah, so that's that's the story.
So Stuart and Linda Resnick, they own more water than anybody else on earth.
And I know that they also own Fiji, which has its own, you know, probably documentary that needs to be made about how they own, for like a dime, they own like a ton of the public water sources around that island.
But for now, let's focus a little bit on California.
So tell us a bit about How Linda and Stuart Resnick came to be farmers, because that wasn't always the case.
And now when you see them, like they just, you know, she is, I hate to say this, but she's, she's, she's incredibly freaky.
I mean, she has a lot of plastic surgery.
She loves to do kind of like public appearances and they use, you know, faces like Stephen Colbert and stuff like that to like put a fun face on the company.
So yeah, tell us a little bit about how they came up How they came to own and run the wonderful company and what effect that had on California's water and etc.
Yeah, I mean, well, the classic story is that in the 70s, there was, you know, rampant inflation.
And so they just started buying up farmland to hedge against that because, you know, land is always a reasonably safe investment.
And then, you know, they got a farming company along with that.
It was called Paramount Farms at the time.
You know, I think just as they sat on those assets, they realized some of these things are marketable, you know, so they started to create these brands.
So, you know, they came from a background that was, you know, very not traditional for farming.
You know, Linda was a Hollywood kid.
Her dad was a movie producer.
Stuart Resnick kind of hints that he grew up around the mob in New Jersey.
He had a security business that got snapped, bringing large amounts of heroin through LAX.
I just want to stop because I know you like conspiracy theories and just this is something that you know there's this it's the stuff that swirls around it I'm sorry to interrupt you but yes Stuart has an interesting background I mean he came from a poor background Jewish you know kind of background in New Jersey he got into UCLA Law School and he suddenly launches this cleaning business you know it's like he's a cleaner Suddenly.
And it's an extremely successful business.
A janitorial business that makes like $10 million.
Yeah, when I saw that in the documentary, I was like, I was like, I was like, wait a minute.
I was like, wait, he sold off this janitor business for, like cuts to an interview of him being like, well, I used to clean, you know, I used to mop floors.
How do you grow that into a $10 million business?
Yeah, exactly.
And this is in the 60s.
This is like, that's a lot of money.
It's a good time.
It's a good time to New Jersey mob connections in the 60s.
Exactly.
And then it only gets more interesting because as you know, LA is basically kind of an Anglo town, especially in those days.
It was dominated by...
by white people, Jews who worked at Hollywood, but the political system was dominated
by the old LA Anglo community.
And he parlayed his janitorial business that he sold into a security business.
They not only installed security alarms in people's homes and businesses,
but he had the largest, basically, private security force, armed security force in Los Angeles.
And the former Chihuahua police on the payroll.
And so it's a very interesting trajectory from just some nobody guy in New Jersey
who comes to study at UCLA.
Says that he has some connections to the mob, again, his dad.
This is something that he just said publicly.
He gave essentially one interview to one journalist for a book that he was authorized to be written about him.
You know, a biography.
And he, this kind of, this business journalist, these two business journalists who wrote a pretty flattering book about the sort of the cotton king, the previous generation of these kind of agricultural oligarchs, the older generation.
And Resnick liked it so much, Stewart liked it so much, that he invited them in and, you know, gave them a couple of interviews.
And so he opened up to them a little bit.
He's very, very tight-lipped about his past.
And then he quickly shut down the project.
I think he was getting uncomfortable with where it was going.
He's a special guy.
down and that's it.
And so some of the material that came out of those interviews was used by another journalist
in a different book about real estate in California.
So we know very little about his background, but his trajectory is very interesting.
So already he's a special guy.
I mean, if there isn't anything funny going on there and maybe there is no mob connection,
maybe he is just an extremely successful businessman who has a nose for markets and getting ahead.
But already he has an interesting story and Linda herself has an interesting story too.
You know, her father produced The Blob, one of the greatest horror films.
Right, that's right.
So they, yeah, so I'm sorry to interrupt you, Rowan, but yeah, but so there's a lot of, they're interesting people, you know, they're not just like, I don't know, they're not just like bland.
They're unexpected.
Yeah.
Unexpected people for farming.
You know, and one person that we were talking to looked at the next couple of businesses, which they brought up, Taliflora and the Franklin Mint, and kind of said, well, you know, if you were still interested in moving drugs around, those would be great businesses to own.
But, you know, I don't like to just kind of speculate, make things up.
Well, you don't have to speculate about the big heroin bust, right?
Yeah, the heroin bust was covered by the LA Times.
Anyway, long digression into their past.
They had a number of businesses.
They've always had a big portfolio that they kept under the name Roll Global.
But then as the pistachios and the pomegranate juice, everything with the wonderful brand took off, they basically rebranded the whole company as Wonderful.
their agricultural empire by that stage was the biggest part of their portfolio.
I mean, pistachios are probably, I think, the biggest single thing. They're about a billion
dollars annually now, and maybe they have like four or five billion annual in revenue.
The way that they take control of water by owning this farming empire is that in California,
the water system is kind of public, but it's quasi-private.
So if you own land, that usually gives you an interest in a water district. So you can
essentially, as a private company, by owning a lot of land, almost take control of water
districts and your water rights.
And everybody running the system is very sympathetic to business. It's a very kind of
fragmented, decentralized system where a lot of power is given to local bodies that are essentially
extensions of the industries that control them. So simply by owning a lot of land, they took
control of a lot of water, but then they also took steps to basically grab infrastructure.
So in the 90s, they got this thing called the current water bank.
You know, it sort of happened in a backroom deal.
They got some state legislators in there.
They did a whole pile of work on legislation called the Monterey Agreement that kind of also changed some of the ways that water could be sold in California.
They allowed like more open trading.
This brings us to the kind of Lost Hills company town and the Central Valley itself and how it was turned from a lush green habitat, as you guys put it, to arid wastelands with prisons, garbage pits, and oil wells.
So, can you explain to us, like, how California gets basically browned and crisped up and what this Lost Hills company town is?
Well, alright, so you know, as someone who's probably driven from L.A.
to San Francisco, right, you know that there's that whole space.
Oh yeah.
That you just want to get past that fucking...
Yeah, as fast as possible and it's just a straight line right on the highway just goes straight straight through the valley.
I mean the Central Valley is essentially like a giant tub, right?
It was, you actually used to be, I think, an inland sea at some point.
Then it broke through where the Golden Gate Bridge is and all the water flooded out of
there.
So it's kind of a natural lake area.
So when water, when snow melt comes off the mountains, off the Sierras, it pools in the
Central Valley and stays there.
It was a floodplain.
It was kind of like a beautiful wetland teeming with birds and tule elk and bears.
It was a pretty lush place before people got there, around the gold rush.
But very quickly as agriculture followed the gold rush, you know, people like Henry Miller, the first big cattle baron, realized that there were sort of loopholes that they could claim land.
So anything that was navigable by boat that was a swamp land, you know, you could kind of claim it if you could say you were developing it.
He did all sorts of tricks.
He had like a boat on wheels.
I can't remember exactly how that worked, but he just got wheeled around in a boat and claimed huge amounts of land.
So these kind of early enterprising cattle barons were able to claim these massive land empires and the first thing they did was to usually drain the water or try to control the way the water was flowing.
There used to be a massive lake, there still is a lake in the middle of California called Lake Tulare, and it actually re-flooded.
You know, in the last couple of years, because we've flipped from record drought into record rainfall, so all of these corporate farmers suddenly saw their farmland reclaimed by the water.
There's nothing they could do to stop it because it's all gathering in the middle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Because most of the farming happens on this dry leg bed, essentially.
Yeah.
And so the history of it is that because waterfall is so seasonal in California, it usually rains in the winter, as you know.
So you have some rains in the winter and then in the spring you have some snowmelt.
So you have, the water is not year round.
And so the earliest things that farmers, these farmers, these big farmers needed to do was create, you know, aqueducts and small private dams to hold the water so they can, so they can distribute it regularly to their crops.
And so, you know, that was the beginning of this terraforming of the land, right?
It couldn't have been done without the federal government.
You know, even on the state level, the state didn't have enough funds to, you know, finance
these huge public works projects, as they called them, but they were really done for
the benefit of a small, of a small agricultural elite in the state.
And so over time, just the entire region became, just was one giant continuous farm all through
the Central Valley.
And over time, every river, every, you know, major creek was dammed and its water diverted to farmland.
And so what used to be this very, very seasonal place that would, you know, get really wet in the winter and in the spring and then dry out in the summer and in autumn and become kind of, you know, semi-arid.
And, you know, it'd be this, it'd be the cycle.
Was completely just turned into an arid wasteland except for the patches, the green, bright green patches of farmland.
So all of the, you know, the ecosystem that was the Central Valley, this floodplain, was completely destroyed.
So all of the animals, you know, a whole web of life was just wiped off the map because you just have these monocrops and that's it, you know?
And, you know, you're using pesticides, you're using monocrops, you're using, you know, mechanical, you know, machinery to just to basically slice through the land.
You're just killing everything except the crops that you're growing.
And for a long time, it was like, you know, it was like a really simple stuff
like alfalfa, which is feed for cows and cotton.
And they just flood that plain with water.
And over time, things would evolve.
You know, they grow citrus and things like that.
So other things would be added depending on market conditions,
depending on, you know, what was more profitable for farmers.
And at this point, of course, you know, then suburban development started to creep in.
So generally speaking, that whole area, you know, is, is completely developed, you know, and the parts that aren't developed are devoid of life.
I mean, just to be out there is to be like, it feels like you're on a different planet.
You know, it doesn't feel like you're on earth really, because it's so lifeless.
It's so dry.
You step just a couple of feet to the left and then there's this lush farm that's laid out with computer grids.
I wouldn't even say they're lush, though, because the thing about it is it's this very neoliberal efficiency where they don't want anything except for the crop growing there, so any weed is kind of cleared away.
But I think one other thing that's striking is that, like you said, the Delta, the farms are older, they're smaller, because it made sense to farm there naturally.
And then big companies like the Wonderful Company came in pretty late, where a lot of the good land had been taken.
So they kind of came in and swooped in and got this land that used to be owned by oil companies.
Farming empire is in some of the worst land in Central California.
It's got no groundwater a lot of it still has active oil production But I mean as Yasha said that the sort of it's just an odd feeling of desolation when you're there Which is which is a strange thing when you think about it as a food producing area like you don't really think of like farming areas as being a dead zone, but that's what they are just because of the way that industry has really pillaged them and and also because of an extension of this kind of very narrow and They'll talk a lot about how efficient they are with water, but what that really means is that they drip irrigate the trees so they don't put a drop more water than would be needed to keep the crop alive.
So there's no weeds, there's no flowers, there's no insects that shouldn't be there.
Very rarely birds.
It's just this desert, you know, this desert.
The bees that they need to pollinate the farms are trucked in.
Frozen, you know, frozen bees that they thaw out.
Yeah, everything about it is controlled and squeezed, right?
Just fully squeezed, you know, extracted.
You know, so when you're there, it does feel like, I mean, it feels, it's interesting because there's also, as Rowan mentioned, a lot of the newer farmland that came online that the Resnick's owned was bought off oil companies.
And so what the Resnick's bought was like the top layer of soil that they can plant trees on.
But the substrate, the mineral layer, where there's still some oil, is still owned by oil companies.
So it's actually, there's actually like, they divided the land based on the layer of the land.
So you actually can own different slices of the land.
And so you'll actually go into an orchard, you know, growing these healthy crops like, you know, pistachios or even citrus crops.
Like they have their mandarins, you know, their branded mandarins that are genetically sort of modified cuties or whatever the hell they call them now.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Halos.
Halos.
Halos, because they had a split with the QT brand.
Yeah, it's the Halos now.
So there'll be these trees, you know, these orchards, the green.
They're laid out in a perfect, precise grid, kind of going out to the horizon.
And then in the middle of that orchard will be oil derricks that are just bobbing up and down.
You know, bobbing up and down.
And then there'll be, you know, these pipes that are oil stained that will be snaking along the ground to these bigger collection kind of tanks where the oil is stored for pickup.
So it's the two things.
The two things are when you think of oil, you know, the oil business, you think of desolation.
You know, you think of, you know, just nothing alive around oil facilities.
Right.
The trees are there.
The food is grown right there.
And so they do fit together.
The desolation actually is, yeah, it's scary to be out there.
And you know that the water that feeds it is taken out from, you know, what is now a dead ecosystem.
It's been dead for so long that people in California, even people who grew up in California, lived several generations in California, they don't even remember it, you know, because it's been dead for so long.
No, you have to go and read old Steinbeck novels to find out that there was once a lush valley there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, I mean, that was so frightening, like, when watching the documentary, because I had no idea.
I had no idea that to see these, like, dozens and dozens of oil bobbers, you know, amidst the fruit trees was just, like, something that, yeah, was, like, incredibly frightening to me.
I mean, I told you guys before we, yeah, before we started recording how, like, you know, watching the movie, Oftentimes felt like watching a horror movie and I mean and I mean Resnick herself I mean she looks like she's got like the energy of like a like a spiritual medium if that makes any sense like kind of like a Hollywood medium like she has that kind of that kind of energy anyways but yes seeing all the oil drilling happening right like within the and just how much of it even even the the fields of the drillers or the bobbers whatever you call them without any plants around them it's just like
Oh my god, there's just like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these machines.
But at least they're not, you know, pumping oil back in and using like oil runoff water to feed the plants, right?
That would be terrifying.
They'd never do that.
No, that would be a line too far.
So tell us about that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, so when you drill the oil, there's a lot of water that goes into that process, injected into the wells, and that comes up dirty.
It's got chemicals from the drilling process.
It's got oil residue.
So in a lot of cases, the companies will just dump it in a pit around California, probably illegally, and like kind of let it seep into the ground.
But then at some point Chevron came up with a recycling scheme for this water.
So they would take it and use some walnut shells left over from the agricultural industry to filter it somewhat and run it into these pools, you know, where you can still see quite a lot of oil on the top.
They'll skim it out and then run that water into the agricultural water system.
So you'll see the agricultural canals will have an oil slick on top of them.
They'll have There's a lot of crud floating in there.
It smells like oil.
It smells like oil.
Intuitively, something doesn't seem very good about it.
So the walnuts really aren't doing their job, is what we're seeing.
Yeah.
We have a walnut problem.
We have a fish problem.
They're getting in the way.
Yeah.
It's a good way.
They're very resourceful.
They'll use their waste.
But at some point, Mark Ruffalo, actually, the Avenger, started a water testing company.
So he threw some money into it.
I think it's called Water Defense or something like that?
Yeah.
And they paid some scientists to go out and test the water and the scientists found acetone, benzene, they found all of these pretty nasty industrial solvents and oil chemicals.
And you'd think the reaction from the industry would be like, oh jeez, we probably shouldn't use this.
Especially a company like Wonderful that has this very healthy image and they're selling Halos to put in your kid's lunchbox.
But the company's essentially just brushed it off and they said, well, okay, you found these chemicals, but we're going to wait and see if we find, if they get into the food.
Oddly enough though, like the only brand consciousness I have around fruit or nuts, like is the Wonderful Company.
Like, because now that we've switched to Hulu and the streaming services, I only get the like antidepressant commercials, but like when watching, like from childhood, to the streaming services watching regular television.
The only thing I remember are the wonderful, the pistachio wonderful commercials, the cuties.
You know, I remember when the cutie craze came.
And like that's, and then I guess before that, the California Raisins, that's basically it.
Like that's my brand consciousness of like- - All of that has grown with oil waste water.
Yeah.
Yes.
Congratulations.
I don't even know if you can escape it, you know, because if you go and try and buy Cuties as opposed to Halos, I'm sure they're all roughly grown in the same area.
So, I mean, the Wonderful Company is the most recognizable brand now.
And, you know, I mean, they actually just admitted to it on their website.
It's in the FAQ section.
It might be gone now, but it was on the Wonderful Halos site.
They said, you know, it's naturally occurring water that comes up with oil waste, you know, but it's totally safe.
I just want to finish a thought here because I think, you know, you started off with a reading about conspiracy theories, right?
About, you know, that the government and these corporations are controlling the weather, that there's nothing natural about the weather.
I mean, talk about a conspiracy theory.
I mean, this is what fascinated me when I first got into reporting.
First, about the Resnicks and the wonderful company and, you know, just generally the ecosystem in which they live, the agriculture industry in California, and how open it is.
I mean, so these conspiracies, these horrible things are happening out in the open.
Like, You could drive, all of it is private property, but because it's owned by these absentee landlords, essentially, who are sitting in Beverly Hills or somewhere else, no one cares that you're there.
So they have some, you know, low-paid workers that are checking that the drip irrigation system is working, they're, you know, spraying some chemicals.
If you drive up there, they don't know who you are, and they don't, frankly, they don't care.
And so you could, you have, you're free to roam this huge expanse of land, right?
And the crimes, you know, quote-unquote, that they're committing, or the horrible things that they're doing, that you'd think, you know, they definitely want to keep it, you know.
Quiet, you know, they definitely, and if you find out, you know, they're going to whack you, you know, they're going to try to shut you up.
It's like, no, they don't care.
They don't care that you go and look with your own eyes at this pool of wastewater with oil waste in it.
And you can just walk down, you know, using your feet, walk down and look at where the canal ends.
It's not, it's, it doesn't take that, it doesn't take that much.
You know, and you can see the brands of the companies, what they grow there in the fields that are getting this water.
So you could you could look at the oil derricks side by side with the healthy fruit snacks that you're buying in the grocery store.
It doesn't matter.
It's all in the open.
And so that's the thing about, you know, conspiracy theories is that you don't really need to.
I mean, the biggest conspiracies are right out in the open and they're not really conspiracies, I guess.
The environment is so business-friendly, basically, that they believe that they can operate with impunity and they're right, generally speaking.
There was a big protest about the oil waste water used on the crops and people turned up and shouted at their offices a little bit and they just basically let it die down and it went away.
Exactly, because it wasn't actually people who cared.
It was, you know, it was an environmental organization, Food and Water Watch, a great organization.
You know, they organized the protest, so people who worked for this environmental organization, you know, dressed up and marched to their offices and did a little protest.
And, you know, the LA Times wrote about it, a couple of stories, and it just disappeared.
Right?
Yeah.
And to the extent that anybody even read those stories, I don't even, you know, if 5,000 people read those stories, I'd be surprised, you know?
So, because just no one wants to know, no one wants to care, and because people are so powerless generally in their lives, that it's, they really do operate with impunity and no fear whatsoever.
You know, and it is shocking to see it.
I mean, I'm pretty cynical as a, you know, as a longtime investigative reporter, pretty cynical about these things.
You know, I'm professional about it.
I know that, you know, the world is the way it is and it's very difficult to change it.
But I don't know, when you're confronted with something as this basic, this kind of, this just brazen, I mean, just to irrigate crops with fucking oil waste, you know, I don't even know how, what?
You know, and yet I'm like, here I am and I've already, to me, it's sort of normalized already, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're like, yeah, that's just, oh, well, they do that.
We're not dead, I guess.
You did choose to spend some time out there, and you spent some time specifically in Lost Hills, which is a kind of
wonderful company town.
And it's so funny because, you know, it probably wouldn't take very much for the Resnicks to make sure their company
town had, let's say, safe water, safe air, all of this stuff.
But they are completely incapable and/or they don't care.
They just did a bit of kind of cosmetic work, like installed a little park for kids or whatever, beautified a little city center area.
But in general, we're talking about tap water, air, and in general, just the environment there being incredibly poor and poisoned.
So can you tell us a little bit about Lost Hills?
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, obviously the Resnick's consider themselves to be good philanthropic citizens, you know, they're kind of liberal, California liberals.
And at a certain point, there was an early article pointed out some of the inequality between them and their workforce.
You know, Linda was shocked.
She's like, wow, our workers are living in poverty.
How could that have happened?
What conditions could have led to this?
So they turned their attention to this town, Lost Hills, which is kind of adjacent to their fields, which also means it's adjacent to a large oil refinery, a big oil field, which is a block from the local school, and started to spend some money around town.
And they have to spend money because the town's not incorporated.
It doesn't have any local agency.
It doesn't have a tax base.
Obviously, they don't pay any tax out there.
I don't know where they pay their tax, but it's certainly not Lost Hills.
So they spent millions of dollars building a nice park.
They fixed up some of the streets.
They put in a community center.
They got a ton of good PR.
David Brooks in the New York Times wrote an editorial about them all over the place.
That was an early editorial, not the last.
But yeah, then you go to the town and sure, there's some things there that are nicely developed, but it's a charter school.
It's a park.
And then you start talking to people and there's sort of like a low-level Flint water crisis there.
So because most of the water for the drinking water comes from aquifers, it's pumped up.
And because they're drained so low by the farming, a lot of these chemicals that are present in the water get concentrated.
So you've got arsenic that's naturally occurring, but now it's in the water system
at like illegally high levels or higher than state safety levels.
So the town had responded to this by using a cheap chemical filtration system.
They dump a whole pile of something in the water that I suppose neutralizes the arsenic
and it makes it taste terrible.
It's not drinkable.
You've got people saying that their kids are getting sort of dry skin and rashes and stuff from it.
Most people are drinking bottled water.
It's one of those problems, also like the Flint problem, where depending on the pipes, it will react worse or better.
So sometimes it'll react with certain pipes and really have a problem.
Some people, maybe with plastic pipes or something, they're not going to have the same level of problems.
So it's a difficult problem to pin down.
But yeah, I mean, you had, you know, basically, you know, cosmetic improvements in the town while this, like, really core necessity of good drinking water was not serviced.
You've got a lot of health problems due to air quality because of the proximity to the oil fields.
Also probably some level of agricultural chemicals that are drifting and being sprayed.
A lot of elderly farm workers have their thyroid removed, which is normally a sign that you've been exposed
to chemicals, bad chemicals.
Not the good kind, yeah.
This is like the real-life, like, horror version of, like, SimCity, you know, when, like, your town is failing, and, like, you got all the unhappy faces, everybody's frowning, and then you, like, slap a park in the middle of the residential area, and, like, for a brief period of time, all of the little, like, faces turn happy and green, but then, but it still can't, you know, you haven't fixed the underlying issues of, like, your horrible, like, town mismanagement.
And it looks like they also kind of hire people to go do water testing and go, well, no, actually, your tests are wrong.
We got these other guys to do tests.
And they send in lawyers to argue with people at the kind of city meetings and stuff like that.
Yeah, they do that.
But, you know, and of course, they push back.
They say that everything's good and they blame the government for forcing them to clean the water, which they say made it even worse.
What's interesting about it is that I was actually surprised that people
were willing to talk to us, just because the Wonderful Company
is the main employer in town.
So most of the men work seasonally because depending on the crops,
you're moving around a lot, people are moving around a lot,
around the Central Valley, depending on the time of the year.
And so some people are working part of the year for the Wonderful Company
and it's a major part of their paycheck.
Some people are working at the factory.
Obviously not everyone chose to talk to us, actually a handful of people,
but enough, you know, only opened their face on camera.
You know, it was surprising.
And, you know, the sad thing is, the sad thing is to give the Resnick's credit,
they're not actually the worst employers I mean, so actually people are generally say, well, they're not bad.
They don't, their pay isn't, it's decent pay compared to some of what you're getting in some of the other outfits.
But it's a very bleak situation.
I mean, you have these people, you know, who live in Beverly Hills.
You know, if you actually look at a satellite, like a Google map of their house, they live on Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills.
I'm sure if you've driven down Sunset Boulevard to Beverly Hills, through Beverly Hills, you've driven by their house.
It's shrouded in trees and sort of set back a little bit.
Orange trees, too.
They've got little orchards around it.
Yeah.
And olive trees too, I think.
And they actually knocked down two neighboring houses to expand their territory.
So if you actually look at Beverly Hills from space, they have one of the largest mansions in Beverly Hills.
So it gives you a sense of, you know, the scope, the size, the size, their extreme wealth.
I mean, it looks like Versailles inside their house.
I mean, it's just, it's obscene wealth.
They've got a taste for like tacky or, you know, 17th century art and, you know, Rococo aesthetics.
It's like West Coast Trump style.
They wanted their neighbor's pond.
They wanted to siphon off their neighboring water supply so they could have a nice toy pond.
The neighbors don't like them because they promised not to destroy the houses and they did it anyway.
Anyway, the point is they have extreme wealth.
The amount of wealth that they have is just off the charts and the place where they get that wealth,
where they extract that wealth from, it's poisoned on multiple levels.
It's poisoned by chemicals that are produced by the oil industry that still operates there.
It's poisoned by the agricultural chemicals that they spray because you have to understand,
farming isn't like what Old MacDonald with his farm going out and chickening out the chickens.
It is like a factory.
So you want, you know, your almonds or you want your pistachios or you want your, you know, your citrus crops to bloom at a certain time.
You know, you don't want them to bloom generally around, you know, the season because generally plants won't come online at exactly the same time, you know.
So there's chemicals that you spray.
hormones, essentially, that you spray to get them to turn on.
So all that stuff is floating around.
They're using a lot of pesticides.
They're one of the largest users of pesticides in the state of California.
In fact, a recent report just came out saying that they're using a pesticide which is banned
on golf courses in urban areas because it's linked to neurological disorders.
They just dump incredible amounts of it in their fields and on their orchards.
And so the people who live there, the people who work for them, producing this wealth,
They're living in an extremely toxic environment.
And there's children growing up there.
Yeah.
I mean, so it is a very, very, very bleak situation and it's totally normalized.
And so, I mean, I think for Linda Resnick and Stuart, you know, what they did with Lost Hills is that they know it doesn't look very good with their sort of liberal Beverly Hills set to have just, you know, just a totally, before they put in the park,
I mean, it was just a desolate landscape and a grid of RVs.
That was the worker town.
It looked horrible.
And so they threw in a bit of money.
Actually, some of the money actually came from government sources as well.
Because they just applied for grants from the government to build the charter school and all this stuff.
So they beautified it a little bit so it doesn't have this punch to the gut
immediately when you go there.
So you could bring in reporters, you could show them the nice park.
It's nice, it's a nice park.
Sure, the water is so corrosive in Lost Hills that the splash park that they have for the kids,
it basically, it melted the pipes in the splash park and it has to be shut down all the time.
That's a whole different story.
But they can show it to people, right?
So they can present a kinder, more gentler kind of extractivism to the public.
That's the bottom line, isn't it?
It's like their relationship to the area is obviously extractive.
making billions of dollars in profit with cheap labor, with the water that's being delivered
there and by utilizing the land.
But in our current world, they get to portray themselves as philanthropists when they like
drop, I don't know what percentage of the money they're making, but you know, we're
talking 10, $20 million, you know, out of, you know, a billion dollar annual crop of
pistachios.
So it's really just a drop in the bucket.
Mm-hmm.
And so they do have different ways of laundering their image, like they've advertised and have a close relationship with Stephen Colbert.
They're linked in with LACMA and the local art scene.
They have Feinstein on their side.
So can you explain this kind of ecosystem of image laundering that they maintain?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, one of the primary ways is, yeah, they're huge philanthropists, donors to the arts in L.A.
I mean, they're one of the largest in Los Angeles.
I mean, they're big donors to LACMA.
they now just opened, gave a huge amount of money to the Hammer Museum at UCLA,
and now it's called the Stuart and Linda Resnick Hammer Pavilion or something.
And so yeah, so they whitewash their image by using tried and true methods
that a lot of rich people use.
They give to charities, they give to the arts.
Obviously they fund campaigns of politicians, they hold fundraisers for politicians.
They're in with, I mean, they were very, very close with Arianna Huffington, if you remember her.
So, you know, she had the Huffington Post.
I mean, obviously they're part of this kind of new money to lead in Los Angeles.
It's very much like, they're like the modern flavor now of like American industrialists.
They're gonna have some liberal social values, you know, in the same way that now America projects liberal social values, you know, as it kind of invades countries around the world or whatever.
But, you know, underneath it all, it's business as usual.
Union busting, you know, pretty, pretty ambiguous political donations.
When you really scratch the surface, they'll give money to everyone, you know, and, you know, they were like doing fundraising for Mike Bloomberg, you know, that's like the level of presidential candidate thereafter.
Also, the Central Valley, as you know, it's a it's a Republican area.
You know, a lot of the counties there have Republican majorities.
And a lot of the Republican congressmen from California are from the Central Valley and from, you know, the San Bernardino County.
So sort of these outlying non-urban areas here, because California is solidly Democratic.
But when you leave the cities and you're in these farming areas, they're Republican.
So they they give to Republicans.
and they also are big donors to the think tank industrial complex that's always pushing for war.
One of the things that's interesting about them is they have their geopolitical dimension
to their philanthropy, let's say, because they're still rivals with Iran.
Iran is still a major producer of pistachios.
Actually, America, thanks to the Resnicks, has now overtaken Iran as the dominant
pistachio-producing country, so Iran is now in second place to America.
But still, Iranian pistachios, and people who've eaten Iranian pistachios
will tell you they're much better than American pistachios.
But that's not the only thing.
But generally speaking, they're fighting for market share.
They want the relationship to stay bad to that country so that they continue to get choked off as a competitor.
Exactly.
And so they give to think tanks.
It's the whole range of things.
And it's the personal intertwined with the political.
And they are very much in sync.
Yeah, and they have like, you know, for instance, we did this little protest outside of LACMA and the Hammer Museum a few months ago to protest, to try to like drum up awareness about the fact that these institutions take money from the Resnicks who are destroying the environment.
They're basically killing what's left of the natural environment in California.
And that they are, you know, in a way, they're kind of like the Sacklers.
I mean, I'd say on some level, they're even worse than the Sacklers because they're killing something that's a lot more fundamental.
You know, they're killing the layer of life that we all need to survive on this planet.
You know, as people who live on this planet, as living beings that live on this planet, we need the earth to function.
And so they are contributing to climate collapse and ecocide.
And so we did these protests and we got their attention, you know, and they sicked a New York Times reporter on us
to basically to do this ridiculous whitewash.
I mean, they got this culture reporter from the New York Times.
And when I talked to her on the phone, I mean, she just regurgitated all the talking points
back to me, you know, she said, "Well, but they're job creators, you know,
"like these people in Lost Hills, "they wouldn't have jobs if it wasn't for the Resnicks."
I'm like, and I'm just, you know, my jaw's on the floor.
I'm like, "Are you, what is this like?"
The 80s?
Are you freaking Reagan?
They're not there to give jobs to them.
It's not a philanthropic effort for them to sustain these people.
They are using their labor to grow their crops.
These people are slowly dying in that town of theirs.
They're all poisoned.
But so she, you know, and it was very, very effective.
She produced this New York Times article that was essentially, it was a very useful document.
It was like all the talking points, all the wonderful propaganda compiled, you know, and, you know, well written, well edited, you know, in the New York Times style.
And it's just produced as a document.
Yeah.
And they can activate that kind of stuff, you know?
It was quite bizarre to see, you know, because I looked at what Yash was doing and it sort of was like, okay, like one guy with a microphone at an LA museum being a nuisance, effectively, you know, like he's yelling, but we had one guy cover it.
It obviously irritated the people running the museum and they didn't like the idea that their big donors were going to get some negative publicity, possibly.
So, you know, they call up a friendly culture reporter from the New York Times and she reached out to us and we're kind of like, well, you know, what is, um, this is going to be maybe interesting.
What are the New York Times going to write about the Resnicks?
And, uh, we put them in touch with some sources, uh, Rosanna Esparza, an environmentalist and PhD kind of environmental scientist who worked in Lost Hills.
So we gave them all of the information.
We gave them a segment of the film that showed the oil waste in the water, uh, You know, the scale of the farms, you know, inequality, you know, all of these sort of problems, water privatization, gave them a lot of material.
And then, of course, the piece comes back, and they've sent a publicity photographer with Linda out to Lost Hills, and they've got some shiny photos of her in a charter school.
And, you know, they mention some criticism, because it's the New York Times, they have to have both sides, so they mentioned some criticism, you know, the amount of water, and sort of summarily dismiss it with a quote from Linda, who just says, oh, well, you know, we're not in your taps, we're not taking your drinking water.
Yeah, I wanted to read from this article because I think it's a good cap off to the episode because it kind of shows how the reporting is used to whitewash the image of these billionaires and also is a form of essentially laundering the issues, right?
Because it'll say, well, we're going to tell you about some of the critiques that these people receive and yet it's framed and minimized and, you know, they selectively choose And then like you said, set it to, you know, a quote by the Resnicks.
And then all of that, it goes through the, the kind of filter of a culture reporter, which is hardly the investigative journalism that is required here, which I think your documentary, your upcoming documentary, Pistachio Wars, is going to be obviously much better at.
But yeah, let's, let's take a little read of this article to cap off the episode.
It's called Giving Big.
A California couple gets gratitude and scrutiny.
So already Giving Big is so, so great to open up.
Linda and Stuart Resnick have directed their pistachio fortune toward large transformational gifts, but also drawn some criticism for their water use in an often parched state.
Now, no mention of, like, oil runoff, poisoned, uh, local, uh, company town.
You know, it's, it's very much like, okay, well, let's just focus on, like, the water use because that's something where we can argue.
So here's the article by Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times.
It's from February 26th, 2024.
Standing on the grand staircase of Linda and Stuart Resnick's opulent Beverly Hills mansion at a party last fall, where Diane Keaton, Bob Iger, and Brian Grazer were among the luminaries making small talk over crudités and Sazerac cocktails, the author Walter Isaacson took a moment to thank his hosts.
Calling Bob Iger a luminary is fucking amazing, especially after the strikes, but anyways.
Not only were the Resnicks giving the party to celebrate his new biography of Elon Musk, They had also been major supporters of his former professional home, the Aspen Institute, donating $36 million to think tanks over the years.
Isaacson was not the only one in the room with reason to be grateful to them.
Milling about the house, where works by Picasso, Fragonard, and Boucher lined the walls, where the museum directors Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has received $90 million from the Resnicks, and Ann Philbin of the Hammer, $30 million, as well as Michael Milken, the former junk bond kin who later founded a think tank, the Milken Institute, $25 million, Who spent time in jail, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Overall, the Resnicks, whose wonderful company, Business Empire, includes Palm Wonderful Pomegranate Juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Halo's Mandarins, and Teleflora, the flower delivery service, have donated $1.9 billion of their estimated $13 billion fortune to academic institutions, climate change initiatives, cultural organizations, and programs in California's Central Valley.
Their gifts have landed them on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of the 50 biggest donors three times.
Quote, you really have to see them as one of the largest proponents of investing in L.A.' 's public institutions, said Mr. Govan, LACMA's director.
Oh my God.
So, I mean, we're going to keep reading it, but go ahead and jump in.
You know, what's interesting about the Resnick's is, you know, there's different kinds of imperialisms, I guess, you know.
So, you know, there's the classic kind of imperialism where, you know, America goes and does imperialism somewhere else.
extracts resources from a different country, but there are more intimate imperialisms.
And the Resnicks, and they're, again, they're just the latest manifestation of something
that has existed in California and existed really in America for a long time, which is
that these people treat their own country, their own...
Like a banana republic.
Yeah, it's just, it's not that far away.
It's an hour drive.
It's two hours drive away.
But they treat them like people that don't matter.
People that you can throw away.
People whose lives are not valuable at all.
And these people are celebrated in our society.
And all this is done out in the open.
It's not hidden.
It's very, very blatant.
We kind of saw Porterville as a microcosm for the bigger story because I think people
don't really understand what water privatization can look like.
They think it's going to be like Elysium or something where you turn up to get your water
for the day and there's a robot guard and he shoots you and then you die because you
don't get any water because you don't have a dollar.
This is a very dystopian thing, but we were trying to make this point about how water
privatization is already in force and how it can look.
And basically what happened in Porterville was that there was a shortage of water with
the drought.
There was a lot less water flowing through the rivers and that caused some problems.
People's wells not to recharge.
But basically, the business interests there had control over the dam, the water delivery system.
And when there was a shortage, they took what they needed.
And then the people suddenly, who never really questioned whether they had access to water before, suddenly found that they didn't.
And, you know, this is the sort of situation you could find in California where, you know, the shortage does get more severe and people are talking about, like, severely rationing the cities.
And then you've got these businesses that are like, well, we own this water bank, you know, we have this water right, and we also have a much more direct control of the political apparatus.
So, you know, they probably will force cuts on people.
And that happened, essentially, in East Porterville.
That was, it played out on a small scale.
Speaking of these company towns, the article continues and does bring up Lost Hills, but not to talk about, uh, you know, rashes or poisoning.
Here's how it's put.
Mr. Resnick, 81, the driving force behind the couple's charitable efforts,
has become particularly focused on giving back in the Central Valley.
Specifically, Lost Hills, where one out of every two households includes an employee of the Wonderful Company.
Over the past decade, the Resnicks have invested about $580 million in Lost Hills and Delano, another Central Valley town, creating charter schools that offer robotics, yoga, and mariachi electives, health, wellness, and fitness centers, affordable housing, a park, and a new pedestrian bridge across Highway 46.
Quote, it's the most satisfying of anything I've ever done in my life, Ms.
Resnick said in a recent interview at her home.
You meet these young people.
You watch them go through school.
You see them come back to the Valley, which was my dream.
Some of them are going into politics.
A lot of them have come back to work for us in middle management jobs, not in the fields like their parents.
But at a moment when philanthropists are increasingly coming under scrutiny, museums have distanced themselves from the Sackler family for its role in the opioid crisis, Warren Kander stepped down as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art after protests of his company's sale of tear gas, and climate activists have protested museum donors and board members, the Resnick have found that they are no exception.
They have faced scrutiny for their use of one of California's often scarce resources, water.
A 2016 investigation in Mother Jones found that the Resnick's agricultural businesses were, quote, "...thought to consume more of the state's water than any other family, farm, or company," and their operations were critiqued the following year in the documentary Water and Power, A California Heist.
And this, this is the turn, right?
So switching the focus from the poisoning of the local towns to the water, which is a cleaner issue to deal with.
So then here we go.
Last fall, a pair of activists protested the Resnick's at both LACMA, which named its Linda and Stuart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in recognition of a $45 million gift.
And The Hammer, which named its Linda and Stuart Resnick Cultural Center in honor of the couple's $30 million gift, one of the protesters, Yasha Levine, who has been working on a documentary called Pistachio Wars, carried a sign that said, Hammer celebrates climate criminals.
They have brought a lot of improvement, but it's not all glitter and gold, Rosanna Esparza, a Kern County activist who has spoken out against the Resnick for their water usage, said in an interview.
And that's it.
That's all they give her.
It's a solid four lines of criticism.
Just, it's not all glitter and gold.
Could we get some more coverage here?
No, no, no.
Let's focus back on the money.
In response to such criticisms, Ms.
Ms. Resnick said, "We've been attacked for water for generations.
We're not taking anyone's water out of their tap.
I don't have anything to do with the municipal water supplies."
So it's just like this absolute fucking hatchet job, rerouting things to the water issue,
cutting the person who might have a longer quote down, not giving you any quote, obviously,
but then cutting her down to just, "It's not all glitter and gold."
Moving on!
I know.
It's crazy.
It's shocking, right?
This is the flagship liberal newspaper in America, and it's just such a brazen whitewash.
I guess because it's the art world and it's cultural criticism, these reporters... I have some people who do art journalism and You know, they are obviously not held in very high regard, you know, journalists who do this kind of cultural criticism, because most of it is just hobnobbing with donors to museums.
That was kind of how it felt, wasn't it?
Like, she just wants to keep getting invited to the black tie events and they asked her to do them a favor, you know, but then it gets put in the Times, you know, which is supposed to have a lot more credibility.
Yeah, they're all fucking like fake phony rich friends who go to the parties together and they, you know, they hobnob and they do all the stuff.
Yeah, and there's a direct connection.
I mean, I just know a little bit of the backstory behind the story.
What I think triggered this article was our protest at the Hammer Museum, because when we did the protest, The head of the of the museum who really turned it around, who took it from this failing institution and created into it, one of the main museums in Los Angeles now, Ann Philbin, she came out, you know, from like her office in the tower and like looked at us and we kind of chased her a little bit.
And I mean, we were yelling at her through the through the loudspeaker and, you know, asking her, like, if she knows that she that she took money from climate criminals, that she's that she's helping whitewash climate criminals.
And she was So pissed.
She was like, what are these pieces doing here in my museum?
And then they called the cops on us after that.
And I know that the author of the article, Robin Pogrebin, she had just a month before that done this huge, huge profile of the director of the Hammer Museum.
Basically just singing her praises, you know, talking about what an amazing job she did.
So, you know, on one level, I think she's like not only protecting the Resnicks, she's also protecting her own journalism, right?
So she's kind of covering for herself because she did a story on these on the Hammer Museum and I'm pretty sure she wrote about the big donation that she got from the Resnicks and she painted it as like a big win as like a huge, you know, career milestone for the director.
And you know, and here and here just a few weeks later, or even a month later, I might have been just actually a few weeks later, we show up and we're saying that, you know, the Resnicks are worse than the Sacklers.
And so I think that's what there's, there's like a, you know, there's a kind of a couple of things came together to create this article.
And I think her own personal protection is part of it as well.
Talk about, again, conspiracies.
Yeah, it's a conspiracy of wealthy people and their hangers-on covering for each other and painting things in good light while making like a kind of cursory head nod to the fact that, yeah, there are some issues.
These are problematic, but there are faves.
Yeah.
Well, you saw the luminaries also at the party that the reporter's writing from.
Yeah, luminaries.
Walter Isaacson and all these other ass kissers.
The critiques shouldn't be that hard to find either.
They have almost a billion, almost a billion dollars, right?
Yeah, $900 million.
So you've got this agribusiness that's going to be the big ticket donor for this new climate research center run by UC Davis.
No one's really given them any grief about that.
They've got such a huge track record for misrepresenting science.
They did this huge pseudoscience campaign for POM Wonderful where they said that POM Wonderful would make you live longer, cure your prostate cancer, fix your erectile dysfunction.
I think they said the same thing for pistachios.
They got slapped by the FDA for that.
They've Basically, on the water issues, they've tried to push their own scientific interpretations of the ecological crisis on the Obama administration through Dianne Feinstein.
They've got a very long documented track record of pseudoscience and trying to manipulate science in their corporate interests.
Now they're going to turn up and be the donors to the biggest climate center in California.
One, I somehow doubt that climate center is going to come up with solutions that involve cutting back water use for farms.
You can look on their website.
It's very much a techno-fix kind of a place.
They're the ones that are going to build the giant carbon capture machines or something.
But whatever it is that they're doing, it's not going to impinge on the growth of industry.
It's going to be some kind of green capitalism, essentially, that they're going to try to preserve.
The town, and the wonderful town.
It's basically a corporate town.
We had company towns in the 1950s where the company would go in and try and make a model environment.
And everyone realized it was a failure because the company has too much control over people's lives.
You know, it controls housing.
The workers are very disadvantaged.
And, you know, they're a vaunted education program.
They talk about all of the diverse things people do.
It's basically a farm education program.
They're training people in a pipeline to work in farms.
So, you know, the idea of class mobility or, you know, all of these things that are supposed to happen with the American dream, you know, are not really part of this new corporate reality.
Fantastic stuff.
Uh, really recommend, uh, that people go check out your documentary when it comes out.
But I also want to know, like, you guys were raising some funds to pay for the incredibly expensive stock footage that you're using in your documentary.
Footage that, you know, shows California through the ages, uh, footage that, uh, that serves to paint the broader picture that, that is definitely not going to be the focus of, of these types of articles.
So where can people kind of follow your work, support your work?
Yeah, if you go and find Pistachio Warriors on Twitter, we'll probably have that GoFundMe pegged up the top of that, along with our festival premiere, which is going to be at DockEdge in New Zealand.
So if there's any New Zealand people listening, you can go and see Pistachio Warriors, I think, in about two weeks in Christchurch, and it's going to be in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin.
The GoFundMe, we were raising money for the stock.
We got enough to get it licensed for festivals, so we've kind of cleared the big milestone, but there's a little bit left on the goal.
Which is going to help us if we want to put it out on like Vimeo or streaming later to extend the licenses.
So if people's pockets are feeling jangly, by all means, go in and drop a few bucks into that GoFundMe because it'll help us get the film out beyond the festivals.
Yeah.
And if you're, you know, if you're, we're actively basically seeking, you know, we're trying to over the next year, six months, we're going to be entering into film festivals in North America and America and trying to get the film distributed.
So it's, you know, it's a slog, but we're finally finished the film and now it's time to get people to see it.
We'll have those links in the episode notes in the description.
So go ahead and click through and follow them and support their work.
I really hope this documentary finds larger distribution because it's a really important story that is just not being told in such a kind of direct and investigative way.
And, you know, I mean, Yeah.
It's obvious, but you guys are not captured by the same financial interests that would want to paint this any other way than the way it really is.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, appreciate it.
I mean, you know, the journey to find distribution is going to be interesting in itself, I think.
Maybe warrants a documentary of its own because, I mean, from what a lot of people are saying is that recently there's been a big drop off in interest in political documentaries from, you know, most of the streaming platforms.
It's got to be true crime.
That's all people want, apparently.
Yeah, but they like horror, and this is, you know, I think is... Exactly.
Maybe we should rebrand it as fiction, you know, and then... I just need to do the supercut on Linda interviews, because I've transcribed so much Linda that I have felt the pain more than any person, maybe, on this planet.
It reminds me actually of something that Julian told me a long time ago, not on a podcast, I don't think, but I think we were just hanging out and he was like, dude, the biggest irony of like, you know, the movies and all this stuff is that, you know, that they, they kind of like show the apocalypse is happening like, you know, way in the future.
And he's like, and what's crazy is that no, the apocalypse is happening all around us.
It's just happening to different groups of people at different You know, there are people that are living like nomads, you know, who are having to, you know, protect their stuff from either, you know, police or, you know, other people who, you know, want to take it from them.
You know, they are living like they're in this Mad Max sort of universe.
And like watching this movie, I felt like, well, this is, it's like the Citadel in Mad Max.
There is this entity that is like controlling the water and portioning it out, like, you know, where it goes.
And it's, yeah, just one of those great examples that like this apocalypse or like, you know, something like that.
like interstellar, you know, with all the farms drying up.
It's the thing that we suppose is happening or is going to happen, you know,
dozens and dozens of years into the future, but it's happening right now.
And it's happening around us and there's no awareness yet.
I think we should spread a little conspiracy of our own, which is that Immortan Joe is based on Linda Resnick.
(laughing)
Same look.
Yeah, I mean, it's a doomy movie.
There's no doubt about it.
But it is a road trip through this environment that people generally don't look at.
And it's a crazy environment to look at.
And then there's just insane dimensions to the story that make it fun, like the marketing and the backstory of Stuart and Linda.
So, you know, I think it all comes together into a pretty great film to watch.
It's a love story.
Love story.
Yeah, you can say that.
We crowdfunded it, so we've had people approach us and say maybe we could do a Netflix-y version, and we've resisted that because we put so much sweat into making this weird, polemical version that probably wouldn't survive Netflix treatment.
So it's going to be out there, thanks to crowdfunding, Kickstarter, and we hope you love it.
It's a really great film.
Congratulations.
And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thanks for having us on.
It was a pleasure.
Yeah.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and of course, our miniseries.
We've also got a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Resnicks bless you and keep you.
Amen.
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