Checkpoint California

Episode 7: facts and sources

Checkpoint California, with Ash Seiter — captain and public information officer with the Lone Pine Fire Department in Inyo County, and vice chair of the California National Party — on his second visit.

This page goes through the checkable claims made in the episode — the ones that were right as well as the ones that weren’t — with what the sources say and links to them. Times are where each point comes up in the published episode. The episode was recorded on October 7, 2026, two days after the President’s remarks it opens with.

Our policy: if something said on the show is plainly false, we cut it before the episode goes out. If it’s off — a wrong number on a true point, a detail misremembered — we leave it in and correct it here and in the show notes. Corrections to this page: [email protected].

Corrections at a glance

The claims, in order

0:57 and 8:41 — The President on Los Angeles and San Diego

Right, with the exact words. At a midterm rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, for Senator Pete Ricketts on Monday, October 5, 2026, defending the war with Iran and its effect on gas prices, President Trump said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego.” He added that “this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.” The crowd cheered.

Sean paraphrases it as “blow up”; the word was “take out”. Ash’s account of the White House’s explanation (8:41) is accurate: Communications Director Steven Cheung said criticism was “not rooted in reality” and that the President “was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.” The President himself didn’t mention nuclear weapons.

Sources: ABC11 · Reuters via Star-Advertiser · Hawaii Tribune-Herald (full quote and statement)

0:57 — “San Diego is one quarter of our Navy and Marines”

Right for the Marines — correction for the Navy. The 2025 military economic impact report from the San Diego Military Advisory Council and UC San Diego says “1 of every 4 Marines is stationed in the San Diego Region.” For the Navy the share is lower: SDMAC puts it at about one in six active-duty sailors, though San Diego is homeport to 63 Navy ships.

Sources: SDMAC / UC San Diego Rady School, 2025 report · SDMAC

2:12, 4:40 and 26:15 — “Radio silence” from California Republicans

Mostly right — correction for precision. Gubernatorial nominee Steve Hilton, the California Republican Party and the state Senate Republicans declined to comment, as ABC10 reported. But some Republicans did speak. Jim Desmond, the party’s nominee in the 48th congressional district, which takes in part of San Diego County, wrote: “I vehemently disagree with President Trump’s comments … No American city is expendable.” Representative Kevin Kiley, an independent who caucuses with Republicans, called the remark “unhelpful.” Others defended it: the California Republican Assembly’s Craig DeLuz called it “a verbal gaffe.”

Sources: Reuters via Star-Advertiser · ABC10

3:24 — Ted Cruz “not defending his wife”

Fair as a description of what came after. In March 2016 Donald Trump threatened to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz and shared an unflattering photo of her. Cruz did defend her at the time — “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward, leave Heidi the hell alone” — but by that September he had endorsed Trump, and he became an ally.

Sources: Fox News · WFDD / NPR

4:33 — “His own vice president calling him … America’s Hitler”

Right. In a 2016 private message to his law-school roommate, JD Vance wrote that he went “back and forth” between thinking Trump was “a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad” or “America’s Hitler.” The roommate, now a Georgia state senator, made it public in 2022. Vance has since reversed his view; he wrote the message nine years before becoming vice president.

Sources: WAFF / Gray News

7:19 and 43:36 — The biggest donor state, and “$275 billion”

Right. USAFacts, comparing the federal taxes collected from each state (IRS data) with the federal spending attributable to it (USASpending.gov), found that in federal fiscal year 2024 Californians paid $275.6 billion more to the federal government than they received — the largest gap of any state, ahead of New York ($76.5 billion) and Texas ($68.1 billion). California supplied 15.9% of the money collected and received 10.9% of what was spent. That is more than Russia’s military spending: about $160 billion in 2025 at market exchange rates, by SIPRI’s estimate.

Other measures put the gap lower but still first. The Rockefeller Institute’s balance-of-payments study, which adjusts for things like business taxes being filed where companies are headquartered, found California paid $83.1 billion more than it got back in fiscal 2022 ($126.5 billion leaving out COVID relief) — nearly three times the next state.

Sources: USAFacts · Rockefeller Institute, 2025 report · SIPRI

8:09 — Sued by three states over abortion

Right. At the end of September 2026, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a suit against California, Massachusetts and New York, whose shield laws protect doctors who mail abortion pills into states with bans. The three argue the laws stop them enforcing those bans. All three are large net recipients of federal funds: Alabama got $2.18 back for every federal tax dollar its residents paid in 2023, Louisiana $2.00 and Arkansas $1.85.

Sources: Stateline · WLOX · Rockefeller Institute

9:30 — Reagan’s “the bombing starts in five minutes”

Right. On August 11, 1984, testing the microphone before his Saturday radio address, President Reagan said: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” It wasn’t broadcast, but it was recorded and leaked.

Sources: History.com · Christian Science Monitor, 1984

10:14 and 10:44 — San Diego’s military population

Right. The 2025 SDMAC report counts more than 109,000 active-duty service members in the region, plus 6,000 reservists and 27,000 defense civilians. It doesn’t count family members; earlier reports put active-duty dependents at about 285,000 to 288,000, so Ash’s 250,000 is if anything low. With families, the military population of San Diego County is comfortably over 300,000, before counting some 230,000 veterans.

Sources: SDMAC / UC San Diego, 2025 report · SDSU military and veterans overview

12:00 — Hilton, Becerra and Swalwell

Right on the story — the margin is about 25 points. The Berkeley IGS poll of September 15–20, 2026 had Xavier Becerra at 58% to Steve Hilton’s 33% among likely voters. (“Triple points” was a slip; Hilton’s own campaign poll in August had him 8 points behind.)

Sean’s account of how Becerra got there checks out. Eric Swalwell led the Democratic field in March 2026, with 17% in Emerson’s poll, while Becerra had 3%. In April a former staffer accused Swalwell of sexual assault; he suspended his campaign and resigned from Congress, and Becerra’s support jumped in the next poll.

Sources: KQED · ABC7 · San Francisco Standard · SFist

13:21 and 17:05 — Mamdani’s free buses, grocery stores and Office of Worker Power

Right. Free buses and city-owned grocery stores were among Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises; neither is in place yet. He created the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power by executive order on Labor Day, September 7, 2026.

Sources: City of New York · KATV

14:27 and 15:31 — “The fourth largest economy”

Was right — now fifth. Governor Newsom announced in April 2025 that California had passed Japan on 2024 figures ($4.10 trillion to $4.02 trillion). The IMF’s October 2025 figures put Japan back ahead, making California fifth.

Sources: Office of the Governor · FOX 11

14:27 — Southern Inyo Hospital’s fundraising

Broadly right; we couldn’t find the $300,000 figure. As we covered in episode 6, the hospital in Lone Pine had eight days of cash in September 2025, and local officials asked the state for $3 million. It was kept open by a $400,000 state grant, a $500,000 county loan and staff furloughs, with local residents donating too.

Sources: CalMatters · Sierra Wave

15:31 — Prop 40 and the counter-measures

Right. Proposition 40 on the November 3, 2026 ballot is a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth more than $1 billion, most of it for health care. Two measures backed by opponents, Propositions 41 and 42, would block it: if either gets more yes votes than Prop 40, Prop 40 doesn’t take effect even if it passes. (Ash calls them sheltering assets; strictly, they block the tax.)

Sources: CalMatters · News From the States

15:31 — “Homelessness has been rising, poverty has been rising”

Right on poverty — correction on homelessness for the latest year. Homelessness rose for most of the last decade, but HUD’s 2025 count found 181,934 homeless Californians, down 2.8% from 2024 — the first yearly decline since 2016. Poverty did rise: the Public Policy Institute of California’s poverty measure went from 16.9% in 2023 to 17.4% in 2024.

Sources: Edhat / HUD report · CalMatters · PPIC

17:05 — Rent control “under certain guidelines”

Right. The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995 exempts single-family homes, condos and housing built after 1995 from local rent control, and lets landlords reset rents when a tenant leaves.

Sources: Senate Judiciary Committee analysis

21:12 — “North Dakota of all places has a public bank”

Right. The Bank of North Dakota was created by the state legislature in 1919 and is the only state-owned general-service bank in the country.

Sources: Bank of North Dakota

28:54 — Massie and Greene

Right. Representative Thomas Massie lost the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th district on May 19, 2026 to Ed Gallrein, whom President Trump recruited and endorsed. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation in November 2025, after the President withdrew his support, and left Congress on January 5, 2026.

Sources: Spectrum News · FOX 8

31:34 — The party “started in twenty fourteen”

Sources say 2015. The party’s own site and the reference works that cover it give its founding as 2015, with its first interim chair from January 2016. The independence movement it grew out of goes back further.

Sources: California National Party · Wikipedia

34:10 — “Inyo County is extremely impoverished”

Lower-income, but not poorer — correction. Inyo’s median household income is $73,991, against $99,122 for California, and its per-capita income is $72,766 against $86,761. But its poverty rate, 10.9%, is lower than the state’s 12.0% (Census figures for 2020–24).

Sources: FRED, Inyo County per-capita income · Census figures via State Demographics

36:52 — PG&E’s 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter

Right. In June 2020 PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 Camp Fire. No individual was charged: the district attorney said he couldn’t prove any one employee was negligent.

PG&E and Southern California Edison together serve roughly three-quarters of Californians. Their rates rose sharply through the last decade, though both trimmed them slightly in 2026.

Sources: Napa Valley Register / AP · PG&E · Public Advocates Office

40:05 — The fire “up in Santa Rosa”, and the Eaton Fire

Right about PG&E — the fire was the Camp Fire. Ash asks to be checked on this one. The fire that matches his description — a failure on old, poorly maintained PG&E equipment, in high wind — is the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, caused by a worn, nearly century-old hook on PG&E’s Caribou-Palermo transmission line. The state’s investigators found PG&E’s inspections had missed the wear and cited “an overall pattern of inadequate inspection and maintenance.” The 2017 Tubbs Fire near Santa Rosa was traced to a private electrical system, not PG&E.

On the Eaton Fire, Ash is right: in August 2026, investigators found it was started by arcing on an out-of-service Southern California Edison tower in Eaton Canyon. The federal government has sued SCE over it.

Sources: KTVU on the Tubbs Fire · CBS Sacramento on the Camp Fire · ABC7 on the Eaton Fire

42:51 — Broadband money and Starlink

Partly right — correction. The Biden administration’s $42.45 billion BEAD program allocated Texas $3.31 billion in 2023, the most of any state. Texas didn’t turn the money down, but its own officials did offer some of it back: in March 2025, Comptroller Glenn Hegar wrote to Senator Ted Cruz that Texas could return up to $1 billion, since private companies had by then reached more than two-thirds of the locations first counted as eligible.

Then the rules changed. In June 2025, weeks after Texas had opened its grant round, the Trump administration dropped the program’s preference for fiber and made every state re-bid. Texas’s approved plan, in November 2025, spends about $1.26 billion on about 240,000 locations; satellite service covers about 27% of them, with SpaceX’s Starlink the largest single provider. Speed wasn’t the issue: Texas finished ahead of its deadline, and even the states that had chosen their providers before the change had to start over. In August 2026 Texas paused all BEAD payments, after its broadband office acknowledged giving satellite providers better payment terms at the Governor’s request, and the Lieutenant Governor and House Speaker called for an audit.

Sources: Broadband Breakfast on the $1 billion letter · NTIA, Texas final proposal approved · StateScoop · NTIA, Texas final plan · Texas Tribune via Texas Standard · Fierce Network

43:36 — “Solar is really gone so cheap”

Right. Lazard puts the unsubsidized cost of utility-scale solar power at $38–78 per megawatt-hour in 2025, down from $323–394 in 2009.

Sources: PV Tech

53:03 — An AI dividend, and Alaska’s Permanent Fund

Right. Pete Buttigieg said in April 2025 that Americans could get “a dividend off of the value that’s being created from AI.” Alaska’s Permanent Fund has paid every resident a yearly dividend from oil revenue since 1982.

Sources: Nate Silver · News From the States

53:03 and 55:45 — Basic income for artists in Ireland and Scotland

Right. Ireland’s pilot paid about 2,000 artists €325 a week from 2022. The government’s cost-benefit study found €1.39 in benefits — to the artists and to society, not only back to the exchequer — for every euro spent, and Budget 2026 made the scheme permanent. Scotland’s government committed in September 2026 to piloting a Scottish Artists Minimum Income; no start date has been set.

Sources: Government of Ireland · Journal of Music · Scottish News

55:45 — Production leaving California, and the tax credit

Right. In July 2025 Governor Newsom signed an increase in California’s film and television tax credit from $330 million to $750 million a year.

Sources: CBS Los Angeles

57:50 — Canadian touring grants

Right that they exist. Ash recalls the Saskatchewan duo Kacy & Clayton touring the US with Canadian support. We couldn’t find the specific grants, but Canadian programs that fund touring abroad, such as FACTOR’s and the Canada Council’s, are still running.

Sources: Kacy & Clayton · FACTOR live performance program

58:51 — Trailer Park Boys, “a government-run show”

Subsidized, not government-run — correction. The series was made by private companies — Trailer Park Productions and Topsail Entertainment, for the cable channel Showcase, and later the cast’s own companies, for Netflix. Public money helped, as Sean says: the early seasons drew on Telefilm Canada, the Canadian Television Fund and Nova Scotia’s film agency and tax credits, and Nova Scotia gave a later production about C$810,000 in 2016.

Sources: Vice · Playback

59:40 — Sideways, Buellton and Solvang

Right. Sideways (2004), with Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, was a modestly budgeted film from Fox Searchlight. The motel in the film is now the Sideways Inn in Buellton, and the Hitching Post II still has photographs from the shoot. The Seattle Times reported in 2005 that business at the Hitching Post was up 30%.

Sources: Seattle Times, 2005 · Decanter

61:05 — “Four hundred films have been shot in Lone Pine”

Right. More than 400 films have been shot in and around Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills since 1919; some counts for the wider eastern Sierra run higher. The Museum of Western Film History in Lone Pine tells the story.

Sources: Lonely Planet · Museum of Western Film History

63:09 — Paramount and Warner Bros.

Right. Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closed on October 6, 2026, the day before we recorded; the combined company is called Skydance.

Sources: WLOX / AP

65:14 — “None of it was original content”

Right for the box office — not for the awards. Ash hedges: it was “something I saw in passing.” The top-grossing film worldwide each year from 2021 to 2025 was a sequel or a franchise film — Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avatar: The Way of Water, Barbie, Inside Out 2, Ne Zha 2. But none of the Best Picture winners in that time was a sequel or franchise: Nomadland, CODA, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oppenheimer, Anora and One Battle After Another.

Sources: 2020s in film · NBC Washington

66:46 — Frank Zappa on the old executives

Right. In a 1987 interview Zappa described the record executives of the 1960s as “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is?’” — and put it out anyway. “We were better off with those guys,” he said, “than we are with the hip, young executives.”

Sources: Open Culture

68:19 — The Byrds, Columbia and Terry Melcher

Right. The Byrds signed with Columbia, then part of CBS, in November 1964; staff producer Terry Melcher produced “Mr. Tambourine Man”, a number one in 1965. Their 1965 UK tour was billed as “America’s Answer to the Beatles!”

Sources: Terry Melcher · Mr. Tambourine Man

70:04 — “Forty-five to forty-eight percent” of California is federal land

Right. The Congressional Research Service’s latest count puts it at 45.3% — about 45.4 million of California’s 100.2 million acres.

Sources: CRS, Federal Land Ownership

70:57 — Echoes from the Canyons

Ash’s podcast is Echoes from the Canyons: A Retrospective Music Podcast, about his father Jimmi Seiter’s years as a road manager for the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Sources: Apple Podcasts · echoesfromthecanyons.com

What we didn’t check

Opinions and predictions — about the parties, the candidates, AI, housing policy and the state of film and music — from both hosts and the guest aren’t fact-checked. Ash’s experiences in the music industry and on the road are his own account. The CNP’s platform, the California DEAL, is described as the party’s position, not checked.

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