A lot going on here.
An insurance exec in California is lured into a conversation with a Tinder date, who turns out to be an operative for Project Veritas, a right wing media operation with a history of manipulation and fraud.
Not clear from the reporting what the sting was attempting to accomplish, but clearly the far right has an interest in casting the current climate-fueled insurance crisis as some kind of money grab by Insurance companies.
In any case, the Exec was recorded making some pretty unassailable points about the problem of people building in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas that are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts.
In a leaked undercover video, comments from a now-fired State Farm executive are raising questions about the company’s massive rate hike request.
The secretive video obtained and posted by conservative O’Keefe Media Group shows Haden Kirkpatrick, the former Vice President of Innovation and Venture Capital at State Farm speaking openly about the victims of the Palisades Fire and residents of the Bay Area.
Kirkpatrick told the New York Times the video was recorded during a tinder date.
“Like in Marin County and Northern California… or some of the fringe areas like where the Palisades are, there should never be houses built there in the first place,” Kirkpatrick said in the recorded video.
“People want to be built in areas where they have natural areas around them for their ego… but it’s also a f****** desert.”
The clips are spliced up, potentially leaving out critical context. And we should note the conservative outlet that published it is founded by James O’Keefe. He’s the former CEO of Project Veritas, a far-right activist group that’s reportedly been subject to lawsuits over publishing undercover content criticized as ‘misleading.’
With that said, the clip is highly controversial, given State Farm continues dropping policies in California amidst their request to raise rates as high as 38%.
The person recording asked this question related to that: “It seems like it’s all orchestrated?”
“I mean it kind of is… but not in the way that you would think,” Kirkpatrick said. “Our people look at this and say oh s*** we’re maybe $5 billion short if something happens.”