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Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Sami Winc: So Victor, let’s turn to California. And recently—the, we know as, well a lot of our viewers know—California has a jungle primary, where the primary is all the parties are in. And the last—the two that are on top are on the ballot for November. Well, no surprise, but our chair of the Democratic Party in California, Rusty Hicks, has decided that this does not work as a primary process.
Victor Davis Hanson: I thought it worked great. It always got the results the law is—they drafted the law.
They said they had 60% Democrats, so they could ensure that in most all—and it worked. We haven’t had a Republican statewide officeholder since Arnold Schwarzenegger left, what, 20 years ago? We have supermajorities in both legislatures, of Democrats. All the old Schwarzenegger judges are all retiring. They’re wonderful judges, but they’re all termed out. That’s not the right word. They’re retiring. And so they got the judiciary, they’ve got executives, they got the legislative branch, all because of these jungle primaries. And the real cause, four million people have left the state the last 15 years.
And these were Reaganite, Deukmejianite, Pete Wilson-type, Schwarzenegger-types. They’re gone. Vanished. That’s it.
Sami Winc: And we know why that is. Another thing about this governor’s race is some of the candidates for governor who are on the Left are already talking about new taxes that they would impose. The most recent one is—I forget the candidate’s name—but he wants to have a tax on EVs, since they avoid the high gas prices, that they would tax EVs.
Victor Davis Hanson: Their message to us, the voters, is, well, you know, we lost $240 billion on high-speed rail. And we’ve lost another $250 billion in COVID hospice entitlement fraud. We didn’t really lose it because the money, as Barack Obama said, it’s spread around. We spread the money around. Spread the wealth. So people got money, but, you know, we need—as for bookkeeping—we’ve lost a half a trillion dollars, so we want you to pay.
Now, you have the highest income tax in the nation. How high are they gonna go? I don’t know. 13.3%. They go much higher, and they’ve got, I think, the fifth—when you add the county add-ons—fifth-highest sales tax. The highest gas taxes. The highest electricity cost outside of Hawaii. The highest gasoline in the continental United States.
Everybody’s angry. I was very curious about that. There’s a national crisis because gas, at its lowest point, I think it was $1.88 or $2 national under Trump before the war, and now it’s up to $4. Any time in the last five years I was driving and I saw $4 gas, I just pulled over and filled up. I just saw it yesterday. It was $6.20. They’re mad that they have to pay California prices, but we in California pay that every day. And it’s even worse than that, Sammy. We pay it every day, and then we keep electing the people who charge us that.
That’s what’s so weird about that debate stage. I looked at a clip today. Porter—she came up with a brilliant idea that if she self-critiqued like she was in a Korean prisoner of war camp. Would you please critique yourself? So she said. And she had that—you know—about being mean to people. And then Becerra—poor Villaraigosa didn’t know what he was talking about. Becerra just gave basically, everything is great, and we’re gonna give you more great things. And then Bianco and Hilton were pretty good. And the guy from San Jose, McMahon, or whatever his name is—he was just—
Sami Winc: Yeah, that was the EV tax guy.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. I’m not them and I’m not them. I’m in the middle. I’m not Left or Right. I’m just nothing.
Sami Winc: Would it surprise you that the Palisades arsonist has revealed himself to be Left-wing? Some of his social media posts are—or sorry, these are the history of his searches on his computer. Free Mangione and kill billionaires. And it’s—
Victor Davis Hanson: He did. I mean, if you think about the assessed evaluation of that beautiful Pacific Palisades, it must have been, I don’t know, billions of dollars. He destroyed it. Killed 12 people. And he’s a hero, probably. And the $100 million was raised for private charities. It’s all gone. They blew that on—the NGOs took that money. I mean, there’s nothing there. Boy, I get back to those videos of LA in the ’50s. If you had a guy like Sam Yorty, whom I wasn’t particularly fond of, but he was a good mayor, in the early ’60s—he would have just gone on there—that would have been all rebuilt by now.
But the subtext was a Leftist burned it down because he hated wealthy people, and he knew a communist mayor. And I say that because she used to visit Cuba—Castro—Karen Bass. And he knew that she wouldn’t rebuild it and would try to have high-density affordable housing. You know what I mean? That’s just a buzzword for we’re going to—look outside Rome or Amsterdam or Paris. We love those high-rises. They have a little bit of lawn. And then the bus picks everybody up. And that’s what they want. Not for them. Not for them. They want a big, beautiful, gracious John Kerry or Elizabeth Warren house. That’s what they want. Or Nancy Pelosi’s three mansions or Barack Obama’s four. That’s what they want.
Sami Winc: Or Bernie Sanders’ three homes.
Victor Davis Hanson: He has three too. Yes, he does. One on the lake, of course. They have to have one. If you’re a Democrat and you’re a Socialist and you want high-density housing for everybody else, it’s absolutely important one of your many houses has to be on the lake. I think his is on Lake Champlain.
Sami Winc: Champlain, isn’t it?
Victor Davis Hanson: And Barack has two. He has one on the Atlantic and one in the Pacific, on the shore. And I don’t know about—Dianne Feinstein had one at Lake Tahoe, a mansion. They usually have them pretty near the sea.
Sami Winc: Yeah, and doesn’t it seem funny to you that they are offended by billionaires, but they want to take more money from the people via all of these excise taxes and things like that? And they’re just fine with the fraudsters that are taking it from them. Like, that’s OK. They’re spreading money around, but a billionaire doesn’t do that.
Victor Davis Hanson: They don’t believe it—when money is stolen or wasted, they think, well, who got the money? The people did. So they don’t mind. And then Hasan Piker, the Marxist pro–Luigi Mangione—he had a new Porsche. So I just did, before we started, I was curious. I said to Grok—and I’m going to check it with ChatGPT—does Hasan Piker have a Porsche, and how much is it worth? $200,000. Some people say he has Cartier jewelry or something, a watch or something.
Sami Winc: He looks like he has that kind of stuff on him.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. So you have a $200,000 Porsche, and you’re defending the guy who killed a middle-class person who worked his way up. UnitedHealthcare. I have UnitedHealthcare. I had over a million dollars in medical fees. There’s only been one little dispute. One dispute on a PET scan that I may end up having to pay, but I doubt it. I wrote them a very nice note.
So when he says that they just poach on people, I don’t know what he’s talking about. They insure millions of people. And they’re in financial trouble, mostly because of the medical fraud on the part of the Left, you know?
But it’s so weird that they’re not even shameless. So this Piker guy—and you praise murderers that kill what you call enemies of the people, or social murders, because they are social murderers—and then you are so brazen you drive around in a $200,000—wouldn’t a true Marxist say, well, I like that $200,000 Porsche, but let me do the math. Ah, I could buy four or five Honda Civics for the people, and I’d like to help them. And if we all—I suggest we all have a program that nobody on the Left buys expensive cars. No. This is nothing about ideology. That’s just the way they gain power for themselves and money.
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