Victor Davis Hanson: California Is Becoming a Warning for America

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Thursday’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: Let’s turn to California, and California seems to be a petri dish of all those ideas that the Democrats have going.  I’ll read a few of the things that are happening this week in California, and you can provide us with commentary. 

The first thing that I think is very interesting is that the federal Congress, the House, has passed a bill for the defense budget of $1.15 trillion. In it, Donald Trump has the ability to seize property in California for an oil pipeline. The property they’re looking at is down near Santa Barbara. 

Victor Davis Hanson:  I think it’s on federal land. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. And if it’s not, they have the right to buy it up, is what the bill says. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, basically, he’s saying to Californians, and I think I’m correct, that we have the fourth or fifth largest oil and gas reserves of any state: Monterey Shale offshore, the Elk Reserve, Naval Reserve near Bakersfield. 

So he said, “You people have the highest gas prices in the nation, and it’s kind of a drag on the rest of the nation because you have the tech sector, and you’re driving everybody out, and you’re losing your competitiveness. Part of the reason is your fuel is so expensive, your gasoline and diesel fuel, and your electricity. 

“You’re trying to get rid of nuclear. Your wind and solar don’t work much, and you’re importing a lot of energy from the Middle East that we don’t like. So we would like to go in and take our federal leases and put them up. There’s a lot of oil out there. Get Chevron and Exxon to pump. 

“And there are other areas that have rare earth minerals in the desert you’re not fully utilizing.” 

That’s what he’s trying to do. 

Sami Winc: All right, let’s look at another story. 

There’s a homeless group that works at 17 different homeless facilities in San Francisco, and they just recently lost their funding. 

They were being funded at about $26,000 per inhabitant they were taking care of, and their facilities were rife with understaffing, sexual abuse, a dead and decaying body in one case, vermin infestation, broken elevators—the perfect example of how the government is not taking good care. 

Victor Davis Hanson: So what happens is the government doesn’t want to deal with it, so it just takes these block grants. Then somebody says, “You know what? They’re paying $26,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 per person. So I’ll just create a little nonprofit, and I’ll say that I’m taking care of people on the street. For maybe six weeks I’ll do a good job. 

“But then I don’t want to get around those people. They don’t bathe. They defecate on the street. They’re violent. They’re mentally ill. I’m just gonna pay me and my family and my staff a lot of money and rip off the government.” 

That’s what they’re doing. 

And they’re not… 

Gavin said if they gave him $10 billion, I think, he could solve the homeless problem. 

And they did, and it’s worse than ever. 

Sami Winc: It’s worse than ever. 

Victor Davis Hanson: We know what the only answer for it is to do one of two things, or both: Have everybody come in for a diagnostic test and cut off the drugs so they can’t get fentanyl, and then either do one of two things. If they are mentally unsound, open up state hospitals where they can get care. 

And if they’re not, have some kind of little village on the outskirts of town where they have, you know, 200- or 300-square-foot little rooms with a bed and a dresser, and then they have a big group facility with showers and toilets, and make it humane. 

And they won’t do that. 

Mamdani said, “We’re not gonna take people off the street.” 

So he’s got a huge homeless problem in New York. 

And Los Angeles—I never believed two things about L.A. I grew up in California, and from when I was a little boy, there was no such thing, really, as downtown L.A. It had the police station and a couple of government buildings, but it wasn’t like San Francisco with high-rises. 

Then in the ’90s, as we came on the eve of globalization, it was a window onto China and Japan. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d go down to L.A. in ’93, ’95, ’98, 2002, 2003, and there were like 20 cranes in the sky at any one time. The city was really clean, you know what I mean? It was immaculate. And they had a downtown. 

So you couldn’t believe that. 

And now you can’t believe it. 

When you go down there, the cantinas have taken over everything, and the street merchants, and these beautiful buildings that were just built 30 years ago have graffiti on them. There’s plywood on a lot of the windows where nobody wants to go. 

You have to step over people, and it’s deserted. It’s kind of like Santa Monica. 

Anything that leftism touches has the anti-Midas touch. It destroys. 

And it’s costing a fortune to destroy L.A. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I mean, it’s very expensive to pay homeless people to destroy things. 

Sami Winc: Yeah, it is. 

It took me a second there, Victor. I’m like, “What?” 

Victor Davis Hanson: It is. It was very expensive to tell BLM and Antifa, “Do you want to destroy the country for four months? Well, we won’t arrest you, and we’ll give you a grant. Go ahead and do it.” 

Sami Winc: All right. 

So California voters have put Proposition 39 on the upcoming ballot, and the state is doing everything to subvert that. 

There’s a new story on how they’ve written into the voter ballots a negative summary of it, and then the informational part of it is also negative. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Which proposition are you talking about? 

Sami Winc: It’s called Proposition 39. It’s a voter ID proposition. So the state’s trying to undermine it, in other words, by subtle means. 

Victor Davis Hanson: What usually happens in California is, whether it was Three Strikes, ending affirmative action, or gay marriage—even in its demented state now, after we’ve lost 12 million conservatives to out-of-state immigration—the people still poll that they want it. 

Overwhelmingly, they want voter ID. 

But by the time the SEIU and the California Teachers Association get done funding against it, and then all of these Bay Area and L.A. wealthy donors, they’ll probably defeat it. 

And if they don’t defeat it, some Ninth District left-wing judge who hasn’t been in the news for two months and thinks he’s Socrates wants to be considered cutting-edge and controversial, so he’ll probably throw it out if it were to pass, like they did with gay marriage. 

We passed a proposition that said marriage was only between a man and a woman, and you could have a legal relationship, but it wouldn’t be called marriage. 

And it passed overwhelmingly. 

Then they libeled it and said it was because of the Mormons and Christians. 

But actually, the post-election data showed it was mostly Black and Hispanic people, and then they shut up. 

The moment that passed, they sent it to a U.S. federal judge, and he threw it out. 

At the time, he was living with another man, so you’d think he would have… 

And when people said he had a conflict of interest, they said, “That is the worst thing you could say. That is so homophobic.” 

So he threw it out, and the people’s will went up in smoke. 

That’ll happen with the voter ID initiative unless it gets to the Supreme Court, if it should pass. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t like to be cynical about California, but I’m 72, and I’ve lived here, and I’ve watched it deteriorate. You want to cry when you see what’s happened to it. 

Sami Winc: Well, I’m not gonna cheer you up anymore with these last two stories. 

One is that California Pizza Kitchen—for anybody who does not live in California, it’s pretty much an institution here. There are 185 stores. The owners have left California, and they also said it’s almost an impossible business environment to operate in. That’s a big business. 

The second story is that in the small seaside town of Capitola, a deranged man—I don’t know if he was homeless, actually—Tyler Liljedahl… 

Victor Davis Hanson: He was up on felony charges. He’d been let out. 

Sami Winc: Yes, he had been let out of jail. 

The state also knew that he talked about hearing voices and having homicidal fantasies, and he stabbed to death a woman in a small seaside village that has about 1% of the population in it. 

Victor Davis Hanson: If you were to describe the case in Californese, their language, it would be something like this: 

“Well, a poor African American young man was only 19, and he made a few errors. He had some violent periods in his life, 19, and we decided not to incarcerate him. We convicted him of a felony, and he’s out now, and for all practical purposes he’s making something of himself.” 

But, Mr. Parole Officer, he went to the Capitola Mall to kill somebody, and he saw an elderly Asian male, whom he wanted to kill. 

I think he was also a racist, by the way. He didn’t go after other Black people. 

But he was afraid the elderly Asian man might put up a fight. So then he found a woman crossing the street, and he thought, ‘Ah, she’s looking at cars, and I’ll just follow her.’” 

She was 73. 

It was just the classic California dichotomy. 

Here was a woman living by herself with a cat. Everybody believed she was beloved. She devoted all of her time to the arts, was an artist, just a wonderful person minding her own business. 

Before he followed her, he went to a sporting goods store and bought two—not one, two—knives, because he said he liked to stab with both hands at the same time. 

Sami Winc: Yeah, so he bought two knives. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Two knives. He goes out, and he stabs her 11 times in the back and chest, through the heart, and he kills her. 

And then what will happen? 

He’ll be out in three or four years. 

This is just… 

There are so many things about California. 

If I can tell you that if he was a young white guy whose parents came out from Oklahoma, and there was a wonderful, beloved Black artist, and he went out there and stabbed him twice, the whole state right now would be in an uproar about its racist policies. 

But they don’t really are. 

There’s been no big outrage. It’s just collateral damage. 

It’s like the Sikh truck drivers who ran over three people—or whatever they did in California. They rear-ended them. 

Oh, they paralyzed that one girl, and he only got five years. 

California is really, I think people should understand, a very sick society. 

It’s the sickest society of all the states that we have. 

And Gavin Newsom has been an accelerant of that sickness. 

And it’s a racist state. Twenty-seven percent of the population was foreign-born, and it does not want to acculturate, assimilate, or integrate them. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.