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, California polls or the California election results have come in, and I was wondering your thoughts, especially in LA, because there’s been lots of news this week and discussion about two things: dirty voter rolls, and then the New York Post had an article on how Nithya Raman was part and parcel to funding a social services by $600,000, and then they went out and paid or got homeless people and anybody else they could to register at that address.
And so, my question is this: How many social services do you think have done that? And what is the impact of the number of votes they can bring in in that fashion, given that Nithya Raman won by 30,000 votes over Pratt?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, with 65% of the vote, she was third. She was seven points behind.
She even gave a tearful, teary-eyed, I lost. It’s so bad. But the point was, she didn’t—when all of these mail-in ballots came in in troves, they went out and they harvested votes. And they went to homeless people, and under the rules, they said you don’t need an address. You just get the lowest corner.
Here’s five bucks, $4. Some people said $4. And we will register you. Oh, you don’t have an ID. You don’t have a driver’s license? That’s OK. We’ll give you an ID number. Well, now that you have an ID number, now you’re registered.
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Well, turn in your registration. Now we’re gonna give you a provisional ballot.
Oh, you can’t read or write or you’re too zoomed out? Make a happy face, your mark, and I’ll be the witness. And here, you can’t read them?
Here’s who you vote for. And give me the—here’s the registration and here’s the ballot, and I’m gonna take it in. And they did that all over Los Angeles to young people, minorities, and homeless people.
And they all came in to such a degree. I don’t even think she won her own district’s vote. It was all over the city in specially designated areas that they had contacts as social workers, social work centers.
And so, everybody said on the left, well, you’re a conspiracist. You think that, uh—show us the fraud.
[President] Donald Trump walked out of an interview because they said, “Show us the fraud.”
They don’t understand what the fraud was. The fraud was the legal system that was legalized fraud.
It was created to create fraud, but it was technically legal. So, in California, you don’t need a license to register to vote. If you’re an illegal alien, you can get a license. But you wouldn’t even need a license.
You can have a credit card without your picture on it. You can have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you can be given an ID number. That’s the first thing. You can register and vote on the same day, and you won’t have to show any picture ID either to register or to vote. You don’t even have to read English.
You don’t have to be able to write. You can make a mark. You can have somebody witness 1,000 times, the same person. Every single person who is registered gets a ballot. They don’t care if you’re dead. They don’t watch it carefully. They don’t care if you’ve moved. They don’t care if the names have been changed and you have two ballots.
I mentioned that before. I have children who lived here. They went to college. They married, and for years, I got mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots. Maybe it was William Hanson. Maybe he registered under Bill. Maybe he registered under Billy, and I took the ballots and threw them in [the trash]. All I would have had to do was make a happy face and have my friend witness it and mail it in, and it would have [counted].
And that happened. And then they said, illegal aliens don’t vote. And then the question was, well, why not? If you go to the disability, they do. If you go to unemployment, they do. If you go to Medi-Cal office, they do. If you go to legal services, they do. If you go to school, they do. You’re given a registration, and you can register without a driver’s license.
But if you wanna be correct and get a driver’s license, you go into the DMV and say, “I want a driver’s license.” And you don’t have to be a US citizen. And so, then, once that happens, you get all these people that vote, and then you have people in these vote collection centers. And you don’t just turn them in.
You get the troves, and then you postmark them, and they can come in for the next seven days, as long as they’re postmarked on or by election day. And then you see if you need them or not.
Believe me, if she had been way ahead, she wouldn’t have done that. It wouldn’t have mattered. They wouldn’t have done that.
They knew that she was third. They had polls. So, that’s vote harvesting.
Then, if you go in and they say, “Well, the person didn’t sign their name. It doesn’t match the registration.” Well, if it’s 40%. So, Victor Davis Hanson, I write Victor, it’s 40%. That counts. But if it doesn’t count, you put it in the seven-day vote-curing pile.
And then you call the candidate and say, we’ve got all these votes that came in. Do you want to cure this ballot? They open the thing up and they say …
So, the candidates then go to extraordinary measures to find the people. And then they bring them in and they re-sign their name. And that’s why the ballots take so long, because they don’t come in for seven days.
And then when you have all this fraud, guess what the rejection rate was in 2024 of all the ballots that were cast in California? 0.09%. Not even 1% was thrown out, just a fraction of a percent.
In other words, they have all these people, and they didn’t do anything. They didn’t say, well, this person’s not registered. This person is registered on this name, but we have three ballots with this. This witness didn’t spell a name. There’s none of that.
They just went ahead and did it. And that was designed to do what? That was designed to get a supermajority in the House, the Assembly, and the State Senate in California. Check. To get 15 years of straight Democrat governors. Check. To get a whole generation of liberal judges appointed by Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. Check. To get the congressional district, not 40%, the delegations of the 52, to get it down to seven. 13% of the state’s congresspeople are Republican, and the state votes about 38%, 40% Republican statewide. And so, it worked. And then finally, why did it work? What happened to the Pete Wilson group? What happened to [unintelligible]?
The middle class, 300 to 500,000 a year, said, you know what? This is crazy. We pay the highest taxes, and we’re down like 45th in test scores. We pay the highest gas taxes, and we’re rated 49th in roads. High-speed rail is rusting. Palisades burns down. It’s not rebuilt. We passed a water bond. They took the money and blew up four dams.
They didn’t build one dam. We did a gerrymandering, anti-gerrymandering bill, and we had five Democrats, five Republicans, four Independents. And guess what? The activists, the lawsuits, the racialists, they all went in and they warped the spirit, and they did that.
And so, people said, I’ve had it. And they’re leaving, the conservative voter.
And then we imported about 10 million people over 30 years that said, I love this country, but, you know, if I say I hate the country and it’s racist and it’s horrible, the more stuff I get, and the more I’m patronized, and the more I can’t be a racist. So, they created that dependent—and I saw that when I taught as a professor.
I saw students that came in, and they were basically—I think I’ve told that story twice to this crowd. As a Latina, I don’t have to listen to “The Iliad.” It doesn’t—It’s not relevant to me. OK, I said, as a white person, your argument’s not relevant to me. And then I got—not she didn’t get chastised, I did.
And then finally, the coup de grâce was we had $14 trillion in Silicon Valley, and that took the political nexus from the LA conservative places, once conservative, to the Bay Area. And we got Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown.
That’s what we got. And they ran the state into the ground with the money and backing of this new world juggernaut. And the whole bicoastal elite were the upper, upper Asian and white professional classes that said, I’m so wealthy now. I want to create heaven on earth. I want to get rid of fossil fuels.
I want diversity. I want to defund the police. I want to do all this stuff. And I live in Brentwood, and I live in Carmel, and I live in Montecito, and I’m safe. I’m safe from the disasters I’m creating for the hoi polloi.
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