Victor Davis Hanson: California Was the American Dream. What Happened?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript 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: We know that in California, Xavier, I think his name is Becerra, is going to win, but he is the most unimpressive of governors I’ve ever seen. Even Kamala Harris said he was not up to snuff, and she is, of course, one of the most unimpressive of mediocrities. 

Victor Davis Hanson: He doesn’t come out and talk about the Biden immigration policies, which he was involved in when there were all of these unattended youth, 350,000 they can’t account for. 

If that had been [President Donald] Trump, he’d be in jail. So, he’s not very … I followed his career in California. He’s not very adept. He’s not a good speaker.

But again, Steve Hilton has all the answers. He really does, and he would be wonderful for the state. He’s running about 18% [behind]. Let’s just say that the polls, being all slanted and designed to raise Democratic money and create Democratic momentum, are exaggerated, as we know they have been in these other races. 

So, let’s say they’re eight points off. So, he’s ahead of Steve Hilton by eight to nine points.  

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Now, my question is this: Why would anybody vote for a person tied in with Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and that whole tradition of Bay Area politicians who’ve taken control of the state from the LA center of power of the 1970s and ’80s, when they gave us a huge government fraud program? Devastating wildfires due to their policies about not cleaning up the forest. 

The highest electricity rates in the continental United States. The highest gasoline rates in the continental United States. The highest income tax, state income tax, 13.3. The highest gas taxes. The highest number of homeless people. Almost the same as Appalachia, 21% below the poverty line. 

One out of every three welfare recipients, 50% of the births on Medi-Cal, welfare type of thing, 40% of everybody uses that health care system. And we’ve got a high-speed rail not far from where I’m speaking that we’ve spent $20 billion on, and it hasn’t laid, in 10 years—12 years—one foot of track. And this group of people has overseen that.  

And I have an answer for you. The answer is this, and I’ve said it before: 28% of the state was not born in the United States. 

Another 7 to 8 million of our 40 million Californians are the children of people, and that can mean they were just born here one day when their parents arrived, right? But anyway, they have not been fully integrated, acculturated, and assimilated. You add those two groups of first- and second-generation immigrants, and you get about 45% to 46% of the population. 

And when you look at where those immigrants came from, three large groups: south of the border, Mexico and Central America; India; and China. Those are all impoverished groups.  

So, in their way of thinking—and I talk to a lot of them—when they come to California and they see how far it has declined and what it was like in the 1960s as a can-do state that was at the cutting edge of aqueducts and water projects and the tripartite UC, CSU, JC system, and I think it was number nine in test scores, and it was well-governed, it was not corrupt, and they had one of the most sophisticated highway systems. 

When they see all that, they don’t know. They just say I don’t know. Listen, I grew up in Venezuela. I grew up in Oaxaca. I grew up… I’ve never seen a place like this. It’s wealthy. And you know what? The moment I set across—I put a toe across the U.S. border—these crazy people think I’ve been oppressed. 

And not only have I been oppressed, I’ve been oppressed by them. So, I come over from India or China or Mexico, and all of a sudden, my kids get preference getting into school. I get preference in civil service hiring.  

And if somebody said, “Well, Victor, you’ve said yourself that DEI was on the way.” I said, “It is the way out.” 

But there was just a statistic that Mission High School in San Francisco, 94% are not proficient in math and like 70% are not proficient in English, and it’s sending a huge amount of its graduates to UC Berkeley. And then there was an example of another school district where 95% are proficient. Instead of getting 45% of the applicants accepted like Mission, they got eight. 

In other words, they were penalized for turning out students that were superbly trained in math and English, and only 8% got in. That’s California, and it hasn’t changed.  

So, they look at that. So, I think those voters, I mean, they’re the majority. They’re 45%. I’m not talking about other ethnic … 

I’m not talking about third-generation people from those same areas. I’m talking about just first or second. So, it takes three generations to become conservative when you’re an immigrant from a poor country. It does. 

Winc: Yeah. 

Hanson: In my experience, it does. 

Winc: Yeah. And to add to your statistics on California, just glancing at the California Post—that’s also the New York Post—today, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s closing down 44 stores, and U-Haul is reporting that more and more people are exiting the state as well. 

Hanson: I see them every day. It’s crazy. It’s one of those weird stories where you see the national story that 11 million people have left, and you think, “Oh my gosh, there go the Reagan voters. There go the Pete Wilson voters. There go the George Deukmejian voters,” right? “There go the Arnold Schwarzenegger voters.” 

And then you start to see … I have a wonderful group of people I hadn’t seen since I graduated from high school, you know, 55 years ago, and one of them lives right here. 

He’s fourth generation. He just left to South Carolina. And I talked to another person—I won’t mention him—but I had just talked to him, and he was talking about a nice home near his in Fresno that I should look at, and I was considering it. And he’s in Arizona now, and I don’t blame him one bit. 

So, it’s everybody is leaving who would vote for a conservative, and everybody is coming who compares the welfare state of California and the DEI complex as superbly convenient to them and much better than the conditions that they had in India and China and Mexico.  

So, when somebody says to them, “You don’t know what California was like before these people took over. You should have seen what California was like under Reagan and Wilson and—” 

It worked. The universities worked. The highways were sufficient for the population at the time. We built nuclear plants. We were at the cutting edge of airports. LAX was not like it is now. It was not. And the California Water Project was going to have more reservoirs. 

And they say, “Well, go down to Chiapas. Go down to Michoacán. Go into, you know, a big city in India. Tell me that this is not better.” And that’s their frame of reference. And then you start meeting people from India in the third generation or from Mexico that have been here, and they don’t know the home country. 

Then they look at it and see this is a dysfunctional society because they can see it on the news, and they’ve traveled to other states. But that’s a long-winded explanation of why I want Steve Hilton to win. But I’m not as optimistic as I should be because he’s got an English accent too. 

Becerra has a slight Hispanic accent, and that … 

Winc: I saw him on Fox News. He said the polls are closing from the 25-point gap earlier, and now it’s below 10. 

Hanson: I believe that. I believe that. But still, he’s also warring against another thing. California, I feel, is the most lax state as far as registration. 

We saw that in the mayor’s race where, is it Raman or whatever her name was? She had conceded, and then all these mail-in ballots came, and then people in the homeless communities were saying they were getting money to register the same day and vote. And I know that, having children at my house, years after they went out on their own, I would still get their ballots here. 

I got them for about five years, and I would write—I’d send them back—and it didn’t do any good. They just kept sending. Anytime you come in contact with a California agency, they send out a registration. That’s intentional. They want that edge, the Democratic Party. 

Yeah. The irony is that right during COVID, I read a Stanford Law article in the Stanford Law Review, they didn’t say so, but it was talking about the effort going on to get mail-in and early ballots in the 2020 election.

OK. So, remember, everybody, Molly Ball, I keep saying, wrote that article in Time Magazine explaining how that was a cabal. That was her words, not mine. Conspiracy, her words, not mine, to change balloting laws so you would have 70% of people not voting on Election Day who could not be audited. 

But the Stanford Review was talking about the incipient, just the beginning of that, and this left-wing neo-socialist review was criticizing it because they said, “This is full of so many holes and can’t be verified that the right will use it.” See what I mean?  

And I thought when I read it, I said, “No, you’re right about it can’t be verified, but it’s your guys who did it, and your guys know how to cheat a lot better than our guys do.” 

That was what was so weird about it. 

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