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.
Jack Fowler: Well, you know what’s not a beautiful place to live, Victor, segueing, is Los Angeles. And you talked with Sami about the really terrific, I think, debate between the mayoral candidates, Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, the Republican who you’ve actually talked to, and you’ve talked about talking to him and Nithya Raman, who’s a city councilwoman.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
So, we won’t re-go over the debate again, but just to let folks know that an online poll from NBC Los Angeles showed that, as of Thursday morning, this was right after the debate, 89% of the voters picked Spencer Pratt, when asked who they thought had emerged victorious from the Wednesday night showdown.
Now, two other things, and then please, any opinions you please share. Today, Karen Bass has announced she’s withdrawing from the next mayoral debate. This was being sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs.
She had promised she would come, but I think she got her, you know, her hiney kicked by Pratt the other day. And she’s just gonna ghost them.
And then finally, worth raising about the debate is that Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who was running, during the debate she backed off her—she had a position change.
Guess what, Victor? She used to be for defunding the police. She’s no longer for defunding the police. So—
Hanson: No longer, for now.
She will if she were to be elected. She’s on the City Council—once the race is over, she’s a City Council member, they’re all Democrats, she will go back to do that. It’s chaos. It’s really tragic, what’s happened to Los Angeles. And Karen Bass was a deer in the headlights at that debate.
Both of them are incumbents. One was an incumbent City Council member and one was the mayor. And they all had a hand in the policies of no cash bail, not arresting people for theft under a particular, you know, they eased that. It wasn’t just $950. Even when people did a little bit more, they kind of winked and nodded.
There are homeless parks. If you go to Venice Beach—I used to teach at Pepperdine one day a week, and I would ride my bike through there, and even in 2000—I think the last time I did it was 2020—it was just dystopian. I mean, there’s zombie—it looked like, you know, “The Last of Us” or some TV show with all of these zombies.
And then it was filthy dirty. My bike would get human excrement on the tires. And then you go down the Pacific Coast Highway, people were just crazy, walking around in the middle of traffic. Just total chaos.
And then when he brought all this up, all they could say is he’s Donald Trump or he’s a right-wing Republican. And he’s apolitical. I think he’s an independent.
All he stuck to was we didn’t have water and the fire burned down. And then you won’t even issue building permits. You wouldn’t let us clean the hills so we could get that flammable brush out. We tried. You didn’t do that. Your fire chief was more interested in DEI than monitoring why all these hundreds of fire hydrants did not work.
Your power and water grandee who was hired, kind of, was a flunky from PG&E. You paid her $700k. She left two critical reservoirs for months dry, right during the Santa Ana wind season, when we had this flare-up.
You went to Ghana for no reason, just for a personal—your vice mayor, as I said to Sami, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat. Of course, it was a feint—he claimed that Israel had phoned in a bomb threat, and it was a complete lie. He’s in jail, I think, now.
And your fire chief was bragging about her DEI hiring. But nobody was saying that we’re in a very fragile landscape where we have to get these reservoirs full, because they had other interests.
And every time you mention that about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the problem with it is it’s not just commission, it’s omission.
When you put so many resources and so much virtue signaling and performance art all about how diverse we are, and you never ask yourself, is that person meritocratically hired? Is that person competent? Because 6 million people’s lives depend on that job, in the air traffic controller or in the water and power or getting oil. And the answer is, we don’t care.
And that’s why Spencer Pratt’s ads are so effective. He walks through the detritus of Los Angeles, and then he superimposes Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass laughing in very beautiful homes.
And his point is the ramifications, the consequences of these people’s ideology never affects them. For them, it’s all some utopian exercise and we’re all the lab rats. We’re in cages, and we can’t get out, and they experiment on us. And then they go home to nice, happy, secure lives, and they’re well paid. And their pay has nothing to do with their actual performance.
And then when you see Gavin Newsom endorse her and say all these things, and then you see people on the debate stage for the governor’s race, which was really pathetic, they were all praising Gavin Newsom, and you say to yourself, California fell apart around 2008/’06, it started going downhill. People started to leave. Taxes started to get really high.
Who, more than anybody, could have been responsible? Because it was a Bay Area phenomenon where it started. Well, who was City County official? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was mayor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was lieutenant governor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was governor? Gavin Newsom for six years now and counting.
So, there’s no person more responsible. And yet when you see him talk, Jack, if you mention high-speed rail, he said, oh, you know—he just moves his hands and just shakes his head and he says, we’ve got this going and this.
And you say, you’ve spent $250—it’s gonna be $250 billion. You probably spent $30 billion. There’s no way you can build it. There’s no way you can run it if it was free. And he just ignores it.
And then when you say, after the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire or the Palisades Fire, don’t you get it, that you drove out all the lumber companies? They can’t glean the hillsides. You don’t let people go up and harvest wood.
You think it’s natural to let all these dead trees from the drought just sit there, 60 million of them, as kindling? And then you say, you have no margin of error, Gavin.
You drove out two big refineries. You’ve got all of these people on the Air Resources Board that wants the purest gas that doesn’t pollute, and you can only get it in the Caribbean distillery and refineries in Japan.
And you talk about fossil fuels as evil, but then you import it from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Do you think that they pump it more ecologically sound than we could?
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: So, you want to use it, but you just don’t want to get your hands dirty. And then when the price goes up, you have a Steven Chu attitude that you don’t express. Well, gas goes up to European levels, we’ll use less.
Well, yeah, if you live in Palo Alto and Santa Monica and Montecito, you don’t care. But if you live in Huron or, I don’t know, Five Points or Parlier, you do care. And $2 can break you if you’ve got to commute. Maybe you can’t afford a Tesla. You have maybe a 2003 Pontiac or something that gets about 16 miles to the gallon, and you can buy it for 1,500 bucks.
But they have no idea. And why, the people who are harmed the most by them, vote for them, I don’t know. But if it’s not sustainable, as I said to Sammy, it won’t go on. And we’re getting to peak dystopia.
That it’s not going—it’s not working.
Fowler: Yeah. The fact that Pratt seemingly has traction here is helpful, Victor. But I think it’s a test here.
Can a city that’s been so committed to such self-inflicted wounds, can the people snap to their senses and say, we’re not gonna do this anymore? I don’t know. It seems like there’s some hope here. But if he loses, I would think all these big cities are just—they’re circling the drain. How much torture can you create and—
Hanson: I think if you go into the LA area now and you go into places in Orange County or communities along the coast, blue-chip places, or you go into Simi Valley, you’re starting to see the breakup of the idea of Los Angeles.
They’re just small communities, and they’re run locally, and they want nothing to do with LA, and they’re very suspicious of anybody coming in anymore. You know what I mean?
They’re trying to reestablish local control and they’re saying, we’re gonna be like Augustine in North Africa in the fifth century AD when the whole world was collapsing. They’re gonna have fortified Hippo or something, communities.
And I think that’s what’s—it’s very similar to the late Byzantine Empire and the late Western Empire where as the federal system collapses and the elected officials collapse and you have these huge migrations of people that are antithetical to the system and the people in power are incompetent and corrupt, then people, on their own, they either migrate, which is happening now, or they create cocoons where—
I’ll give you an example. There’s a rural school not too far from here. I grew up with it. It was just a rural school. But some very, you know, concerned people began to move into that district. And then they fixed the school up. And then they began paying much more in that little school district, and they recruited the best teachers in the country. And now that school, a rural school, K-8, I think it is, you have to register when your child is born, to get into it.
But they’re very careful. They moved there. They live in that district. And they said to this wider world, we don’t believe in your schools. We don’t believe in any of this. We’re going to go live near a school. Get our school board. Control it. And then we’re going to have meritocratic hiring only.
And we’re not going to have any DEI. We’re not going to have any teachers union. We’re not going to have any of that weaponized curriculum. Just a classical curriculum. And everybody wants to go there. And they’re very careful.
And where I live, in a 50-mile radius, I’d say there’s three or four communities that have decided, you know, as the Romans say, non hic porcus. Not this pig. We’re not going to do it. And they have reestablished local traditions. They have good restaurants. They’re very careful about zoning.
They don’t have a lot of new housing development. They discourage rentals. And they are throwbacks to the 1950s. It works. And they’re very coveted, to live there. And if you want to go to their schools. It’s very hard to get a transfer.
And so, I can see it, where my daughter lives in the foothills, that there’s a whole bunch of people, and they’re not conservative necessarily, from the Bay Area. She lives on a dead-end road. Cul-de-sac. It’s, kind of, about a quarter-mile long, and there are homes there.
And they all have one thing in common. They’re all semi-upper-class or middle-class professionals, at one point. But usually the woman is now raising children at home. They have chickens. They’re back to the land.
And they don’t talk politics. And they’re very involved in Little League, local PTAs, schools. And their whole existence is a rejection of the Bay Area. And that’s why they’re there. They voted with their feet, to stay in California for a variety of reasons, but they’re creating an alternative identity. And I think that’s going to happen.
That’s what red-state America is becoming.
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: Parallel polis.
This is funny, when you see Gavin Newsom, when he looked at—because he is really the most disingenuous politician of my lifetime. He looks at these red states and now they’re redistricting. Now he calls them the Confederate states.
Gavin, if they’re the Confederate states, after the Civil War, the Confederate states were devastated. They were plagued with racism. They were the home of the Klan. They had Jim Crow, and the northern industrial states and New England were booming.
And you tell me how that flipped. Because people vote regardless of ideology. And they’re leaving your paradigm for that paradigm. And they’re not going there for Jim Crow. They’re going there for safety, low taxes, good infrastructure, responsible government, police, security.
And then he said, and I’ll end with this, Jack. He said, or he wrote, he was very anguished because he showed the Confederate states, he called them, and he said their legislatures have redistricted, like Louisiana and now Tennessee. And it’s eight-zero, House seats. Even though the Democrats in those states had 45% in the last election. Or 38%. Look at Alabama’s doing it.
And you just stop and take a deep breath and say, my God, this guy really is shameless. He’s shameless because everybody knows that you can take a blue-state paradigm of New England.
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: And you look at Delaware, New Hampshire. They’re the same. Massachusetts, nine-zero.
They have no representation, even though Trump in those states got from 38 to 45%.
And then you look at California, and under his directorship, we’re going to have about, of the 52 or 53 seats, we’re gonna have maybe 9%. I don’t know, seven Republicans.
And so here he is in the most gerrymandered and biggest state in the union calling others Confederates for doing what New England does and what he does in spades.
It’s really—
Fowler: It’s projectionism, which is their power.
Hanson: I don’t understand his career. I never understood his career. I have never understood it. I understand the Gettys launched it. I understand he was under the tutelage of the Pelosis.
I understand that the Bay Area assumed political power after the riches of Silicon Valley were manifest. I understand Willie Brown. I understand Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown.
