RUSH: Victor Davis Hanson was on with Chatsworth Osborne Jr. last night on the Fox News Channel. And I want to play these two bites. Victor Davis Hanson lives in California as a farmer. He lives and works, he lives on a farm not far from Fresno. And he knows the circumstances of life away from the coast. But he also works at the Hoover Institute, which is a Never Trumper conservative think tank at Stanford in Palo Alto, and he goes there occasionally.
So he’s got the experience of life throughout the state of California. There’s nobody better to accurately describe what California has become. Now, I want to play this also because yesterday we had the news that the governor, Gavin Newsom, said that Republicans are becoming passé, a party headed for the garbage bin, the dustbin of history. And he said the reason for it is that the Republicans proposed denying health care and welfare benefits, free education to illegal immigrants. It was Prop 187.
Prop 187 passed. Fifty-nine percent of California voted for Prop 187 in 1994. Gavin Newsom said that’s what killed the Republican Party. It’s not what killed the Republican Party. A federal judge overturning it and throwing it out. What killed the Republican Party is numbers and demographics, open borders, bringing illegals in and finding ways to flood the culture and the electoral system.
Anyway, in discussing California, why I think Trump should go there, as you just heard me stealthfully mention to the vice president, California, as I said the other day, it’s beautiful. But it’s so many different things in one state, and there’s nobody better at describing it and characterizing it than Victor Davis Hanson. So he’s on with Tucker Carlson. The question: “In what sense is California a Third World state, in your opinion?”
HANSON: It has all the symptoms of what we associate with failed states. It’s got the highest basket of income tax, gasoline taxes, sales tax, and yet its schools are rated in the last 10%, the bottom 10% of the nation’s test scores. One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California, a fifth of the population is below the poverty line, a fifth of all the homeless people in the United States live in California. We have the most billionaires of any state in the nation. And then we have the largest underclass.
RUSH: Now, stop and think about that. How can that be with liberal Democrats running it? Aren’t billionaires supposed to be eviscerated? Aren’t billionaires supposed to — all their money taken from ’em and redistributed in socialist economies and societies where everything is equal and everyone’s the same and there’s no pain because nobody’s ever laughed at, nobody’s ever made fun of, nobody ever loses.
And yet California, look at these numbers. A fifth of the population is below the poverty line, a fifth of all homeless live in California. The most billionaires of any state and the largest underclass with liberal Democrats running this state for decades. How can that be?
And then Joe Biden’s out there saying the first thing he’s gonna do, his Mondale impersonation, gonna raise taxes, the first thing he’s gonna do is raise taxes. These billionaires are gonna start paying — nope, nope, not. If it’s not happening in California, it isn’t happening, ’cause every damn one of these liberal Democrat politicians wants to be one of these billionaires or as close to one as they can get. So the comments continue. This is Mr. Hanson talking about how Gavin Newsom got it all wrong in deciding and determining what happened to Republicans out there.
HANSON: Governor Newsom’s got it exactly wrong. Twenty-five years ago when we had Prop 187, that passed by 59% of the population. It fueled Pete Wilson’s come from behind victory over Kathleen Brown. It was very popular. But three days later a federal court invalidated it, and that got rid of it, the deterrent factor, and people wanted to come to California, often illegally, and they resided here illegally. And that was unfortunately part of a perfect storm where at the same time four to six million people over the next 25 years said, if I’m gonna pay the highest basket of taxes and get the worst roads, infrastructure, public schools, and among the highest crime rates, then I might as well go where there’s no income taxes.
RUSH: That’s right. It’s a combination of the influx of illegals being granted endless warfare causing the beginning of people leaving the state. Many of them were Republicans. But it wasn’t, as the governor said, the passage or the support of Prop 187 that killed the Republican Party in California. Quite the opposite.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, now we go to CNN and the problems with LA homelessness. They sent a reporter out there, Maeve Reston, to do a report on “the tent culture,” the tent culture of the LA homeless. Now, when Trump supporters are in tents like they are today in Orlando waiting for the president to make a speech, they’re ignored, they’re mocked, they’re laughed at. But you go to a tent city of the homeless, and my gosh, you’ve got some of the greatest virtue, some of the greatest people on earth.
Here is Maeve Reston’s report. She gets a question here from one of the other anchorettes. “The number of homeless people in Los Angeles gone up 16% this year. Why? What have you learned, Maeve?”
RESTON: There are so many obstacles to getting, uh, these 60,000 people housed in LA County, and it’s not just the fact that there’s resistance in neighborhoods. But many of the folks that we talk to who are living out on the streets are facing mental health issues, substance abuse issues. And this huge tent culture has really grown up here. And a lot of people want to stay in their tents, you know, feeling that if they are put in housing, they’ll be subject to rules; uh, they’ll lose their freedom.
RUSH: Right. They want to stay in their tents because they don’t want to deal with the rules of living in a house, and we have to respect that. We have to respect that. There’s much more freedom living in a tent or a shopping cart. There’s a bunch of different things that are analogous to a tent. It’s always amazed me that the left says, “It’s perfectly fine for people to live in tents!” They make the case for it. “Hey, they want to live in tents. Hey, they want to live in shopping carts.
“Who are you to take it away from them?” Rather than try to improve their lot, their circumstance, instead you make the case that the Democrat Party has compassion and is caring for them. “If they want to stay in tents, then by golly we’re gonna make sure they stay in tents or shopping carts.” So next, the infobabe Poppy Harlow was talking about the instances of homelessness in Los Angeles with Maeve Reston later on, and this is the conversation that ensued…
MAN: (groans)
HARLOW: And I just wonder why this is happening when the economy is so good. Is it this issue of the growing income divide which, you know, a lot of tech executives like Marc Benioff recently called it “unbridled capitalism”? Is that part of what’s at play here?
RESTON: That’s exactly… Yeah, that’s exactly right, Poppy! And you have even the presidential candidates, uhh, talking about this now, the fact that so many people are facing economic hardship in states like California, where housing prices are through the roof and people just can’t afford the rent anymore. And so you have families living in cars across the city.
RUSH: Who’s running the city, Ms. Reston? Who’s running the state? You got more billionaires in the state of California than anywhere else, and you got one-fifth of the homeless population of the country in California. Where’s all this compassion? Where’s all this mandatory take-it-from the billionaires and give it to the others? You blame this on unbridled capitalism?
“Exactly, Poppy, exactly. That’s exactly right. Unbridled capitalism.” And, of course, that theory came from Marc Benioff, who, what is he, Salesforce? He’s some highfalutin tech company. He’s a billionaire. He’s out there, “Unbridled capitalism is why there’s homeless.”
Mr. Benioff, with one check you could get all those homeless people out of LA and put in a house somewhere, and then you could pay the utilities for a year. You could do that, and you wouldn’t even miss it. But no ho-ho-ho-ho, isn’t gonna happen, because that precedent we cannot establish.
So in this sense, California owns it, LA owns it in a political sense. And when they’re blaming unbridled capitalism, let me tell you what they’re doing. They’re blaming it on Trump, they’re blaming it on conservatives, they’re blaming it on Republicans. That’s what that means.
It is an ideological argument. And it’s never made any intellectual sense because these people all end up beating up the system that made them wealthy, made them affluent and continues to. People in the news media. Well, some of them. The amount of ignorance coupled with a really damaged ideology is on constant, daily display in the Drive-By Media.
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