California’s NGO Money Pipeline, Unfunded Mandates, and Rebuilding After the Palisades Fires | Elaine Culotti & Victor Davis Hanson

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And I also build and develop homes but I do that in the Pacific Palisades. I've sort of had this awakening since 1991 about how California has changed. And when I wake up in the morning now, I worry about what's gonna happen today and what can I do to fix that and where is the intervention. I used to wake up every morning and be like, I am the luckiest person on earth to live in this beautiful place. I think we know what's wrong. It's the leadership in Los Angeles. But was there an agenda behind the sloth? Or was it just a state, just the typical California incompetence? And or was there an ideological agenda that made this disaster worse because it's still a disaster? What I think is really important for both Democrats and Republicans to understand especially voters is that the majority of our money goes in the middle before it goes to our problems. The Pacific Palisades fires, for example, a disaster happens, FEMA comes in and FEMA has what's called a METOC, a mandatory award task contract or something like that, which then tasks contractors to come in and do work, including be the accountant. So in our case, it was ECC was our accountant for the fires for the $1.1 billion that came in. And then they distribute that money to Army Corps of Engineers or Clark Construction, whoever the security paving, it doesn't matter. But the middleman hands out the money. You'd have to live under a rock to think that eventually there wouldn't be fraudsters in the middle. I think you're onto something when you say mandates, that the state put mandates on formulas for gas, formulas for electric use, clean energy, without any consideration what it would mean to people, let's say, in Fresno County that are very poor. We've been microdosed into this DEI world and woke. I mean, it starts with, you come up with this idea of carbon taxes and you're just gonna like create all of these encumbrances on huge corporations because they're such bad, bad, bad corporations, right? Never mind that Chevron's been providing gas to California since its inception. So what we do is we say, this is bad, bad, bad in the name of environmental law. You know, we can go and we can fight these bad, bad ideas and then you create just layers and layers of legislation that start this idea that we can just basically mandate stuff now.icken to explain to us why she ran and I'm very interested and I think you will be too that she has a lot of unique answers to some of the pressing problems. And so I might as well start out Elaine with why don't you introduce yourself to us and just give us a brief little description of why you're running and then I can ask you some things about our problems because I know that I've read some of the things you've written and you have some unique ideas that I haven't seen voiced elsewhere. So go ahead. Hi. It's hi. Hi, Victor. Before we start, I just want to say I'm super fan. I'm like kind of a super fan. So much so that I was a correspondent for the Daily Signal before my run. It's conflict so I couldn't do it while I'm running. And I am running for governor of California as a no party preference. And the reason that I'm doing that is I farm. I'm I'm sure if you know that I farmed down in San Diego County. And I also build and develop homes, but I do that in the Pacific Palisades. So what's happened to me is I've sort of had this awakening since 1991 about how California has changed. And when I wake up in the morning now, I worry about what's going to happen today and what can I do to fix that? And where is the intervention where I used to wake up every morning and be like, I am the luckiest person on earth to live in this beautiful place. And when that shifted, I shifted. And I realize, and I'm sure, you know, so does your audience certainly, because it's the Daily Signal audience and many others that we have this one party state and it's, um, and it's killing us. It's just killing us to not have choices. And even though, even though 41% of Californians are either an independent party candidate or a no party preference candidate or undecided or disillusioned with the other parties. So with that, um, thank you for having me on. Okay. Thank you. Well, let's just start with, um, because I know you've been active in the, the Palisades fire and it's been over a year and nothing's been, I was teaching up Pepperdine last semester and I would drive through it a couple of times. Um, what, I think we know what's wrong. It's the, it's the leadership in Los Angeles, but was there an, I, was there an agenda behind the sloth or was it just a state, just the typical California incompetence and, or was there an ideological agenda that made this disaster worse because it's still a disaster. They're not building. And what, what would you do to speed it along? I know it's going to be connected with your ideas about the billionaire tax and maybe loans and, and below market real loans for people and help. But maybe you could explain that first. Um, well, I don't think like anything happened, you know, intentionally, but I, and I never have any, I know everybody wants to say they did this and you know, Karen Bass burned my house down and everything else. But here's the thing. It's like, this isn't a fire issue. This is a three decade old problem, maybe four decades of not actually returning California tax payer dollars into California in like, in a meaningful way. So for example, most of our roads in our major cities are a catastrophe. And then most of our highways, like the 99, for example, for your listeners and up in the central valley, they're, they're just a disaster because no one spends money on them. Um, we don't have a good bridge system. We don't have good water going to our farmers. The Stockton deep water port needs to be dredged. We have millions and millions of dollars, you know, cascading into programs that people feel like they're, they're helping and they're doing good, but really they're not supporting the infrastructure around those people that they're helping. And so it doesn't really, it kind of doesn't matter. Like, you know, what did my dad used to say? It's like free ham at the synagogue. If you're not going to support, you know, your housing and your, uh, oceans and your roadways and your, our fire department, for example, we have, um, this old system, it's called a tree system. Uh, similar to how we were talking earlier about your heart, like the, there's no pressure from the bottom to push water up to the top in the palisades. So no matter what would have happened, the system is so old in the tree system. We would never have, would have had water pressure in our fire hydrants in all of these neighborhoods and never mind that we don't have fire department turnarounds. There aren't any, uh, we don't have like any kind of brush clearance required in properties that are really large, but in open space and wild life pres preservations, cause they're kind of like no man's land. So no one maintains it. And all of these things are all part of small legislation and small bills that get passed in very small communities and they become these massive problems. And California is filled with way too much legislation that conflicts with good stewardship and it's not unclear to me how to fix it. You just have to have a bill for a bill, which try telling that to a trial attorney and there's a million fixes, but they start with understanding what the problem is. Yeah, I didn't mean ideological that it was intentional, but what I was getting at is it was a systems and my view was a systems collapse that you had. I don't know why a mayor would go to Uganda during fire season, for example. And I don't know why the second mayor, the vice mayor would be under house arrest for phoning in a phony bomb threat about Israel. And I don't know why the water and power director who came from PG&E was widely heralded as sort of a super executive wouldn't have insisted that the hydrants were intact or the reservoir was fixed that would have offered help. It just seemed to me that what we're doing in California, we're focusing on a utopian agenda. And I mean, I think that's part of the problem with the slow zoning and permit process and palisades that they feel that maybe the diversity equity or there's they have a vision for the new palisades is different than the old one. And that nullifies the interest of the property owners and their inherent right to get it a speedy application to rebuild. But I guess what I'm saying about California is we inherited this wonderful infrastructure from our grandparents. We had the greatest water delivery system in the world. And we had the tripartite community college, state colleges, U.C. which was a model for the world. Still is the largest CSU, the largest campus in the world. But it our generation, I don't know what maybe it was the affluence or leisure. I don't know. They're not interested in the existential fundamentals of water, as you said, water, fire, safety, infrastructure. And they pursue. I'll just give you one example for the 99 that you properly mentioned. And the let's just say the three main longitudinal connectives in California, the one on one, the five and the 99 for about 10 billion dollars, you could have ensured at least three lanes in each direction for all three of them. 10 to 15 billion. Some people say 25. We spent, I don't know, I can't quite believe our governor that's only been 17 billion on high speed rail, which is four miles from here. My heart when I'm speaking, the overpower one of them. But whether it was the Mojave solar plant that ended up being dismantled or it was the Monterey battery factory, which is a billion dollars, which has gone up and smoked twice, which it's taking thousands of acres of valuable farmland by deliberately cutting off the water and making these huge solar farms. While we're importing oil from Saudi Arabia, gas, our special blended gas from Japan to what I'm getting at is that it just seems that an ideological bent from a coastal elite has said, we have reached utopia. We're very affluent and we can now go on to the next level. We're not worrying about living one more day. We're the existentials have been taken care of. So we're going to have open borders or we need another $500 million for health care for illegal aliens, or we're going to not really audit apparently $200 billion in federal funds for all of these hospices, Medi-Cal. That's not a problem. And we're going to have, even though the voters have rejected racial preferences and time and again, we're going to go revisit that now in the legislature because we know best. But what we can't do and won't do is ensure there's not wide widespread forest fires, there's water for farming that we have with the fifth riches of all the United States states as far as oil and gas reserves, but we're not utilizing them. I guess they think that Saudi Arabia or Kuwait can produce oil more environmentally sound than we can, but we won't do it, but we want other people to do it for us. So what I'm getting at is by ideology, why can't we just and it's not a party thing because Ronald Reagan was a good governor, Pete Wilson, but so was Pat Brown. I grew up with him, the older Brown and the first term of Jerry Brown. He was very fiscally conservative. But it seems to me that or California is driven by an utopian ideology that they're going to do high speed rail without considering the cost and what they could have otherwise done for the benefit of the majority of the people. I don't know how to correct that. You had some very interesting ideas about the billionaire tax that maybe you could tell us that because I had never really explored that the way you have. So, OK, first of all, I want to unpack what you just said because it's quite a bit. Yeah. In 2017, Donald Trump passed the Tax Act and Jobs Bill, which did a one little tiny interesting thing, which I think is very interesting, is it created on your tax return? If you're a high net worth earner, you could take a deduction on charitable donations and then you would not pay tax on that money. And there was this weird little conversion where the money still went in federally and you took the deduction, but the money was awarded to those charities of choice sort of through a federal channel instead of an individual channel. And the the impact of that is pretty interesting. Thirty five million households were affected by it in 2017, and it was approximately twenty billion dollars. And what it did is it channeled twenty billion dollars into charities, but it was through like a federal program. I'm not sure and I haven't completely connected it, but I like to untangle spaghetti and try to figure out how we got here. And what I think is really important for both Democrats and Republicans to understand, especially voters, is that the majority of our money goes in the middle before it goes to our problems. And what I mean by that is if there's a government grant or if there's taxpayer dollars in the general fund or any money that needs to go to solve a problem that's been approved to be solved, for example, homelessness, instead of going directly to homelessness or giving homeless people on the street, you know, a bed and money and a shelter, we put that in a middleman. And so, for example, at one point, we had like, you know, back in the early teens of America, we had about twelve thousand non-profit churches. Today, we have one point six million non-profit churches. We have what's called an NGO, an NGO for people who are watching the show and know a lot about, you know, about fraud because you've been watching it every day. An NGO is a similar, it feels and acts like a government agency, but it doesn't have the regulations that a government agency has, including auditing. So if you think of like the Pacific Palisades fires, for example, a disaster happens, FEMA gets called, FEMA comes in and FEMA has what's called a METOC, a mandatory award task contract or something like that, which then tasks contractors to come in and do work, including be the accountant. So in our case, it was ECC was our accountant for the fires for the one point one billion dollars that came in. And then they distribute that money to Army Corps of Engineers or Clark Construction, or whoever the security paving, it doesn't matter, but the middleman hands out the money. Well, I mean, if you're, you'd have to live under a rock to think that eventually there wouldn't be fraudsters in the middle. And so I think Democrats and Republicans all across America have been stolen from strip mind through these middle companies, and they've gone relatively unchecked. And some of them by design and some of them just because there's just too much to do. And if you took away every single NGO in California, every nonprofit in California and every special interest group in California, California would be fine. Yeah, it would be. Who's who's allowing, I mean, we've legally set this up. So what has happened is we've legally taken advantage of it and who's allowing this this scam to continue and perpetuate. It has to be the legislature and the governor or the people in power, right? But it starts at the top and it works its way down. So for example, on the jobs act and tax act, I mean, obviously, when the Biden administration came into power and saw this little loophole, it was really easy to set up a bunch of charities that could receive funding that were not approved or were not checked. And you could create all these NGOs and middlemen. And then all of a sudden you're taking taxpayer dollars and putting them into special interest groups and NGOs and charities and they're tax deductible. So why would you say anything if I'm getting my tax deduction line? I don't I don't realize that my money that I'm spending on, you know, a fire event, a fire concert for the Palisades is going to be going to act blue. No one told me it was going to go to act blue when I spent eight thousand dollars or my neighbor spent ninety thousand dollars or whatever we spent money. No one says, oh, by the way, this money is not actually going to fire victims. It's going to go. How can a governor just refuse to take the money or what would be the answer? I think that the answer is, first of all, you have to legislatively untangle allowing middle parties to be distributors of government dollars, whether it's tax dollars or grant dollars, there needs to be either oversight or the individual that is doing the tax donations. In other words, me personally, my tax line, I can vet my own charitable donations. So I can give the money to my church, but not to some random church that's a special interest group. We this is going to this is starting to unfurl. Let me give you an example. What happened in Minnesota? So in Minnesota, you have a group of. What were they? Medical or Medicare places to take care of children, daycare. I'll tell you things like that. Correct. And you also had hospice for elderly people or places where you would go and see if you could get other special services. If you go back to those groups, those groups are approved by the state and by the governor. And so they take in money and then there's no check and balance. So the question of America is where did the money go and what will happen to the people that did it? And the answer to that is it was set up legally. It is likely nothing will happen to the people that did it, unless they can catch catch them in a fraud outside of the structure of the state, which was allowed by Tim Waltz under the Biden administration. Trump came in and said, whoa, hold your horses. What is that? Why is this being allowed state to state? In fact, I think one of the interesting things I was just listening to this this morning is whether or not they're going to stop the voter fraud on the mail in votes by using basically something really simple, which is going to be mail fraud. Yes. It's like, how does where, where did it jump the Rubicon? Where did it go from being a really bad approved idea to a crime and to find the line? And here in California, it's been going on for decades. It's not going to be $200 billion, Victor. It's going to be 750 billion because it is in everything. It is in all of our unfunded mandates across California. 2.5 million double registrations. And when you talk to people, they say, well, well, that's just my son went to college and they still mail is valid here. And he gets one. It's not, it's more than that. It's two and a half million people. So it's terrible. It's fraud has fraud is like it's rampant. It's almost like the robber with the gun at the bank has gone into the NGO business. It's literally that bad. Every single NGO, charity, church, nonprofit, special interest group, every single one of them needs to be completely shut down and one by one, they need to go through them. It's the only way to do it. You got to stop it. It's kind of what happened with USAID, you know, where all this that you just had to stop it. Now, I know it's uncomfortable and sure, there are good actors in everything. It's not like you can say that all the people that work for a charity are thieves. It's not. It's two or three people or one or two people, but that's enough. If it's the person that's stealing at the top, the people that work there don't know. I know so many people that work in nonprofits. They're amazing people. They don't know. The effectiveness is zero. You have $24 billion of nonprofit money that we cannot audit because it's Gavin shut it down and you have $847,000 per homeless person and none of them are housed. Okay. How much more do you need? And we will not be allowed to look at it. And here's the other thing about the selection is if you don't get someone in the office that's not a Democrat, California, like a Hilton or me or literally anyone that's not a Democrat, they're not going to open those books. They're not going to open up all the books and say, look, here's where all the money went. So for me, I'm like, okay, that's fairly likely that there's going to be no accounting because Swahwell is not going to allow anyone to look at Gavin Newsom's books. Not his own either. Exactly. And then it was clearly not his own either. And it will pave the way in a way that we don't want a golden little carpet for Gavin Newsom to the White House. And so that's why I got involved because I'm like, listen, this isn't, I'm just a math person, you know, if you have 40 million people in California and you have 17 and a half million people paying taxes, you have a problem right there. Number one, and that is check my math because you can check my math. Number two, you have 200 guys, the billionaires, it's 214, pay 47% of the 17 and a half million contributed taxes. So you had a general fund that was over $300 million. It was around $310 million when Gavin Newsom was coming in. We had a, I think $80 billion like, you know, in the black slush fund. Yeah, we did. Correct. Right. Now you're already down to 265 because so many people have left. That's the kind of joke about the state with the U hall and, you know, who's the best, you know, economic development governor in the land. It's, you know, Gavin Newsom for other states, right? Not for here. So that $265 billion has about $122 billion coming into it. That is from the 215 billionaires. I call them the 200. The 200 billionaires. So now you come up with this idea for this billionaire's tax, you make it retroactive and you say, we're going to go look in your underwear drawer billionaires, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergei Brind and all these people. We're going to go and we're going to like actually lift up the hood of your car and see what's in there. They have billions of dollars. What do they say? They say like, you know, thank you very much. We are out of here. So now you've got an exit of approximately half or to my, my math about 88 billion. So whoever gets into the governor's office on day one is going to have this crazy deficit in bills that can be paid. So in my world, I was like, California's going broke. Um, and some big like math, you know, politicians have said it's going to be like 2030, no, it's already now, but as governor, I cannot bankrupt the state. You're not allowed to do that because the state sovereign, but you could go to all these cities and bankrupt the cities in chapter nine and reorganize and cut out all the middle fat and see if you could put it back together where there's enough revenue to rebuild back the state. So this is like my logical thinking. So then I created a platform called mayors matter and I put together a filming team and I flew all over California from Humboldt County to Chula Vista. And I started interviewing mayors and say, tell me about your city structure. Tell me about what your highs are, what your lows are. And I had like kind of a mirror. I'm like, I get goosebumps. I have kind of a miracle about California. And what I realized as I don't want to cry because it makes me so like joy. It makes me joyful, you know, when you, when something good happens in the midst of something bad. And what I realized with mayors matter is that everybody that is in these cities across, they're all, they're trapped. Democrats, Republicans and independent mayors and city councils are trapped. They're trapped in this weird place where there's not an 200, 500 and say 550 roughly employees, 575,000 employees in California. You know, Sacramento's, you know, general office under the Newsom administration create, they take the lying percentage of the revenue for their jobs. So the big jobs get a lot more money. So the smaller cities, so there are 225,000 employees get like less than 35% of the revenue for paying bills to themselves to pay for like a city manager or a mayor. We have mayors in our state that make $600 a month and work 70 hours a week. So if you think that like, and they care, they've been the mayor of Sunnyvale, you know, told me, Elaine, if we could only do something about the sales tax and why we don't get our sales tax, if we could only, that would be $20 million a year to our little state, our little area. And you start to, if we could just not do SB 79 in Burbank, we're getting our studios up and running, but now we have to put high density housing in single family residential neighborhoods. If we could just not do these homeless initiatives that ask us to have beds for homeless people that we don't have, and then they bring homeless people here. These are all unfunded mandates and they're all pressed on our cities across California and they are so expensive. And are you ready, Victor? Yes. 15 years of not paying back the $2 billion in unfunded mandates to these cities. If I was governor, you would never have an unfunded mandate. You're not mandating anything without the money. A. B. It's so disruptive to the cities because the mayors don't want the constituents that vote for them to be in a huge fight with them over something that they have no control over, like SB 79. Even prop 50, that becomes an unfunded mandate. So is sanctuary cities are unfunded mandates? Do you think every mayor in every city said, yes, give us your, you know, illegal aliens and criminals and missing children and we're going to protect them from ICE? That is not what happened. It is the opposite. Gavin Newsom started pressing unfunded mandates on all these cities and poof. You're a sanctuary city and poof. You're a sanctuary city. Did not provide the resources for housing. Did not provide the resources for them to do paperwork and apply for applications. Did not provide medical care. Did not provide, there's no money for that. And then these people think they're in a sanctuary city and they're in a health city, a health scape, and they don't belong there because we don't have any money to have sanctuary cities or house illegal aliens. Period. And then they go one step further and they incite cities and citizens of those cities to break the law. They say, you need to hide them from ICE. They tell people in California. I know they do. That you should break the law. This is a government run amok. And it is not the cities that are wanting this type of behavior. Let me, because I'm getting a lot, when I have a lot of people at right, and let me just have kind of a firing line with you and I'll give you a question and give me a two or three minute, if it's possible, answer and we'll just go through what everybody's angry. So we have the highest kilowatt charges in the continental United States, except for Hawaii and the entire United States. It wasn't always that way. We had nuclear, more than one nuclear plant. We had, we import, we have all these solar farms that are wonderful during the day and we, we can't store the electricity at night. So we import it from coal fire plants, say in Utah or Arizona. And as I, so what would you do to lower the cost of electricity? Because I see Tom Steyer's commercials and I mean, he made his fortune investing in Indonesian coal plants. So I'm not too convinced, but he says more competition with, I guess that means the public utility would give up the monopoly to Southern California, Edison, PG&E, but what would you, what can a person, I don't want to say what you would do, what, if you were a governor, what theoretically could you do for electricity? First of all, Tom Steyer, for everybody who doesn't know this is actually a for-profit prison guy in Texas. Okay, so let's, we'll go on to the next. Every, every Democratic candidate has something that we should talk about, you know, that is just good, good intentions gone completely awry. First of all, I'm an oil and gas person. I believe in oil and gas and I always remind people if they're not sure. The Beverly Hill Belize was one of the greatest shows ever on TV. And it's an oil and gas show. So let's just remember that California was built on oil and gas. Number one, number two, um, we have a lot of power plants and power infrastructure that has just been closed and not taken care of, which all needs to be revitalized, which comes under a lot of the infrastructure issues. And number three, we can't have an all green car society without choices. And I want to just point something really obvious out to people who thinks that this is even possible. I was there during the fires and you cannot charge an electric fire truck, DWP truck, ambulance or anything when there are fires or national disasters because there is an electric grid working. So you have to have oil and gas. It's just totally unrealistic that we're going to live an electric life. And if we have a more realistic growth into an electric car industry, for example, where it's by design, but also by choice, you will find that gas cars and some of the restrictions that we're putting on gas cars and things like that will just go away because people will choose what's economic for them. Our other reality is that because we don't refine oil and gas in California like we used to and we have not only did have we lost a lot of it, but you even have companies like Valero who've paid a billion dollars to get out of here because it's so unfriendly. If you have a business environment that is friendly and encourages that, what happens is you have competition in the world. You have we don't have competition in our electric grid at all. In fact, I learned something so interesting from the fires and that is that our cable companies, which are vast, are using trenches and poles and everything from the department of water and power PG and all of the power companies, and they pass that cost on to consumers, which they should not. They should rent that and pay that money to the department of water and power and to the state and consumers should just pay their cable bill. But it's a weird kind of thing that's just gone on, gone unchecked because it's not, it's so it's progress, right? Progress happens. We get on these communication skills, Wi-Fi happens, and we're so dependent on it and none of us sit around and think about how does it work? Who's paying for it? What does it cost? What's it doing to our infrastructure? And we just care, does our Wi-Fi work and do we have five bars? So between Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and all the big cable companies and then department of water and power and PG&E and private power and then all the oil and gas companies, we have so much money in the state and provide so much money in the state that we have a participation rate of 90%. The problem is everybody cannot do business here. So if you can't do business here, you lose Costco gas. Why? Yeah, but I'm just going to interrupt a minute. But when I, I was born in the state in 1953, and I would tell you that in the mid-60s, PG&E was one of the most efficient power companies in the United States. It was, it was renowned. PG&E was the gold standard. Southern California Edison was smaller, but it was very well run. They had hydroelectric. They were on the forefront of nuclear plants. They had, they were, they had great natural gas and oil plants. Moss landing was very efficient, Moral Bay. They had all, they had reserve power. And there was just basically two or three of these companies. So what I'm getting at is, I think you're onto something when you say mandates that the state put mandates on formulas for gas, formulas for electric use, clean energy, without any consideration, what it would mean to people, let's say, in Fresno County, that are very poor, because that's what they say. So if I were to say Gavin Newsom, I said, you know, I work during the week at Stanford University and it's, it's a different planet than Fresno County. And everybody thinks it's wonderful to pay six or $7 of gas. They can afford it because they're getting clean. And then I come here and I go to the service station a mile away, 99.9% Hispanic. And the line is 10 cars for an ARCO AMPM that's 20 cents cheaper a gallon. And people park their car, they go in and they give $40. And then they come back and they see how little then they park their car and they go back in. Not everybody has a credit card. So you have this 21% of the state's population living below the poverty line. And then you have this coastal strip from La Jolla to basically north of San Francisco, where the per capita income is some of the highest in the country in property prices. And that's where the political power. So they are adding these mandates that you're talking about without any consideration, how it affects construction, manufacturing, mining, timber, farming, commuting for the, and that's, that's where we have this poverty rate. I mean, we're the poverty rate is almost what it is in Appalachia, 21, 22% of the population. And we have one third, we should have one sixth given our population. We have one third of all the homeless population. Mississippi has a much better test scores than we do at eighth grade and senior in our schools. We spend about twice, three times as much as Mississippi per student. So what I'm trying to get out is there has to be, it just seems to me that this wasn't this did not exist when I was young. And it's not, as I said, whether it was Pat Brown or Ronald Reagan, the state was well run. And that we developed a culture along the coast that maybe it was the 11 trillion dollars of market capitalization in Silicon Valley. Maybe it was all of the natural bounty we were coasting on. But we developed an attitude that we were at the end of history. We could do anything we wanted and we didn't care about the essentials of can we get up one more day? Do we have food? Do we have power? Do we have fuel? Do we have safety? And the people who suffered that the consequences of this ideology were not the people who promulgated it. They were the people that were basically. And go back to the carbon tax era. You know, we've been microdosed into this DEI world and what I mean, it starts with this idea of carbon taxes and you're just going to create all of these encumbrances on huge corporations because there's such bad, bad, bad corporations, right? Never mind that Chevron's been providing gas to California since its inception. So what we do is we say this is bad, bad, bad in the name of environmental law. And in the, you know, we can go and we can fight these bad, bad ideas. And then you create just layers and layers of legislation that start this idea that we can just basically mandate stuff now. And I'm just saying, like, if you think that that it's all just one thing, it's not. I'll give you an example. We have this thing in California called tort tax, which nobody ever talks about tort tax. Tort tax is like an embedded cost in your insurance, your fuel, your everything in California. That's about $3,000 per household in a normal California. When you get into the West Coast here, you're talking about like $15,000 annually per household. And what it is, is it's a tax on all the litigation that costs these companies so much money so that they can continue to fight litigation because we have so many lawyers. So that's tort tax for you. These are things that people don't even know exist. But if you had tort reform and if you created barriers in law, for example, if you lose, you pay your bill. Why not have if you lose your pay? But no trial attorney would ever, you know, fund Elaine Kalati for governor because she wants to have tort reform and she says if you lose, you should pay the bill. But understandably 50% of businesses out of the four million businesses in California, 50% of them are in litigation. If you open a business in California in the lifetime of the business, you stand more than a 90% chance that you will be in litigation. So you have to look at reform for tort tax. Online sales in California, we have this thing called Bradley Burns tax. Bradley Burns says if you make a sale at your local Home Depot, that 1% of the 10% tax in California goes back to your local Home Depot region, whatever town that is. Bradley Burns creates, you know, several hundred, let's say we do $800 billion a year in sales in California. Well, 1% of that gets spread across California. And so they can do their Christmas lights programs. They can help house their homeless. They can clean the glass on their storefronts. They can move people out of businesses and doorways. Well, what happened? We started to go online. So anywhere you look, you're only going to find 24, 25% online sales. We all know it's like 80%. I mean, for goodness sakes, Amazon does nearly a trillion dollars of sales a year in the United States. So let's just talk about one thing. Okay. Why do we not return tort tax to the cities where the sale commenced? I mean, it came up in 2019 in Los Angeles alone. It could be $60 billion annually. It's crazy that we don't do it. Why don't we do it? We don't do it because Gavin Newsom said it would be too much work for Amazon to figure out where that item went and vetoed the bill. So now our entire infrastructure is set up with 1% tax to come back to cities and it's getting less than half of what it should. This is a stupid little thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it's huge. It's another question. You mentioned, I think, quite rightly so that we have a monopoly of one party. But as I'm speaking today in 2026, I think you could make the argument that we had Ronald Reagan eight years, Pete Wilson eight years, George Dupmesian eight years, 24, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think he was more independent than the Republican, but you had 32 years. And then we've had Jerry Brown and Jerry Brown and Pat Brown. And, oh, we had one or two years of what's his name that Arnold, we recall. But my point is it was pretty evenly distributed until recently. As far as this used to be a multi-parties, I mean, it was a bi-party state. I can remember when the Republicans actually controlled the legislature some years back and forth. So there has to be a reason why the last 20 years we became a monolithic state. And let me just give you some reasons and see if you find them viable or illiberal or whatever. One of them was the vast increase in tech in the Bay Area. And I said, eleven trillion dollars when I was a little boy, L.A. politics dominated the state. It was Sam Yordie or Mayor Bradley. And most of the speaker speakers were all from that part. Now it's Barbara Boxer, the late Barbara Boxer, the late Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Camilla Harris, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, all from the Bay Area, which reflects, I think, the vast shift in resources to the North. L.A. controlled the state when I was growing up because of its population and wealth. And it's become relatively much poorer than the Bay Area. We've also, I don't know the exact figures because everybody argues whether it's eight million, ten million, seven million have left California. But most of the statistics that show that say they're their middle class or upper middle class and they tend to be more conservative than liberal. So that voter who voted for the Republican antithesis is gone or has been shredded. And we then have massive immigration. Twenty seven percent of Californians were not born in the United States. That required a massive Marshall plan of civic education, assimilation, acculturation. We didn't have that. So those three elements, you combine great wealth among the elite. You bring in a lot of people who are not familiar with the United States, mostly from Mexico, Latin America, China, India. And then you drive out the people who might have been able to be a buffer. And you get what we have today, a pyramidal Democratic Party with an elite on top and a vast base on the bottom. And they won out of, I guess it's, oh, excuse me, 50% of all, I think it's 45% of Californians are on Medi-Cal and 50% of all births in California are on Medi-Cal. And Medi-Cal is a growth. Insane math. I should do a little more research on the Medi-Cal Medicare. You know, I because I deal with that because that's existential forces. And when you the only thing that I can see would happen with the immigrant second, first and second generation would say, I don't want to hear about D.I. from the Democratic elites anymore. I don't want to be used. I want affordable gas, affordable housing, affordable car insurance, affordable home insurance, affordable electricity, good paying jobs. And I'm not getting it from them. And I may be Hispanic or a first generation Asian, but I'm not going to vote blockstep anymore for these people because the proof is in the pudding and this state is last or near last and all the things that used to be first in. And I haven't that is starting to happen. If you look at the vote in California, it was all time record for Republicans among minorities, but it wasn't enough to really make a difference to offer an alternative. But I don't know anybody who's going to be elected governor, who's not a Democrat has to figure out how to appeal to. That 27% who wasn't born in the United States in the second and third generation and and offer practical solutions as you you're talking about rather than the same old ideological Eric's wall. Well, what people don't realize is something like Tertax affects the Hispanic family living in East LA that owns a landscaping business and owns home. There's they're paying it to we're all paying it. The reason I came up with this idea called the Great American Credit Union was because I felt like, you know, when I was younger, I'm entrepreneurial. I've started a lot of businesses and the SBA was a way to get money. Sure. But there was also all kinds of little bank loans you could get and you could get people like your someone would loan you some money as long as you had a match and you could start a business easily. You could open up a store on Main Street and sell furniture. You could do anything you wanted. And that kind of natural willingness to open a business is in my DNA. And so I was looking at California's balance sheet where we stated earlier in this discussion where you have this, you know, 265 billion dollars a year that's coming in and 17 and or 122 billion of that comes from 200 guys. And I was like, if I went to Bank of America and I said, Hey, I need to borrow some money from California and here's my, you know, my, my, my business plan. And Bank of America would say, well, how come, you know, 47% of your cash flow comes from one customer? Like it would fall flat on its face. No bank or institution would loan California money on its tech industry, you know, billionaire bros, if they're paying half of your costs, because if that's the case, then if anything goes wrong, you have no way to keep your business going. So that was kind of a weird way when you're talking about the tech industry. That was kind of in a weird way. How great American credit union was born in my mind. Like, why are we not investing in California in a bank, in a real credit union for California, where anyone who participates is in a dividend paying business where money is going in for California from Californians for California. And no one can touch it. And then the billionaires, they back it. And why not? Because, I mean, look, you go to Vegas, if you're a really good poker player, someone's going to have your back and not just the house. You can get anyone to spot you. And then you split the big. And if we don't start doing that and get the money away. So I was like, how would it work? Well, if you took 122 billion, which is what they contribute every single year. If you said, hmm, let's divide that into 500,000 and start all these businesses up. How, what was, what would that look like? How many businesses could we start? Well, not only that, we could employ 2 million people. That would be amazing. And that credit union could raise instead of 122 billion, it could raise 500 billion a year. And that 500 billion a year could be invested in lots of things. And you could have opt out for your social security. You could say, I want to have a 401k through my credit union. I mean, they do it for police officers. They do it for the fire department. They do it for nurses. They do it for SAG-AFTRA. They do it for everyone gets a credit union. Why doesn't California get one? And then it's like, how, how would it work? How many businesses could we open? How long would it take to pay it back? And it's surprisingly so much more efficient than letting the government do it. Because an example would be, imagine if we had done high speed rail through a credit union with American contractors and our money going directly into the infrastructure of California instead of all the opposition and all of the fighting and all of the legal parameters that stopped it from happening to begin with, because they went off half cocked. And what if that was the case? And what if the investors in the credit union owned Palo Alto, where it's coming in, or part of LA where they can't get underneath the hill? And so it's like, you know, we need to make this happen, because this creates a bridge between our two most powerful cities. It brings business and people into the central valley so that we can reinvigorate our farming. Why is farming number seven on the list of revenue streams in California when it was always number one? We have let these people eclipse us. They have eclipsed everything. This billionaire class has taken over everything and all decisions are made around what they want to do. And I'm of the mindset of rip the bandaid off. Just tear it off. So who cares? Let them go. Let them come back because we're amazing, not because they're amazing. Well, I'm more worried about the top five percent that pay 50 percent of the income tax because they are leaving. These are the people, you know, it hits 9 percent, I think it's 75,000. But these are the people who are making $150 to a million dollars and they are leaving. I drive down this avenue, which was all small farmers and it's all been sold out to corporate farming who and I went to a corporate farm was a wonderful guy. But the homes are bought by the 40, 60, 80, 120 acres are bought by big almond growers, for example. The homes that are rented out to people who rent out to illegal aliens for cheap housing. Wow. And there's no there's nothing here. And I ask myself, who I'll just use that imaginary names. Where did the Smith family go? Where did the Jones family? Where did the White family? Where did the Black family? Where did where they all go? And I know every one of them, they left. And I can tell you, they went to Idaho, they went to Nevada, they went to Tennessee, they went to Texas. They're gone. And they were very successful, medium level farmers. They were members of the hospital board, little league, a whole thing. And the community just disappeared. And it became very poor people and just a few very wealthy people. But I, I don't know how to. That is the biggest problem that I see as the demography. How do you get those people to stay and fight and change rather than just leave? Because they're, if you talk to them, and I know you do, it's not just that they feel they're regulated and taxed to death. They feel they're insulted. They feel I pay 55% of my money to state, local, regional taxes, federal taxes. And all they do is call me a fat cat, a wealthy guy, because I make 200,000 a year. And I'm sick of it. And they leave. If every thing, if every single thing that you did created revenue and jobs, you would have to have a tax exempt status on the growth. Otherwise, you're not going to encourage people to work here. And what I mean by that is if you're employing people and you're building businesses and you're creating jobs and you're creating a revenue stream, the tax that comes off of that revenue stream that rightfully goes to Sacramento to run the state is fine. But to create higher taxes to pay bills because you have less revenue. And I want to stress that I come from a position where when Gavin Newsom says we don't have a revenue problem, it's because Gavin Newsom doesn't know what revenue is. Okay, revenue, we have a huge revenue problem. We don't have people that are producing because if they produce too much, their tax too high. So you have to create where it's not a penalty to make a lot of money, where it's an incentive. And that creates a tax basis on sales tax, income tax, and all sorts of different taxes that are normal taxes that create the state's general fund. Not ancillary taxes that they come up with because they have shortfalls, which has gone on for way too long. But you can also imagine that the bigger problem when you peel the onion down, way down, is what you were talking about earlier about this sort of democratic kingdom that has developed. It's funny about the no king stuff when it's really like Nancy Pelosi and Gettys and Gavin Newsom. Like, what if you think, right, if you think that we don't have this problem, we have it deeply in the Democratic Party. And what you have to do, I think, or at least this has been my experience being a candidate, is that you have to have check and balances on all of the special interest money that becomes a donor to get someone into office. Because recently, as you know, they canceled the USC debate. And USC, my kids are my son's graduating in May, my daughter went to USC. I live in, I mean, I love you. I love donating to school. I do listen. Okay. USC was trying to do what universities do. But what happened is you have this kind of weird group of people that wanted to do this debate. There were big Democrats and Channel 7 News, and they normally do it through the police side department, but they didn't. They did it through the arts department and they fudged the way they were going to pick the candidates and they wound out up leaving off these three or four, if you count all of them, low polling Democrats as Hilton's like a little polling Democrats. And so because they were minorities, it became kind of this weird hot potato and they just canceled it. But what really happened is I wrote a letter and said, how come you have four Democrats and two Republicans and no independence? Why are you not giving equal time to the top polling independent candidates? And because that, by the way, is election interference, which is different than just a racial divide. Who would have ever thought in this day and age that it was easier for USC to play the race card than it was to say, oh, shoot, we should probably give fair time to the independence. And I say that because across America, what has happened, Victor, is many Americans have left the Democratic or Republican Party and come to the middle. It's now on an average across America at 30%. It's 30%. Look at Georgia. Look at Ohio. I think Ohio is 31%. And we are no different here. We are registered 23% and 41% undecided. So the middle is bigger. Let me ask you, but all of what you said today, and correct me if I'm wrong by my supposition, tends to be more critical of the status quo. And that has been democratic. So when people come to you, are you, it seems to me you're drawing more conservative or traditional minded voters than liberal voters because you're critiquing the Gavin Newsom and what California has become a monolithic party. So are you getting people who say to you, well, there's only two Republicans and you're going to draw off support from Republicans. Or do they say, where, where, where, how do they calibrate where your support comes from and who benefits and who loses among the candidates if you were to be successful getting in the top three or four as far as poll. Is that come up? Yeah, it has actually. We've had a lot of discussions about everybody's a different opinion, but mathematically, I think it's impossible for the state to win outright on the Republican side. With 24% registered Republicans and two candidates running. So mathematically, it makes no sense to me, but. Except in this weird primary. Except in this weird, well, even in a jungle primary, you know, you still need to get 7 million people to vote, even though 11 million will vote probably in the general. And so like, so with with the current bench, like if I get 1.7 million votes, I'm through the primary. And that is possible. But the problem is you have so many Democrats that are old and they've been around a long time that the is all. This is all I ask. Okay. I don't want Democrats, especially liberal Democrats to blindly vote for a Democrat without understanding how bad things are. And that is my marketplace. I am going to get independence or independence that are sure that that if they vote for Steve Hilton or Chabianco, it's going to matter. Those guys are going to they're going to vote for Republicans just because they think that Republicans have more advertising and have a better chance. My goal is to get liberal Democrats, liberals, not conservative, already woke up Democrats. I'm talking about the far left Democrats to understand that what's happening isn't working for them because they don't understand that it's not sustainable. Right. Yeah, everybody says it's going to be fine and what we're doing is great, but it the math does not lie. We are out of money and we can't afford all of these groups that we have here. And the people who are doing this are not going to change. And they're not going to change. They say, well, they're going to change. I said, no, they're going to run it into the ground and then walk away. It seems to me that they have no policy to change it. They have zero policy to change it. I'm like, show me their policy to make it work. If I was to condense what you're saying, it seems to me just to take one example. You're you you're appeal or you're aiming your appeal at somebody like the Palisades owner. Solid liberal Democrat voted straight Democratic ticket. All of a sudden, House goes up in flames, thinks that there's a Democratic people in office and all of the city council is Democrat. The state's Democrat surely because you're a solid liberal Democrat, you're going to go in. You're going to get your permit. You're going to build a reasonable house, nothing extravagant, more or less replicate what you had. And then they hit a wall and they hit a wall. They hit a wall and they hit a wall that says, well, you have to do this. There's this regulation and we're considering high density housing over here. And maybe you were you can't do what and that person and I met some of them. They just are there. They're they're just they just need somebody, right? And the way that the system is set up, it blocks the sun from independent voices. There is no room. You're not even allowed on a debate stage, let alone get funding. Forget you're going to get funding. You think trial lawyers are giving me money or big pharma? I'm considered an anti-vaxxer because I didn't want the covid vaccine. You know, that's I'm I am the true true California hippie. Like I believe in my body, my choice. And so like, don't don't shame me because I didn't want to get that. It's not I'm still just I had to get it to teach at Stanford University. For example, you know, and I wish I didn't because I got long covid twice, but mandating things. Here we go. Mandating, mandating. Let me ask you one off the walkway. What is the relationship, if any, between you and the people that are running for mayor at the same time, because you're in the same L.A. district? So I met with Karen Bass. I know Spencer. I love Spencer. He's so great. I don't think we should even be considering right now, Nithya Raman. I think that for two reasons, I think that Nithya Raman is much closer to the sort of socialist mentality. She says she's a Democrat, social. We don't have any money for her funding. So nothing's going to help her. I think that Spencer Pratt is an amazing human and very upset. And, you know, he has as good a chance as anybody. But I also like don't want to sit here as I and be and say anything other than the situation with Karen Bass is is beyond unfair in a lot of ways. She's she's dedicated her life to California. And she should not have been gone when the fires happened. And these are all terrible things. And the way that she handled DWP and also the fire department had and all that can all be scrutinized to pieces. But I just want to say, OK, there are four million people in Los Angeles and 25 or 27 percent of them are on food services and living in shelters. And she walks those streets and she has to deal with that with no money. And whether or not you like her or hate her, this is the state of California. We don't clean up our trash anymore. We do not move homeless people out of the front of public spaces, even though they passed the what was it something Pratt? What was the act they passed that said you could move it? I just wrote a whole paper on that. We don't implement any of the laws, not even prop 36 to stop people from stealing yesterday. Yesterday, I was buying dinners and groceries at Vons. And there was some homeless guys in there that needed food and they walked right out with it and nobody did anything. It's we are not doing anything about that. This is her city and this is what we're dealing with. And can you clamp down with what money we're under unfunded mandates? Don't you think San Francisco is dealing? I've been recently to put it this way. I used to speak a lot at the the Capitol Club and the Jonathan Club or books and things. And I always had to time my arrival. At an off hour. So I said, I have to come in here now at one o'clock, not too long ago. And I thought it would be bumper to bumper. It was deserted. And I walked up and down and all I could. The only commerce that I saw was vibrant were canteens along Park and kind of like hawkers in New York. And I just couldn't. And then I saw buildings that were beautiful buildings with graffiti. And it seemed and then I thought this is San Francisco, but not too long ago. I went to San Francisco and San Francisco under Mayor Laurie, who is a Democrat, seems to be more successful than Karen Bass. And he wants reprimands. Yes, he's he's adopting a lot of things you're talking about. And it seems to be gradually, not dramatically, but incrementally working. I don't think that. Well, I don't know if people still park their car without, you know, they well down the windows in San Francisco so people don't smash them. But it seems to be working. But when I go to LA, it just seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. Well, I definitely think that one of the results of Mayor's Matter is that the size of the city matters. And even though San Francisco is an incredibly rich city because it's so close to tech and tech hub, Los Angeles is not a and B. It's such a huge metropolis. It's you can't take a day to drive across it. One of the things I think that's really important to recognize is that in LA, we don't have money for resources like police. OK, so we have these things, safety officers, I call that safety officers are police, fire and EMT combined. So we have 12,000 in California. So I mean, in LA, so you have 12,000 safety officers. Well, that's thirty three hundred people per safety officer where if you go to a smaller city, it's going to be three hundred. So we're 10 times that per safety officer. We also have about 25 percent of our fire fleet is in repair. We don't have enough fire trucks. We don't have enough water. We don't have all of our stuff. Our city is dilapidated, right? Has no money in his dilapidated suit. No matter who is governor, whether I mean mayor, no matter who it is, let's say Spencer Pat gets the job. Well, what he's going to do is he's going to focus on the obvious things like going through like all the NGOs and how come we're not housing people. He's going to crack down on crime. He's going to try to do the things that he's talking about doing, but he's got to get through his city council and his city council is, you know, very, very powerful. And there's only one person on city council. Her name is Tracy Parks. That is like reasonably conservative. And so you've got this thing where. This idea that because you're the mayor of LA, you're going to inherit some sort of unknown power. And my point is like, you have to have someone in the governor's office that is working with the city to implement a rollback on all the unfunded mandates so that you can get back in control of your city. And right now we don't have that. So I can see mayor Lurie working toward this kind of homogene with Sacramento. He's like going with the program, but he has a much smaller acreage. And he also had an optic that was unbelievable when he was voted into office. So it was so terrible. They were like truly hit bottom. The thing about LA is it's everywhere, but it's also not. We have managed to keep it out of the really high, high, high neighborhoods. It is true that now that the power anything. When San Francisco gets a cold, LA gets the flu because that's where the power is. Right. It's generated in that Sacramento San Francisco. That's 100% true. That's a great statement. And California, I don't think people realize it. There's existential problems in Los Angeles. There's over a million point five Mexican nationals. And I think it's maybe two million and it's the second largest city in Mexico. Really by population. And that requires, especially now, it requires a massive program to again, assimilate. And I'm speaking of somebody whose family is intermarried with people from Mexico and they, it has to be assimilated, integrated, intermarried, acculturated. And we're, we're stuck with this tribal idea of politics. Tribal idea of politics. Oh, I like that. In other words, you, you've voted for the people who are in the community. Yeah, I like that. It resembles your superficial appearance. I like the tribal idea of politics to some degree. I, because it means I think it speaks volumes on how people get into office. But listen, I went to Heritage in. It's not how they get in office. It's what they do in office for. For their people that look like them. No, for people that don't look like them. For people that don't look like them. In other words, I went once to Libya and I was walking through the country and nothing worked. And I said to a government official, this is during Qaddafi. I said, why do you have two million barrels of export a year, a day, excuse me. And nothing works. And he said, we hire our first cousin. And what he meant was once we take care of our own people. But then he said, but you know, Mr. Hansen, there's a lot of tribes in Libya taking care of their own people. So yes, we have tribal, we elect people who are supposed to represent your ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, whatever, or in constituency. But then they get in and they're tribal and they can't look for the common good at the expense of the particular tribe that gave them power. And it's a very American thing. It happened in Tammothi Hall in New York and the Irish and the Germans, etc. I mean, one of the reasons I'm going to study this, I'm going to study this. And when I get on again, because I'm coming back, I am going to know this cold. That's what I'm going to do. I also want to say that, you know, as an independent, I put something on my website, which has been kind of controversial, and that is immigration reform or amnesty. People are like, why are you putting that on your website, especially the Republican friends? And I was like, well, there's 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States that are 30. Well, no, there's 11 million that are registered to get their paperwork. Yes. So and those those 11 million people are like trying to figure out how they're going to become legalized citizens. And I'm just like, I just want to point out to, you know, people that watch your show, like, shouldn't everybody else that came in here illegally behind them, get behind them in line or get out? Yes. Why don't we? Why are we not addressing the line that we already have? And so for me, that's been voiced a lot. But by who? I haven't heard anybody say it. Trump said he was willing to do that. Well, good, but you don't hear any of the people that are running for office that are willing to say that. Well, because that that. Yes, you did. And that dialogue and conversation ended on January 21st, two thousand twenty one, when Joe Biden immediately with Alejandro Mallorca's, who was probably the worst public servant in history, led in 10 to 12 million illegals, five hundred thousand criminals, we think. And at that point, anybody who was traditional, conservative, Republican, who had said, I'm going to be flexible. I don't believe in amnesty, but I do believe if you've been here and I'm just doing it by memory, but most of the proposals were if you've been here for five years, you're not on public assistance. You have not committed a crime and you want a green card and you enter. We don't care what you do with your green card. You can be Simpson, Missoli in nineteen eighty six, sixty five percent of the people who were eligible for citizenship chose to get a green card instead. And they said, why do we need citizenship? Because our children are citizens under the anchor of baby statue, the 14th Amendment. And more importantly, we don't think there's much difference between being a citizen and a green card. And they were right about that. It's the citizenship exclusivity is really eroded. But my point is that was all progressing. And had Biden not done what he did, there would have been a bipartisan. They wouldn't have been called immigration comprehensive reform, which was a word for amnesty. But there would have been some effort to do what you're talking about, to say to these 10 or 11 billion people, you broke the law. You have to pay a small token fine of two or three thousand dollars. And you have to get off welfare if you're on it. We're not going to subsidize an illegal alien who's on welfare. And you can't have a criminal record. And that and that a felony, do you do I counts as a criminal? If it's a felony and it should. Yes, it should. And other than that, here's a green card. And if you want to pursue citizenship, more power to you, but you're legal and nobody's going to harass you. And then when that 12 million came in, there was a new constituency. And all of a sudden, if you listen to the La Raza and the open borders, people, they're saying, we have 30 million people. We have 53 million people that were not born in the United States of various status, 16 percent of the population of the United States. We're a nation now of immigrants, legal and illegal. That's what Mondani said all the time. So they felt that the momentum was on their side. And then the reaction came and said, you know what, I'm not for any amnesty. I want every single person who broke the law and is bragging about taking over the United I want you out. And that's what happened to the dialogue. And anybody now on the Republican side who says, I want to allow people who have been here five years and no crime and no welfare and they're working and they're willing to pay a small three to five thousand dollar fine and they want to get a green card and then they can pursue citizenship if they qualify. I want that they'll say that's suicide. Right. You just hit the nail in the head. And I'm just saying I'm one of the only people that says that's not political suicide. We cannot maybe not in California. It's not what we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Like the people that came here on the right path that have been stuck for 11 million people, to be clear, that have been stuck for upwards of 10 years trying to get through this process. Just all of a sudden, everyone just jumps in line in front of them like they're in an amusement park or an airline counter. It's ridiculous. We have to recognize the problem is this, the, the, the people who say they represent quote unquote, undocumented. Immigrants, if you were to say to them, I want to take care of the people that have had residency here for five years before the Biden influx and they're not crime. They have no criminal record. They're employed. They're one of our hardest work data. But the rest of them that just came in with, they're going to have to either go back home, self deport, or they're going to have to apply for citizenship. Are they going to have to, but we're going to deal with them and they can go back home and they can apply for citizenship legally or what. That is where that representative will say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to. They I want them all here, no matter what. And that's why you get the right wing reaction, because the two sides are like this. I don't know any major Democrat who says, OK, I'm for amnesty. The way you're talking about it or it's not even amnesty. It's an application for a green card and they they can choose whether that should be amnesty rewarded by citizenship when they go through the court or what. But I don't know one Democrat who would then say thank you for that. But I'm not going to enforce immigration law with the people who came in in this huge influx. I don't know. I don't believe for one minute that the immigration approval rating, like to bring immigrants that are on the list already in the system who filled out the paperwork and are legally in line. That group of people, that 11 million, the 11 million pre-bid an error. I don't believe that they're any different than the historical divide of the Democrats and the Republicans over allowing illegal aliens to work legally because of the impact it has on wages. So whether you're like Walmart or Koch Industries, it doesn't matter. You have a big impact on wages if you have a group of people that are kind of in a situation where they will work for less or nothing because of their legal status. And this has historically kept wages low in America. And people talk about it and they know about it, but they don't say it when they're running for office. And the truth is the Democrats. These are Chavez said it. I mean, there you go. Yeah. And now they're going to tear him down to people down to the border to physically restrain people from entering. Exactly. Nobody wants to talk about that. But you got to talk about the fact that if you, you know, first of all, we have Zell. I don't know if anybody's paid attention that people get paid no matter what. So I don't know how much kind of an impact it has on wages really anymore. Also, you know, you the fire, you know, was a big eye opener to me when my gardener said I lost 66 homes, you know, employed 120 people and, you know, has a home and kids. And and there's a lot of especially in California, middle class Mexican American people that work and contribute to the economy and our society and they employ all sorts of people. And we just can't put blinders on. It's a joke. And it's also not that difficult to untangle that spaghetti. If you it's I think it would get majority we support if you present it that way. And the polls suggest if you say to the average American voter, I want to give people a you don't use the word amnesty or citizenship. You say I would like people to have an avenue to become legal residents and then they can choose among the very statuses they prefer. Gas worker, green card holder, student visa citizen. It's up to them. If if if no criminal record, gamefully employed, not on social services. And here's the qualifier. Then the critic says to you and what stops the process from being repeated. So then you do this. What Ronald Reagan said, I did the Simpson Missoliac of 1986. I gave two million people just that and only 33 percent took it. But then people said, yeah, Ronald, but you didn't enforce the border. Missoliac took you to the cleaners because we had again another wave. So then they said to Reagan, are you going to have another Simpson Missoli? And he said, no, and I debated Alan Simpson, who was a good friend of mine, Senator Simpson from Wyoming. And he he admitted that he looked back at it as a failure for that reason, that they could not control the border. So any discussion of what you're talking about has to be combined with this was an aberration that we're not going to repeat, but we're not going to make it worse by punishing people who got mixed signals from us, but from now on, the border will be secure. Maybe I take you as that's a partial yes. And so that to me is something I can build on because I think that it's only a partial yes. If it's a one time thing and people realize they did something wrong and pay a penalty and they don't come back and say, well, I didn't know what I was doing with the DUI. I'm more gainfully employed. No, you have to have basic rules. Like you have to have all of like a checklist of five, you know, you have to you can't be have criminal cases against you, period. You certainly can't be a kidnapper or robber or somebody who's just been living under the radar and never even apply. You can't go to somebody's country and go on social welfare without. You can't be on the run and you can't be on. Yes, exactly. So I but I agree that I agree that. We have to at least have the discussion without it affecting whether or not you can get elected because now you don't know if Steve Hilton or Matt Mayhan, who I think is the tech golden boy, they're trying to push through that guy. They call him Max Tax Mayhan and San Jose, by the way. I know, I know of him. Yes. Right. And they're trying to like groom him. They have him in some room, propping him up with a shirt, telling him what to say. And, you know, shoving a bunch of money behind him. I think it was eight and a half million dollars raised for him in eight weeks by Rick Caruso and all those guys. And I say, like, don't you guys just listen, what are you doing about immigration? Make them say it. This is the problem. Like make them say it. Make them come out on a microphone and go, you know what? I think we have a problem. We've got to work on it. No, they can't do it because of the demographics of it. And that, my dear, is what is wrong. OK, that's it. You just had it. I didn't have one break and I'm going to get scolded by the daily signal. But let me just have a break and we'll get back to our sponsors. Then we'll just have a concluding remark because we're kind of over time. And I'll be right back. OK. And we're back. And I'm with Elaine Kulati, who's running for governor. I was going to ask you this, Elaine. You don't use the word independent or you have no political preference or what's your preferred term and why? It's actually a category. It's called no party preference. You can actually sign no party preference. And what's the. Is that just generically known as an independent? No, there is an independent party in California. Oh, there's the independent party. But but if I use a small I independent, you're an independent. If you use a little I, I guess. Yes. Yes. If you use a baby I, I would be independent. Yeah, it's just I don't have a party preference. I'm a policy person. I don't care about. You're not registered. Are you registered as an independent or is a no party? I'm registered as a no party preference. No, good. And I'm legitimately no party preference, although people would like to paint that is that I'm like, wish what? No, I'm not. I'm not at all. I know exactly. I'm fiscally very conservative. I'm probably the right of right Republicans when it comes to money and don't write a check when you don't have the money. But let me. Go ahead. Let me ask you a concluding question because I'm going to get scolded over an hour. And you've been very generous with your time. You've been. Somebody's somebody's going to call me and say, well, you. Why are you interviewing a person who is not pulling among the top four and what chance does she have without money or a party organization? So tell me what's your answer to that caller? I I don't even know why would I answer it? Guys, I am not polling low. If you go on the poly market, sometimes I'm number two. I beat like nationally. So that needs to be known. So you feel that in some polls, you're actually not fifth or sixth. You're third or fourth. Yeah, I can be. I'm I'm definitely polling high on poly market. Poly market is my like my jam. But that's people say that's not a poll because it's a betting ring. Well, so what? That's who do you think? What do you know? I agree with you on that. They've been more accurate than polls. That's correct. And here's the reason because there you've got people that are not in California that are looking at the race. And they're saying like historically, this is how races go. I mean, if you think about Democrats, number two person right now is Katie Porter. I mean, this is an unstable person. Like how hard is it to vote for me instead of her? Well, as it is as unstable. Well, Swahwell has a lot of like technical problems. But the most important thing I think to say about Swahwell is this. OK, I have not read any policy that he has that works for California. Number one, number two, he incited Californians to break the law. And I just why would you do that to your constituents? If you will vote for you, especially it was very ironic because when you look at the the optics of the ice protest, you saw not. I don't want to stereotype everybody, but in many cases, especially in Minnesota, you saw affluent, apparently affluent white women who were in the middle of the day not having to work and the majority I saw. If you look at the majority of the ice officers, they were Hispanic or black, but mostly here in California, they're Hispanic. So you had these middle class Mexican American people had good jobs and they were trying to enforce the law as good American citizens and they were being spat on and cursed out by wealthy white liberal women. And nobody talked about that. He's the worst. Also, I find it really ironic that he was like this huge J6 guy and, you know, taking away basically no due process for those, you know, a couple hundred people that were in jail for four years. Yeah, you know, he's got this whole thing thing. And I'm like, what? How me? It's like it's all for the but not for me kind of thing. It's to me, it's very ironic. She was at the San Francisco Consoles Office. How did she get that job? What? She was a she was a Chinese national and she was working there as basically a propagandist dash espionage. So if you vote a column criticizing China, which I've written many, she called him up once and said, you're an idiot. I need to talk to you. She showed up and I said, I'm not going to talk to you. And she said, actually, I'm right outside the Hoover Tower on campus. No way. Yes. So she came up and something bothered me about her tone. So I had two assistants, one of them, I said, it's five o'clock. This person sounds completely unhinged. Could you stay here? So we opened the door and this woman came up with tight leave eyes, boots up to her knee, blouse open with her sunglasses tucked in it. With a very heavy Chinese accent, basically saying I was an idiot. I was pro-Japanese militarism. I betrayed the Chinese in World War Two because I wrote a book. That and finally I just said, you know, I'm so sick of you. She had gifts. She wanted me to go across to a very well known restaurant. She'd made reservation. She said. And then I clearly had a crush on you. No, she did not. No, no, I was a torn up 65 year old. She was doing what she did with all of them. And she said she and then she broke into her Cal State. Heyward, maybe I can't remember which campus and it was a valley girl talk. OK, man, like you're an idiot, man. We could we take you to the cleaners, man, like the China goes into Japanese airspace and it was last year of Obama and Obama does nothing. Nothing. What are you going to do about it? I said, why don't you leave? So she left and I thought when she turned up with Eric Swalwell, my assistant called me and said, that's Fang Fang. I said, yes, it is. It looks just like her. It was. And my point of all this is anybody who would fall for that, who comes in with this. Rescade dressed Chinese national from the consulate's office with no knowledge. And then she breaks between a genuine Chinese national can barely speaking, least who I'm an L.A. Valley girl. Is an idiot. And he fell for it. And he was on the House Intelligence Committee when he did. And who knows what he said or did to her, but he was censored by the Congress. He's he's not a viable candidate. And my the funny thing is that's disqualifying in itself. You're right. I think there's the mortgage fraud as well. It might be just orders. Not that's a problem. What's going to happen? I don't think either one of them may win, but I think they'll have a recall or they will have us something if somebody will be then may have. And I mean, Steyer, I think, you know, no matter how much money, Steyer is great proof that the money, you know, in the end, it doesn't really work. No, he's tried so many times and so many venues. Right. It's all about really capturing people's, you know, idea that you're I mean, for me, like my slogan is don't vote for me, vote for us. Because I feel like you've got to, you know, I might not be the smartest person in the room politically, because I'm not a I'm not a political hack. Are you under pressure from? I know Steve Hilton is a good friend of mine. Are you under pressure from a the Republican Party or either the two candidates? No, no, not at all. I think that I think that like my support in the middle, you know, if I were in a perfect world, it would be Steve and I in the in the in the in the primary. And then California would have an option to choose a candidate that they want, not a candidate that's their only option, because it's the only one with a D, a Democrat. Yeah. I think what scares me and also there could be a Republican there. Steve could beat me, right? At the end of the day, Steve could beat me, but it would be a fair, it would be a race, a proper race. If he gets in there with a Democrat, then it's not even fair. Even if he's the better candidate, you just have too many Democrats. So it's like this whole thing where if you want to have a fair race, you have to have choices, which means you got to have three parties because in California, if you don't have three parties and you only have the two, that's a one party state because you've only got 24% registered Republicans. So for me, it's like I'm the best thing they've got going and they know it. Plus I like, I can talk to Steve and I can talk to Chad and you can't get a hold of, I can't go have a meeting with Swallow and say, well, what are you going to do? You know, I'm a voter. Like they're not going to meet with anybody that's going to give them any good ideas or Swallow's that he's a special case for a variety of reasons. Right. Right. And it doesn't see me as a voter because I'm running, but quarters of special cases, you said for a variety of reasons. Well, she's just unstable. And I think like, you know, we should recognize that for what it is. She had, it wasn't just the little filming thing. She also did a big interview, which all the other governors did. She walked out of that, you know, I saw that, I saw that too. Right. Well, we're out of time. We really got this Hail Mary man. Oh no. We're out of time. I'm, and, um, we went a little long and I didn't have our breaks, but I'm sure our engineers can address that. And thank you for coming and good luck. And thank you. And I want you to take very good care of your health because you are a national treasure. I don't know about that, but I'm doing my best. I had some bad luck with misdiagnosis. Then I had bad luck with a bleed and then I had really good luck with a good surgeon who got me back in just in time. I think you have a loving family around you and you have your, you're a treasure. You just take good care of yourself for me. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll see you. We'll do this again. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for tuning in to the daily signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.