Where Are the ‘Neocons’? Exposing the Left’s New Anti-Israel Narrative

 

Recently, during the confusion, the anger, the controversy over the memorandum of understanding concerning negotiations that will ensue with the United States and Iran, JD Vance, our vice president, was tasked with visiting the media and being the public spokesman on behalf of the memorandum.  

It wasn’t an enviable job. He’s very skilled. I think we all admire him a great deal. 

But one of the strange things that followed was there was criticism in Israel, and that would be natural. We are a large country and very powerful, and we’re 7,000 miles away from Iran. Israel is a very small country of roughly 10 million people, and it’s right proximate to Iran. So obviously, our ultimate strategic aims and agendas are not always identical. 

But Vance made the argument that there were people in the Israeli Cabinet who were too critical of the deal, and he wanted to kind of slap them down and say, no one likes you in the world except … I should say supports you except us, i.e., you should show more gratitude. 

No. 2, we give you over $3 billion of aid, and 75% of your missile defense is contingent upon us. Donald Trump, see, is your best friend you’ll ever have, as you have acknowledged yourself.  

And fourth, the United States policy is the United States policy. It’s not affected by other people trying to influence it. 

This was kind of extraordinary because in that speech, he was more critical of the Israelis, really, than he was of the Iranians because he talked in the sense that we’re dealing with Iranian moderates, and there are people who might emerge as a new Iran. He didn’t have that tolerance, it seems, for our ally Israel. 

The question of whether Israel is an asset? Yes, we give over $3.5 billion to Israel, but unlike all of the other money that we give—we give $1 billion to Egypt, we give almost $1 billion to Jordan. Both, by the way, are autocracies. They’re not constitutional systems or consensual governments like Israel that’s Western. And we gave $17 billion—$17 billion, six times what we gave Israel—as late as 2023. I think it’s been over $100 billion so far. 

So, Israel’s not the only recipient of U.S. aid, but unlike all the other recipients, maybe with the exception of Ukraine lately, it’s a strategic partner. Its intelligence is vital to our knowledge of the Middle East, especially of terrorists, which it shares daily with us. 

It is a laboratory of U.S. weapons. Every day they are flying F-15s, F-16s—latest models of each—F-35s, using Patriot missiles. And almost daily they consult with our people and say, this is what we’ve learned as a flaw. This is what we’ve learned as unrealized advantages. And that knowledge is incorporated into our defense profile. 

Another thing that was—so it is an asset, and this is quite aside from the idea that there are commonalities between Israel and the West in general and the United States in particular.  

We both are part of a long Judeo-Christian moral tradition. We both are consensual governments. We both have freedoms. Israel is not as other nations in the Middle East, threatening death sentences to some people who say they want to break away from their religion.  

You can break away from Judaism if you want in Israel. Try that in a Gulf state or Saudi Arabia in the case of Islam, and you’re going to be in big, big trouble. 

One of the things he said was that the neocons—and we’ve heard that word neo, neo, neocons. That’s a term for people who were, in the former decades of their life, their formative decades, they were liberal, so we put the Greek prefix “neo,” meaning new cons—and then they flipped during the Reagan years or the Bush years into conservatives, and many of them were Jewish Americans, most notably people like Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol.  

Their children and others in the next generation have been strong supporters, so the idea or the accusation is we are going to war against Iran because a small influential group of neocons feels their first loyalty is to Israel, and defending Israel is not in the national interest because there are 550 million Muslims surrounding Israel.  

So, in terms of population or oil wealth, they are geostrategically more valuable. That is not true in itself, but what I’m curious about is: Who are the neocons? 

If you look at the primary spokesman for the neoconservative movement that happened incidentally to be Jewish, they all detest Donald Trump now. 

Bill Kristol, he was the arch spokesman of the neoconservative movement. He’s advocated voting for [Zohran] Mamdani. Professor Elliott Cohen, radically anti-Trump. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, hysterically anti-Trump. Former National Review writer Mona Charen, radically anti-Trump. Jonah Goldberg bolted away from National Review, radically anti-Trump. I could go on and list David Frum, radically anti-Trump.  

Some of them in cases are voting Democrat even though the Democratic Party is now a socialist-Islamist party. 

So, there is no neocon movement anymore that is an inside lobby for the Israelis. 

Second point I want to make very quickly is there is a larger climate on campuses today of antisemitism. We’re seeing candidates like Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in the Senate in Michigan, or we’re seeing Graham Platner, who are openly anti-Israel, but also anti-Jewish. 

And I think I could be frank and say, if you are a Jewish American, you cannot run on a national ticket on the Democrat side. If Joe Lieberman were going to be nominated today, it would be impossible to be a vice presidential candidate as he was in 2004. The antisemitism is so marked and explicit in the Democratic Party.  

So, we have to be very careful when we talk about inside influence and a general climate where already Jews are unfairly targeted and suspect. 

And I’ll finish with Lebanon. Donald Trump was critical as well. He said, you can’t blow up a whole building when a Hezbollah person walks in. And I think JD said something to the effect—I’m just paraphrasing—you can’t kill your way out of your problem. 

But if you say to Lebanon and you say to Israel, tomorrow, just don’t fire, either one of you. Israel will be fine with that. The people who are breaking the truce are Hezbollah, which has hijacked the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government hates Hezbollah just as much as we do and just as much as Israel does. But Hezbollah isn’t even a nation. It is terrorist thuggery. Its relation to Lebanon is like the cartel’s relation to Mexico. 

And they are attacking Israel daily. They had 160,000 missiles originally. They have shot thousands into Israel. Israel tries to be disproportionate, just like we are. If somebody attacks us, we attack them 10 times harder. Why? To create deterrence. 

So, when somebody shoots missiles or drones at Israel and then runs back to the suburbs of Beirut and has them stashed in the basement and thinks, you can’t hurt me, Israel targets that basement. It does not blow up the entire apartment building by intent. It tries to blow up the particular areas within the apartment. 

It is much more careful to target individual Hezbollah killers than the Hezbollah people are willing to target the IDF. They target everybody. 

And again, if you don’t want Lebanon to be an issue—and I don’t know why it’s even in a memorandum of understanding. It has nothing to do with our effort to disarm Iran—it shouldn’t be in there at all. That should be something the Israelis handle and Hezbollah handles. And all we need to do is say, don’t give money to Hezbollah. But that’s an Israeli-Hezbollah question. 

And Iran is desperately trying to cling onto something to get leverage, but we shouldn’t allow them that leverage. 

Why America’s Universities Are Falling Apart

 There’s been a lot of news lately about the university’s higher education crisis, and universities are now competing for students rather than students competing with each other to get into universities.  

Maybe the elite universities still, because of their brand name, although they’ve suffered a great deal and their admissions reflect that and their applications are down, they’ll always make it—the seven or eight so-called top tier. 

But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad strait. And why is that? 

First of all, it’s demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached, in 1960, about 3.6 children per family. It’s recovered a little bit the last three years, but it’s 1.7. So, the cohort of 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds is less than half. 

So, they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people. 

The second thing that’s really turned people off is that tuition has increased, over the last 50 years, three times more than the annual rate of inflation.  

Now, why is that? 

Mostly it is because of administrative bloat.  

Where I work, at Stanford University, The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford, and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student. 

This is because the university became in loco parentis. It said, “I am a parent, and I’m going to monitor the 360-degree, 24/7 life of a student. If he’s not happy, we’re gonna deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment, we’re gonna deal with it. We’re gonna deal with everything, and we’re going to try to be political. 

“Our job is not disinterested, inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, religion, etc. We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion, and we’re gonna offer an antithesis.

That turned off people, believe me. 

Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it’s almost automatic. Where I worked at the [California State University], I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure. 

Release time is very common now. You can say, “I want to be a part-time administrator,” or “I am tutoring,” or “I have a special project,” and you can get a reduced teaching load. 

Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it’s between two and four courses a year. A year. 

Maybe not at the CSU, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses. That’s the California State University system, the largest in the world. It has gone from four classes to three classes a semester. 

And part of the way that they finesse that was when you increase the administrative budget and you increase release time for full-time faculty and decrease teaching, you hire part-time, temporary lecturers, and you exploit them. 

You pay them about 40% per class of what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don’t really give them the same type of benefits. And at some universities, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time, exploited lecturers is getting up to 40% and even 45%. 

Another thing that turned the public off about these universities: They grant-gouge. 

We’re starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10% or 15% commission, but 40% and even higher. 

In other words, if a professor got a million-dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and say, “Well, you’re using your office or your phone or your lab, so we want 40% of it.” 

And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound. Financially unsound. 

Largely because, again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education but form a huge overhead. 

Another thing that got people very worried is another way they financed this debt, expanded their administrators, and cut back on teaching: They brought in over a million foreign students. 

And unlike American students, there are no scholarships. There are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium, if not a little bit higher tuition. 

Now, the problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000 from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China. 

Then you start to politicize the student body, and you can see what happened after Oct. 7. 

We had enormous demonstrations, often led by foreign students, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That’s essentially code for destroying the state of Israel. 

And we had violent demonstrations often led by people from the Middle East. 

And, of course, the FBI suggests that 1% to 5% of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage. 

The public knows this, and they’re not fond of that idea—that sometimes their children don’t get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium. 

DEI did damage—diversity, equity, inclusion. 

The idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act, were deliberately, consciously, insidiously using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, and to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender. 

It was entirely anti-meritocratic. It was like the Soviet commissar system. It was like the McCarthy period. 

If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out, in most cases, a diversity statement. 

And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, “Honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-meritocratic,” you were not going to be hired. 

There’s another reason that these universities are in crisis. 

The federal government came in and guaranteed student loans. 

Once they did that, the universities jacked up the rate of tuition, as I said, three times higher on an annual basis than the inflation rate. 

So the government came in and said, “You guys can loan students money, and we will back it up, so they will pay you back with federally guaranteed dollars.” 

And we know now that there’s a 30% to 35% non-compliance rate, that people are either late or have defaulted. 

And so, when you have $1.7 trillion in debt and you see that the debt is increasing because the students are not graduating in four years—the average graduation now is six years. 

About 30% to 40% of people who enter college do not ever graduate. 

But the whole thing is subsidized by loans from banks that are guaranteed by the federal government, and that gave a green light for universities to offer these crazy courses that nobody wants—peace studies, race studies, Black studies, environmental studies, etc., studies—because the students took them and the government paid for them. 

And nobody worried about whether they graduated or whether employers found a well-educated and empirical product coming out with a B.A. 

Finally, we’re short a couple million plumbers, electricians, blue-collar carpenters, sheet rockers, and roofers. 

These are very important to the economy of the United States. 

But when these universities said, “Come to us, and maybe even if you don’t graduate—40% of you—or if those who do average six years, and even though you’re gonna run up a big debt, you can take psych and sociology. It’s a good time to kind of float around, live in your basement, and have a good time in your 20s.” 

But the economy answered back: We’re wasting kids’ formative years in their 20s. 

We need master electricians. We need oil workers. We need skilled carpenters. 

And the irony is that if you graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology or sociology versus being a master electrician at the age of 22, the electrician these days is going to be making $100,000-plus, and the sociology B.A., or the person with two or three years of psychology, is either going to be unemployed or not using that education at all in employment. 

Or, if he is hired, he will be making half of what the electrician or the roofer or the carpenter makes. 

Add it all up, and the universities are in bad shape, and they’re in desperate need of coerced reform because they will not reform on their own. 

Europe Refuses to Enforce the Rule of Law

 person 1: First of all, there have been protests—significant protests—against the murder of Henry Nowak in England and the attempted beheading of the gentleman, whose name I forget, forgive me, in Belfast. So throughout Ireland, throughout England, and including Scotland—Glasgow—there have been these protests.

So, here’s what I think is a typical response from your typical Eurocrat. This is John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland. Here’s the headline from The Scotsman newspaper over there:

“Scotland must stand against racism, hatred and intimidation.”

“First Minister John Swinney has said Scotland must stand against racism, hatred and intimidation after protests following a knife attack in Belfast.

“In a post on social media, Mr. Swinney said, ‘The scenes we saw in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ayr last night are unacceptable. Scotland is a welcoming nation, and those who choose to make their lives here are valued members of our community. Racism, hatred and intimidation have no place in Scotland. We must stand against it.’”

Don’t you—

person 2: Where do they get this? Do they have an AI thing that always turns out this boilerplate? “This has no place here. This isn’t who we are.” All that stuff?

Why doesn’t he just admit that there’s no audit of the people coming into the U.K.? They come in illegally for the most part. They come from areas that are governed illiberally. They come with religious differences. They have ideas about women and homosexuals, other tribal people, people not of their tribe. They have very negative views of them.

And they won’t assimilate, integrate, or acculturate at a pace that would be expected of any other immigrant. So, they have gotten the message that they’re going to be subsidized with housing, education, food, and medicine, and they feel that the host owes them that.

Then, when they’re deterred from the consequences of their behavior—whether it’s a rape gang or walking down the street and hitting somebody—they go to the next level.

Now, “they” is a collective stereotype and generalization. But this demagogic politician doesn’t say anything about this. But he wants to give a soapbox platitude so that he feels good about himself. But he doesn’t understand that no one is listening to him anymore.

There’s an entire European movement, and if they don’t intervene and say, “We expect every single person in the U.K. to have come legally, and they must reside legally. If you’re an immigrant, you must be self-supporting and fully employed, and you will face the full force of the law just like subjects of the Crown. If you can’t do that, would you please leave?” They can’t say that. I don’t know why they can’t say it.

I don’t know how they got in this position where some cities are 20% to 30% non-Indigenous people, but it’s not working, and it’s going to spread.

The next thing that’s going to happen is that if they won’t address it in a sober and moderate fashion, people are going to get frustrated. We saw those two girls, I think they were from Scotland, remember? They were defending themselves from that predator.

person 1: With the knife and a hatchet?

person 2: Yeah. And she was trying to protect, was it her sister or her friend?

person 1: Her sister. Her sister.

person 2: Yeah. Everybody demonized her and said, “Oh, this is…” You know.

Then he was found guilty the other day of actually trying to attack them or solicit them in some fashion.

But if you allow grooming gangs and you don’t do anything about it, people are going to get frustrated, and they’re going to get violent.

You have to treat everybody equally under the law, and you have to have the rule of law. That’s where we learned the rule of law—from the Western tradition via Britain.

And if there’s no rule of law…

You know, here in the United States, there was just a poll that said it was overwhelming. Seventy percent wanted everybody deported who was here illegally and committed a crime.

I thought, “Well, that doesn’t do anybody any good. Who wouldn’t?”

Then I read down further: 56% of the population wants everybody deported who came here illegally.

How could that be when we’re told by the leftist media that all these people who are spitting at ICE, throwing rocks at them, and waving plastic phallic symbols represent the public?

Well, the public is tired of that. They look at the ICE agents and don’t see demonic figures. They see largely minority people who want a living and want to protect their communities, which are the most impacted by illegal immigration.

person 1: Yeah. Look, why is an elitist type—whether in government or media in England—who believes he has the right to say, “You lower-middle-class white dude are a racist for this and this reason”?

So, they have some racism calibration, but they won’t apply it to immigrants who have racial—

person 2: Because they have this Marxist, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Derridean, postmodern, Frantz Fanon idea that there is a binary. There’s no middle. There’s a victim and an oppressed person, and there’s a victimizer and an oppressor.

And the duty of all good Marxists is to—and they have redefined this. Marx didn’t talk about race. He talked about class. They said class doesn’t matter because many people on their side of the binary are wealthier than the so-called oppressor side.

Barack Obama is much, much, much, much wealthier than Joe Biden. His children are in much better shape than Hunter Biden.

Yet they are on the oppressed side. Nobody can define it. We don’t know what makes a person part of the oppressed side. I guess it’s one Confederate drop, one-sixteenth non-white blood, non-Christian faith, or whatever standard they use.

Once they went down that road of racial essentialism, they had to have something.

Even Native American tribes who went down that side said that nobody can be in charge of this casino unless they have tribal blood. Well, in our society, what does that mean? It means they have to have DNA, and I think it’s one-sixteenth or one-eighth.

You can see how absurd this is. It’s going back to the antebellum South. And that’s what they’re doing.

You can be very, very wealthy. You can be very privileged. You can have every advantage.

Cory Booker’s parents were corporate grandees. He grew up in a very upscale environment, and we’re supposed to think he is a champion of the oppressed?

Jasmine Crockett has two accents: one that reflects her middle-class, upscale private schooling and another that she puts on when she wants to be authentically inner-city.

It’s a joke. The whole thing is performance art, and everybody’s tired of it.

So, this guy is going to get up and lecture, lecture, lecture. But he should ask himself: If you say “black” today, or “non-white,” it’s usually in a positive sense.

But if you hear a government bureaucrat, a media figure, or a celebrity say “white,” it’s almost always in a negative context. It’s a pejorative.

And people who are somewhere between 67% and 71% of the population—

By the way, I think it’s a ridiculous rubric anyway. I live in a Hispanic area, and in the summer I am darker than many of my Hispanic friends. I see people at the bank every day speaking Spanish and they’re pure white.

I don’t know why we call them non-white. I don’t know why anybody calls anybody white or non-white. But that’s another story.

The point I’m making is that it’s always used as a pejorative, and that’s not sustainable. People will not put up with that.

When you add “deplorables,” “irredeemables,” Peter Strzok saying, “I smelled them all at Walmart,” the CNN commentator saying, “I have more teeth than everybody at a Trump rally,” Joe Biden saying, “ultra MAGA,” “semi-fascists,” “garbage,” and “chumps,” and then Barack Obama saying they cling to their guns and religion—

It’s time to quit that because there’s a big revolt, and you don’t want it to get like it is in Europe.

When you have the young Ukrainian woman butchered, and this conniver DeCarlos Brown is now suing the FBI, and then you just recently had the young kid walking outside his home in Philadelphia who was murdered, and the woman set on fire in Chicago—these high-profile black-on-white crimes—and then the reaction is…

I don’t know what the reaction is, but in the case of Karmelo Anthony, you had counter-demonstrations where they basically said he was the victim and the man he murdered was the oppressor.

When you have AI imagery of people urinating on Austin Metcalf’s supposed grave—I guess it was manufactured by AI, but the message was still hatred.

We have got to get rid of this university idea that if you’re on the victim side of the binary, you’re incapable of racism or oppression. That’s just a get-out-of-jail-free card. That is just an invitation to be racist.

The only thing that keeps us from behaving badly is some kind of deterrence, whether that’s religious, legal, social, or shame.

But if you remove those deterrents, you’re going to see human nature in the raw, with the veneer stripped off.

After Spencer Pratt’s Office Burned Down, He Declared, ‘It’s War’

 

person 2: Speaking of war, Victor, Spencer Pratt says it’s war.

On Friday, two things happened. One is his business mysteriously burned down.

person 1: I know it, it did. Not so mysteriously. I think some of his political opponents’ supporters did it, but who knows?

person 2: Yeah. But he also put out a concession video.

I’m going to read this now. This is from RedState:

Watch it. They’ll wish the mail-ballot fraud scheme to elevate [Nithya] Raman had never taken place.

Pratt says he’s moving on from the campaign phase of his mission to save Los Angeles to the next, more interesting phase, reminding people that his goal wasn’t to become mayor but to expose the corrupt machine and that he’s laser-focused on just that.

“Do you think they can really get rid of me that easily?” says Pratt. “Hey, morons, I didn’t get into this for political power. I got into this to expose the corrupt machine. Nothing’s changed. You enjoy your worthless meetings in City Hall. I’ve been lighting you up every single day, and now I don’t have to worry about offending CNN viewers.

“I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war.”

He made threats. He’s got some videos and documents that are going to be very harmful to one of the two candidates.

, I think he’s here to stay. I don’t know. What do you think?

Hanson: Yeah, I think so. I think what he’s referring to is that every would-be whistleblower or discontented person is sending him material. He’s the person to do it, and he will air it, and that’s going to give him a lot of exposure and clout.

But when you run for office in Los Angeles, or California in general, what he’s basically saying is this, the subtext is this: Is it so hard to say that if you want to be a voter, then you don’t just go to get a building permit or apply for disability and give your name, and they mail it to you?

You just register to vote. You go to a state office, and you take the initiative, and you register. Then you give an address. You show a California driver’s license, which is now not required. You should have to have a driver’s license or a state-issued ID, one or the other.

They mail it. You give them an address. They check it on a computer to see if you’re actually at that address, and they mail you one ballot.

Then you take that ballot, and if you want to fill it out, we could call it an absentee ballot. Maybe you would be ill. But more likely, you should go to the polls, and you should show your California driver’s license again.

And we don’t do that.

But we do if you want to get disability. I must have been to 40 medical procedure appointments for this latest bout with cancer. I’m talking about blood draws. I’m talking about X-rays, CT scans, and lung-volume tests.

Every place I went: “Can I see your ID? Can I see your ID? Can I see your ID?”

But not to vote? Not to vote?

That’s just crazy.

So, what he’s saying is, you people conduct elections, and you have no idea who’s voting. You give licenses to people here illegally, and that license is used to get a registered vote, but you don’t even check if they’re at the address. You don’t even check if they know English.

Nobody has to know. How could you vote and not know the language of the country? By making an X. You can do that in California with a witness.

And then what’s so hard? India, you’re talking about India has 1.4 billion people. They don’t take a week to tally the ballots.

And what’s the good of saying, “Well, we authenticate”?

Well, you have to authenticate it because you have so many laxities built into this corrupt system. And even then, when you did that in the 2024 election, you only rejected 0.09% of the ballots. So, you’re not really auditing them. You’re letting them go right by you.

I think the election exposed that California has reached critical mass at this point. People said to themselves, “This state is dysfunctional. It can’t conduct honest, transparent elections with readily tabulated votes. Nobody trusts it anymore. It has no confidence from the population, and we understand what’s happening.”

300,000 to 500,000 people are leaving every year who are taxpayers in the middle- and upper-middle-income brackets.

When they go, then we have more entitlements, and more people come into the state, either legally or illegally, who are impoverished. And there’s less and less money to pay for more and more people who want federal, state, and local help in California.

And therefore, we’re going to do what? We’re going to raise the gas tax. We’re going to raise the income tax. We’re going to raise the property tax.

Then more people are going to go, and more people are going to come in to get more benefits. That’s where we’re in a doom loop.

And it’s not going to get better.

It is a Third World country. It’s falling apart.

And when you add $250 billion of fraud and stolen money—and I must say, trying to be as objective as I can, I’ve been following that story—I would conservatively suggest that, based on what’s in the paper and the names and online pictures of the people who have been arrested, 60% to 75% are immigrants.

So, that’s not a good look.

People come over here, and instead of kissing the soil and saying, “Thank God I’m in the United States. I owe so much to my host,” it’s, “Oh man, there’s nobody here. These people are stupid. They give away stuff. I’m going to get mine.”

That’s the wrong attitude.

Fowler: Hey, we flew them over here, even at our own expense, so they could then rip us off. It’s easy to connect those dots.

There’s an online publication out of Fresno, Victor. I coincidentally saw it the other day. I think it’s GV Wire. And it had an article by two nonprofit leaders from a Catholic organization.

They’re trying to do the Lord’s work, and we’re hurting in the Central Valley now. There are fewer donors, and the reason is people are leaving.

Hanson: They’re leaving. Just last week, two people that I would say are in the high-income brackets—they pay a ton of taxes—basically said, “I’m done.”

As one person said, “With the federal income tax and Medicare and the Obamacare and California’s 13.3% income tax, I pay 58% of my income. And I get the worst roads. I get gangbangers. I get high crime. I get filthy streets. I get homelessness. And I get elections like they have in Los Angeles.

“And we’re sitting on a bonanza of gas and oil, and we have $6.50 gas. We have the second- or third-largest forestry industry in the country, and we let it burn down. We have 60 million trees that burned up, and we drove everything out except maybe two companies.

“We have rare-earth minerals. We have everything. It’s the most richly endowed state in the country and the most beautiful, and it’s the most ill-governed.”

So, they’re leaving.

And I don’t know what’s going to happen. You get the impression that people want them to go. It’s like the Seattle mayor said, “Bye-bye.”

How California’s Election System Keeps Democrats in Power

 

person 1: So, , California polls or the California election results have come in, and I was wondering your thoughts, especially in LA, because there’s been lots of news this week and discussion about two things: dirty voter rolls, and then the New York Post had an article on how Nithya Raman was part and parcel to funding a social services by $600,000, and then they went out and paid or got homeless people and anybody else they could to register at that address. 

And so, my question is this: How many social services do you think have done that? And what is the impact of the number of votes they can bring in in that fashion, given that Nithya Raman won by 30,000 votes over Pratt?  

person 2: Well, with 65% of the vote, she was third. She was seven points behind. 

She even gave a tearful, teary-eyed, I lost. It’s so bad. But the point was, she didn’t—when all of these mail-in ballots came in in troves, they went out and they harvested votes. And they went to homeless people, and under the rules, they said you don’t need an address. You just get the lowest corner. 

Here’s five bucks, $4. Some people said $4. And we will register you. Oh, you don’t have an ID. You don’t have a driver’s license? That’s OK. We’ll give you an ID number. Well, now that you have an ID number, now you’re registered.  

Well, turn in your registration. Now we’re gonna give you a provisional ballot. 

Oh, you can’t read or write or you’re too zoomed out? Make a happy face, your mark, and I’ll be the witness. And here, you can’t read them?  

Here’s who you vote for. And give me the—here’s the registration and here’s the ballot, and I’m gonna take it in. And they did that all over Los Angeles to young people, minorities, and homeless people. 

And they all came in to such a degree. I don’t even think she won her own district’s vote. It was all over the city in specially designated areas that they had contacts as social workers, social work centers.  

And so, everybody said on the left, well, you’re a conspiracist. You think that, uh—show us the fraud. 

[President] Donald Trump walked out of an interview because they said, “Show us the fraud.”

They don’t understand what the fraud was. The fraud was the legal system that was legalized fraud.  

It was created to create fraud, but it was technically legal. So, in California, you don’t need a license to register to vote. If you’re an illegal alien, you can get a license. But you wouldn’t even need a license. 

You can have a credit card without your picture on it. You can have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you can be given an ID number. That’s the first thing. You can register and vote on the same day, and you won’t have to show any picture ID either to register or to vote. You don’t even have to read English. 

You don’t have to be able to write. You can make a mark. You can have somebody witness 1,000 times, the same person. Every single person who is registered gets a ballot. They don’t care if you’re dead. They don’t watch it carefully. They don’t care if you’ve moved. They don’t care if the names have been changed and you have two ballots. 

I mentioned that before. I have children who lived here. They went to college. They married, and for years, I got mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots. Maybe it was William Hanson. Maybe he registered under Bill. Maybe he registered under Billy, and I took the ballots and threw them in [the trash]. All I would have had to do was make a happy face and have my friend witness it and mail it in, and it would have [counted]. 

And that happened. And then they said, illegal aliens don’t vote. And then the question was, well, why not? If you go to the disability, they do. If you go to unemployment, they do. If you go to Medi-Cal office, they do. If you go to legal services, they do. If you go to school, they do. You’re given a registration, and you can register without a driver’s license. 

But if you wanna be correct and get a driver’s license, you go into the DMV and say, “I want a driver’s license.” And you don’t have to be a US citizen. And so, then, once that happens, you get all these people that vote, and then you have people in these vote collection centers. And you don’t just turn them in. 

You get the troves, and then you postmark them, and they can come in for the next seven days, as long as they’re postmarked on or by election day. And then you see if you need them or not.  

Believe me, if she had been way ahead, she wouldn’t have done that. It wouldn’t have mattered. They wouldn’t have done that. 

They knew that she was third. They had polls. So, that’s vote harvesting. 

Then, if you go in and they say, “Well, the person didn’t sign their name. It doesn’t match the registration.” Well, if it’s 40%. So, Victor Davis Hanson, I write Victor, it’s 40%. That counts. But if it doesn’t count, you put it in the seven-day vote-curing pile. 

And then you call the candidate and say, we’ve got all these votes that came in. Do you want to cure this ballot? They open the thing up and they say … 

So, the candidates then go to extraordinary measures to find the people. And then they bring them in and they re-sign their name. And that’s why the ballots take so long, because they don’t come in for seven days. 

And then when you have all this fraud, guess what the rejection rate was in 2024 of all the ballots that were cast in California? 0.09%. Not even 1% was thrown out, just a fraction of a percent. 

In other words, they have all these people, and they didn’t do anything. They didn’t say, well, this person’s not registered. This person is registered on this name, but we have three ballots with this. This witness didn’t spell a name. There’s none of that. 

They just went ahead and did it. And that was designed to do what? That was designed to get a supermajority in the House, the Assembly, and the State Senate in California. Check. To get 15 years of straight Democrat governors. Check. To get a whole generation of liberal judges appointed by Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. Check. To get the congressional district, not 40%, the delegations of the 52, to get it down to seven. 13% of the state’s congresspeople are Republican, and the state votes about 38%, 40% Republican statewide. And so, it worked. And then finally, why did it work? What happened to the Pete Wilson group? What happened to [unintelligible]? 

The middle class, 300 to 500,000 a year, said, you know what? This is crazy. We pay the highest taxes, and we’re down like 45th in test scores. We pay the highest gas taxes, and we’re rated 49th in roads. High-speed rail is rusting. Palisades burns down. It’s not rebuilt. We passed a water bond. They took the money and blew up four dams. 

They didn’t build one dam. We did a gerrymandering, anti-gerrymandering bill, and we had five Democrats, five Republicans, four Independents. And guess what? The activists, the lawsuits, the racialists, they all went in and they warped the spirit, and they did that.  

And so, people said, I’ve had it. And they’re leaving, the conservative voter. 

And then we imported about 10 million people over 30 years that said, I love this country, but, you know, if I say I hate the country and it’s racist and it’s horrible, the more stuff I get, and the more I’m patronized, and the more I can’t be a racist. So, they created that dependent—and I saw that when I taught as a professor. 

I saw students that came in, and they were basically—I think I’ve told that story twice to this crowd. As a Latina, I don’t have to listen to “The Iliad.” It doesn’t—It’s not relevant to me. OK, I said, as a white person, your argument’s not relevant to me. And then I got—not she didn’t get chastised, I did. 

And then finally, the coup de grâce was we had $14 trillion in Silicon Valley, and that took the political nexus from the LA conservative places, once conservative, to the Bay Area. And we got Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown. 

That’s what we got. And they ran the state into the ground with the money and backing of this new world juggernaut. And the whole bicoastal elite were the upper, upper Asian and white professional classes that said, I’m so wealthy now. I want to create heaven on earth. I want to get rid of fossil fuels. 

I want diversity. I want to defund the police. I want to do all this stuff. And I live in Brentwood, and I live in Carmel, and I live in Montecito, and I’m safe. I’m safe from the disasters I’m creating for the hoi polloi.