America Being Overtaken? We’ve Heard That Before

 

The recent Chinese-American summit, as I’ve spoken elsewhere, has raised anxieties that there is a tension between an establishment United States and a rising power, China. And a lot of people who I would call declinists say, “Well, China’s gonna replace us.”

A lot of people on Wall Street are afraid of that, a lot of people in the military, a lot of people on the left, a few people on the right, but we’re not looking at it empirically.

So there are two things to be cognizant of. Number one, there’s about eight or nine ingredients that allow a society to flourish, to advance, to expand, that are critical to this argument.

And they cross time and space. They’re ancient. One is fuel. The United States is the largest producer of gas and oil in the world right now. Another one is food. The value of our agricultural products is at an all-time high. We’re completely self-sufficient in food, and we’re, in terms of the value of the exports, the biggest exporter of food.

So, food and fuel. How about education? The Times Educational Supplement that studied the top 50 universities in the world—if you look at the United States, 90% of them are here in the United States, especially in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are at the top in the world.

So, in higher education, we’re there.

Fertility—we’re not at 2.0 anymore, but we’re much better than Europe at 1.3 and much, much better than China at 1.0, which is a shrinking and aging society. We’re not at 1.7. It’s about as good as you can get in the Western Hemisphere.

In terms of the military, we’re going to spend the largest amount of money we ever have in real dollars and the largest in many years as a percentage of our budget. We invented the aircraft carrier. We’ve got 11 carrier groups. We have the most sophisticated weapons in the world.

As far as space goes, we have a NASA program and then we have SpaceX, and SpaceX on its own is superior to most space programs elsewhere in the world.

So, by any fundamental evaluation, the United States is not in decline. So, why do people say that? Usually, they say it because they’re unhappy with the other party.

So, most of this is now coming from the Left. If you’d watched MSNBC, which I’m forced to do sometimes to get a different view, and CNN, they’re all saying that the summit was a disaster.

[Chinese Leader Xi Jinping] had all the cards. [President Donald] Trump was played. That’s not true. I just explained why it isn’t. But Western declinism is kind of intrinsic in general to Western societies that are paranoid about decline, and particularly in the United States.

And let me just finish by giving you a few examples.

During the Great Depression, which started in 1929 with the stock market collapse and continued all the way to 1940, unemployment was 25% at some point across the United States.

People said look at Europe. There is a new paradigm. Fascist Italy, fascist Germany. They have wonderful infrastructure programs. Hitler is building autobahns. Mussolini is building rail tracks. They didn’t suffer the Depression like we did.

They have a new formula. They’re rearming. By 1939 and ’40, Charles Lindbergh said we couldn’t win a war against Germany. The Luftwaffe is invincible compared to our decrepit forces. In fact, at the outset of 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, our army was smaller than Portugal’s, 19th in the world.

So, everybody said, our system doesn’t work. We had a Depression. Now we’re unprepared. And four years later, we destroyed all of our enemies, and the U.S. economy was larger than all of the economies of the belligerents in the war put together.

And the U.S. Navy was the largest navy in history, and it was larger than the Russian navy, what was left of the German, Japanese, Italian navies, and the British navy all together—the U.S. Navy, one navy.

So, that was just a passing paranoia, but it was typical.

The next thing happened after World War II. Our ally, the Soviet Union, suddenly switched sides. It became an enemy even after we supplied 25% to 30% of its Lend-Lease effort to win the war.

And yet, they started the Cold War, and then people got very scared because they said this totalitarian command economy is very, very efficient. It’s better than ours. Look what’s happened. They’re ahead of us in the space race. They ignited a hundred-megaton bomb, the biggest in history. There was something called the missile gap.

They have twice the missiles that we do pointed at us. That’s what John Kennedy got elected on. It really didn’t exist, but that’s what he was about to convince people about. So, the Soviet Union, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “We will bury you.”

And what happened? It imploded two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then we found out that it was completely overrated. It was a rotten system. The CIA estimates of its military power and its economic vitality were all wrong. It was a pathological society, and it broke apart.

That didn’t stop the declinists. Then they said by the 1980s and the 1990s, right after the Soviet collapse, well, we have a new problem. Our capitalist free-market democratic society is not as efficient as what’s going on in Japan.

They called it Japan Inc. Look what Japan has done. They’ve got more money than we do. Their cars—the Honda, Toyota, Lexus—are all better than our cars. GM is through. Ford is through. American Motors is through.

And then what happened? An aging, shrinking Japanese population backed by unwise government and corporate policies went into a period of about 15 years of destructive deflation.

And today it’s a strong economic power. We’re friends with it, but no one in their right mind thinks Japan Inc. is going to replace the United States.

And then at the millennium, we were told the European Union was the new paradigm. Four hundred and fifty million people, one continental nation-state. But it wasn’t a nation.

And today, the EU with 450 million people has an economy about 65% the size of ours, and no one thinks the EU is going to take over. In fact, we’re worried that Europe is in rapid decline.

I say all this because what we are saying now about China is not new. It’s an old phenomenon of pessimism and declinism in Western civilization, particularly in the United States.

China is not the new rival that’s going to replace us. It is the new version of Germany and Italy and Japan and the Soviet Union and Japan Inc. and the EU—the pseudo threats that we’ve all seen before.

 

There’s been a very strange story that was printed not long ago by the liberal opinion journalist Nicholas Kristof. Now, apparently, he’s been retired. He’s written for decades at The New York Times.

He’s sort of a social activist. He does some good things sometimes, but he tries to draw attention of The New York Times readership to supposed crises of morality all over the globe, such as the so-called genocide. And it depends on who you talk to. In Darfur, he visited it very many times. But he’s had a checkered career.

During the anthrax scare near the millennium, he wrote a series of articles suggesting that a government scientist was responsible for sending that deadly anthrax bacillus in the mail to particular people.

There was no real evidence of that. The person was never formally charged. And there was litigation back and forth.

He also ran for governor of Oregon, where he moved as a young man, and his family has a farm. But he hadn’t lived there. He’d been, of course, living on the East Coast because he was working at The New York Times. The Democratic secretary of state disqualified him from trying to run for governor in 2022, arguing that his main residence was elsewhere, out of state.

She was a liberal Democrat like he is, and yet he got very angry and accused her of being politically biased and corrupt. The Oregon Supreme Court, very liberal, upheld that decision, so although he’d raised $1.6 million, he could not stay—he could not run for governor.

But here’s what he’s done recently. He’s written an article that alleges that prisoners following the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in Israel by the Hamas terrorist organization and people of Gaza, who tagged along. Many of them were caught in jail, and some directly involved in the assault, some just in the subsequent operations in Gaza itself.

And he’s interviewed them. Many of them are anonymous. And he says that they have been systematically raped, molested, tortured.

But what got the sensational coverage for these allegations was that he said that in some cases, and one in particular, a former Hamas person said that he had been raped inside an Israeli jail by a canine, by a dog. And that this was a part of an Israeli policy to train canines to rape inmates and to abuse them.

There’s a lot of things wrong with that.

First of all, most of the sourcing for the article either came from the Euro-Med website, which is hard-Left, anti-Israeli, and founded by someone who’s closely connected with Hamas.

Second, most of the sources were anonymous. Third, the ones that were not, are affiliated in many cases with the Hamas terrorist group.

But most strange of all, there is no scientific proof that a trainer or an owner can prepare a dog to commit sexual intercourse against a human’s will or against a human at all.

Dogs don’t rape people. To the degree that there has been any recorded incidents of dog-human sexual content, it’s in the context of bestiality.

That is, an owner coaxing a dog in some fashion to have intercourse, but there’s no … Dog sexuality is so different from humans. You can’t just say to a dog, “Achieve sexual preparedness and go have intercourse in a forcible manner against that victim.”

It doesn’t happen. And yet, Nicholas Kristof doubled down and said there was scientific evidence that it happened, and it didn’t. That was a complete fabrication.

And when he said that it wasn’t necessarily the rule in Israeli jails, he said it was systematic. So the article is self-contradictory.

It’s based on either left-wing, anti-Israeli sources or pro-Hamas informants. Most of them anonymous.

He has a history of not being reliable, even though his reputation is one of being a global humanitarian who tries to draw our attention to abuses.

There’s one final thing. It wasn’t just a sin of commission. There was a sin of omission. Let me define what I mean by that. He knew, as did The New York Times, that Israel had been conducting an exhaustive investigation, exhaustive, over almost two and a half years, to find out what actually happened on Oct. 7.

And they had all sorts of evidence. They had prisoners who confessed to what they did. And remember, these didn’t need to be coerced. In the Hamas mindset, they want to brag on what they did. They’re proud of it. They had instruction booklets telling them how to say, “Spread your legs,” and other commands in Hebrew.

They were greeted as heroes by Gazan civilians when they came back and heard the story. When they brought back over 240 hostages, the hostages were in danger of losing their lives from an angry mob.

So, there was no reticence on the part of cooperating with the Israelis. Then they had people who survived the attack who had testimonies. Then they had extensive photographs of the bodies of the slain.

They had camera footage from the Hamas terrorists who were so exuberant and happy to kill Jews that they actually filmed it on their military helmets.

And they collated all of that evidence together, and the result was medieval. It was a story of people losing their limbs, of women being raped repeatedly, gang-raped, being shot, being mutilated, being sexually—in a sexually perverted manner tortured, children beheaded. It’s horrific beyond words.

That systematic report was coming out and has now appeared.

And so, the supposition is that Nicholas Kristof, who’s very anti-Israel, cooked up an idea that he would preempt this story by an even cruder, weirder, surreal story that, well, whatever Hamas did to the Israelis that you’re going to read this week, that’s the implication—not explicit, but implicit.

It’s not going to be as bad as what I’m going to tell you, because the Israelis train dogs to rape people.

That is the biggest blood libel and slur against the Jewish people that I’ve ever heard. And yet, The New York Times, which always brags about fact-checking, didn’t fact-check it at all.

And the result is he is now being sued by the Israeli government and the Netanyahu administration. I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. It’s very hard for a foreign country to sue an individual, especially when the prime minister is in the public realm. But it’s going to draw attention to The New York Times in general and Nicholas Kristof in particular.

He has skated on thin ice for a long time. And he’s not a reliable opinion journalist. And this confirms that he should not be writing for The New York Times.

It’s a free country. If they want to peddle these lies and these libels, they’re welcome to. But it’s going to destroy their reputation if he comes back again and pursues what he’s been doing for a long time.

Zombies, DEI, and the Fall of LA: Why Spencer Pratt Is on the Rise

ack : Well, you know what’s not a beautiful place to live, Victor, segueing, is Los Angeles. And you talked with Sami about the really terrific, I think, debate between the mayoral candidates, Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, the Republican who you’ve actually talked to, and you’ve talked about talking to him and Nithya Raman, who’s a city councilwoman.

: Yes.

So, we won’t re-go over the debate again, but just to let folks know that an online poll from NBC Los Angeles showed that, as of Thursday morning, this was right after the debate, 89% of the voters picked Spencer Pratt, when asked who they thought had emerged victorious from the Wednesday night showdown.

Now, two other things, and then please, any opinions you please share. Today, Karen Bass has announced she’s withdrawing from the next mayoral debate. This was being sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs.

She had promised she would come, but I think she got her, you know, her hiney kicked by Pratt the other day. And she’s just gonna ghost them.

And then finally, worth raising about the debate is that Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who was running, during the debate she backed off her—she had a position change.

Guess what, Victor? She used to be for defunding the police. She’s no longer for defunding the police. So—

: No longer, for now.

She will if she were to be elected. She’s on the City Council—once the race is over, she’s a City Council member, they’re all Democrats, she will go back to do that. It’s chaos. It’s really tragic, what’s happened to Los Angeles. And Karen Bass was a deer in the headlights at that debate.

Both of them are incumbents. One was an incumbent City Council member and one was the mayor. And they all had a hand in the policies of no cash bail, not arresting people for theft under a particular, you know, they eased that. It wasn’t just $950. Even when people did a little bit more, they kind of winked and nodded.

There are homeless parks. If you go to Venice Beach—I used to teach at Pepperdine one day a week, and I would ride my bike through there, and even in 2000—I think the last time I did it was 2020—it was just dystopian. I mean, there’s zombie—it looked like, you know, “The Last of Us” or some TV show with all of these zombies.

And then it was filthy dirty. My bike would get human excrement on the tires. And then you go down the Pacific Coast Highway, people were just crazy, walking around in the middle of traffic. Just total chaos.

And then when he brought all this up, all they could say is he’s Donald Trump or he’s a right-wing Republican. And he’s apolitical. I think he’s an independent.

All he stuck to was we didn’t have water and the fire burned down. And then you won’t even issue building permits. You wouldn’t let us clean the hills so we could get that flammable brush out. We tried. You didn’t do that. Your fire chief was more interested in DEI than monitoring why all these hundreds of fire hydrants did not work.

Your power and water grandee who was hired, kind of, was a flunky from PG&E. You paid her $700k. She left two critical reservoirs for months dry, right during the Santa Ana wind season, when we had this flare-up.

You went to Ghana for no reason, just for a personal—your vice mayor, as I said to Sami, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat. Of course, it was a feint—he claimed that Israel had phoned in a bomb threat, and it was a complete lie. He’s in jail, I think, now.

And your fire chief was bragging about her DEI hiring. But nobody was saying that we’re in a very fragile landscape where we have to get these reservoirs full, because they had other interests.

And every time you mention that about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the problem with it is it’s not just commission, it’s omission.

When you put so many resources and so much virtue signaling and performance art all about how diverse we are, and you never ask yourself, is that person meritocratically hired? Is that person competent? Because 6 million people’s lives depend on that job, in the air traffic controller or in the water and power or getting oil. And the answer is, we don’t care.

And that’s why Spencer Pratt’s ads are so effective. He walks through the detritus of Los Angeles, and then he superimposes Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass laughing in very beautiful homes.

And his point is the ramifications, the consequences of these people’s ideology never affects them. For them, it’s all some utopian exercise and we’re all the lab rats. We’re in cages, and we can’t get out, and they experiment on us. And then they go home to nice, happy, secure lives, and they’re well paid. And their pay has nothing to do with their actual performance.

And then when you see Gavin Newsom endorse her and say all these things, and then you see people on the debate stage for the governor’s race, which was really pathetic, they were all praising Gavin Newsom, and you say to yourself, California fell apart around 2008/’06, it started going downhill. People started to leave. Taxes started to get really high.

Who, more than anybody, could have been responsible? Because it was a Bay Area phenomenon where it started. Well, who was City County official? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was mayor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was lieutenant governor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was governor? Gavin Newsom for six years now and counting.

So, there’s no person more responsible. And yet when you see him talk, Jack, if you mention high-speed rail, he said, oh, you know—he just moves his hands and just shakes his head and he says, we’ve got this going and this.

And you say, you’ve spent $250—it’s gonna be $250 billion. You probably spent $30 billion. There’s no way you can build it. There’s no way you can run it if it was free. And he just ignores it.

And then when you say, after the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire or the Palisades Fire, don’t you get it, that you drove out all the lumber companies? They can’t glean the hillsides. You don’t let people go up and harvest wood.

You think it’s natural to let all these dead trees from the drought just sit there, 60 million of them, as kindling? And then you say, you have no margin of error, Gavin.

You drove out two big refineries. You’ve got all of these people on the Air Resources Board that wants the purest gas that doesn’t pollute, and you can only get it in the Caribbean distillery and refineries in Japan.

And you talk about fossil fuels as evil, but then you import it from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Do you think that they pump it more ecologically sound than we could?

: Right.

: So, you want to use it, but you just don’t want to get your hands dirty. And then when the price goes up, you have a Steven Chu attitude that you don’t express. Well, gas goes up to European levels, we’ll use less.

Well, yeah, if you live in Palo Alto and Santa Monica and Montecito, you don’t care. But if you live in Huron or, I don’t know, Five Points or Parlier, you do care. And $2 can break you if you’ve got to commute. Maybe you can’t afford a Tesla. You have maybe a 2003 Pontiac or something that gets about 16 miles to the gallon, and you can buy it for 1,500 bucks.

But they have no idea. And why, the people who are harmed the most by them, vote for them, I don’t know. But if it’s not sustainable, as I said to Sammy, it won’t go on. And we’re getting to peak dystopia.

That it’s not going—it’s not working.

: Yeah. The fact that Pratt seemingly has traction here is helpful, Victor. But I think it’s a test here.

Can a city that’s been so committed to such self-inflicted wounds, can the people snap to their senses and say, we’re not gonna do this anymore? I don’t know. It seems like there’s some hope here. But if he loses, I would think all these big cities are just—they’re circling the drain. How much torture can you create and—

: I think if you go into the LA area now and you go into places in Orange County or communities along the coast, blue-chip places, or you go into Simi Valley, you’re starting to see the breakup of the idea of Los Angeles.

They’re just small communities, and they’re run locally, and they want nothing to do with LA, and they’re very suspicious of anybody coming in anymore. You know what I mean?

They’re trying to reestablish local control and they’re saying, we’re gonna be like Augustine in North Africa in the fifth century AD when the whole world was collapsing. They’re gonna have fortified Hippo or something, communities.

And I think that’s what’s—it’s very similar to the late Byzantine Empire and the late Western Empire where as the federal system collapses and the elected officials collapse and you have these huge migrations of people that are antithetical to the system and the people in power are incompetent and corrupt, then people, on their own, they either migrate, which is happening now, or they create cocoons where—

I’ll give you an example. There’s a rural school not too far from here. I grew up with it. It was just a rural school. But some very, you know, concerned people began to move into that district. And then they fixed the school up. And then they began paying much more in that little school district, and they recruited the best teachers in the country. And now that school, a rural school, K-8, I think it is, you have to register when your child is born, to get into it.

But they’re very careful. They moved there. They live in that district. And they said to this wider world, we don’t believe in your schools. We don’t believe in any of this. We’re going to go live near a school. Get our school board. Control it. And then we’re going to have meritocratic hiring only.

And we’re not going to have any DEI. We’re not going to have any teachers union. We’re not going to have any of that weaponized curriculum. Just a classical curriculum. And everybody wants to go there. And they’re very careful.

And where I live, in a 50-mile radius, I’d say there’s three or four communities that have decided, you know, as the Romans say, non hic porcus. Not this pig. We’re not going to do it. And they have reestablished local traditions. They have good restaurants. They’re very careful about zoning.

They don’t have a lot of new housing development. They discourage rentals. And they are throwbacks to the 1950s. It works. And they’re very coveted, to live there. And if you want to go to their schools. It’s very hard to get a transfer.

And so, I can see it, where my daughter lives in the foothills, that there’s a whole bunch of people, and they’re not conservative necessarily, from the Bay Area. She lives on a dead-end road. Cul-de-sac. It’s, kind of, about a quarter-mile long, and there are homes there.

And they all have one thing in common. They’re all semi-upper-class or middle-class professionals, at one point. But usually the woman is now raising children at home. They have chickens. They’re back to the land.

And they don’t talk politics. And they’re very involved in Little League, local PTAs, schools. And their whole existence is a rejection of the Bay Area. And that’s why they’re there. They voted with their feet, to stay in California for a variety of reasons, but they’re creating an alternative identity. And I think that’s going to happen.

That’s what red-state America is becoming.

: Right.  

: Parallel polis.

This is funny, when you see Gavin Newsom, when he looked at—because he is really the most disingenuous politician of my lifetime. He looks at these red states and now they’re redistricting. Now he calls them the Confederate states.

Gavin, if they’re the Confederate states, after the Civil War, the Confederate states were devastated. They were plagued with racism. They were the home of the Klan. They had Jim Crow, and the northern industrial states and New England were booming.

And you tell me how that flipped. Because people vote regardless of ideology. And they’re leaving your paradigm for that paradigm. And they’re not going there for Jim Crow. They’re going there for safety, low taxes, good infrastructure, responsible government, police, security.

And then he said, and I’ll end with this, Jack. He said, or he wrote, he was very anguished because he showed the Confederate states, he called them, and he said their legislatures have redistricted, like Louisiana and now Tennessee. And it’s eight-zero, House seats. Even though the Democrats in those states had 45% in the last election. Or 38%. Look at Alabama’s doing it.

And you just stop and take a deep breath and say, my God, this guy really is shameless. He’s shameless because everybody knows that you can take a blue-state paradigm of New England.

: Right.

: And you look at Delaware, New Hampshire. They’re the same. Massachusetts, nine-zero.

They have no representation, even though Trump in those states got from 38 to 45%.

And then you look at California, and under his directorship, we’re going to have about, of the 52 or 53 seats, we’re gonna have maybe 9%. I don’t know, seven Republicans.

And so here he is in the most gerrymandered and biggest state in the union calling others Confederates for doing what New England does and what he does in spades.

It’s really—

: It’s projectionism, which is their power.

: I don’t understand his career. I never understood his career. I have never understood it. I understand the Gettys launched it. I understand he was under the tutelage of the Pelosis.

I understand that the Bay Area assumed political power after the riches of Silicon Valley were manifest. I understand Willie Brown. I understand Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown.

I understand that was the power, but he was the prodigal son. He was the black sheep of that group. He never distinguished himself, and yet, somehow he became the most influential Californian in the last 30 years.

Yeah, now he’s handing out diapers.

 

The Newsom Nightmare: Why California’s Elites Refuse to Face Reality

 

We’ve had a series of debates on the future of California, at least in venues for the mayoral race in Los Angeles, in which the outsider Spencer Pratt challenged Karen Bass, the mayor, and Councilman Nithya Raman, both hard leftists.  

And then we had these—a series of gubernatorial debates in which we had just two conservatives, Chad Bianco, the sheriff from Southern California, and Steve Hilton, Fox commentator. 

And they were arrayed against Kathleen Porter, Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa, and, in addition, Tom Steyer.

Now, there’s a common thread to all of this, none of the people on the Democratic side want to talk about any issues. In the mayoral race, neither Bass nor Raman wanted to talk about what happened in the LA fire or why Karen Bass was in Ghana, or we don’t want to talk about why the reservoirs were empty or the hydrants not working or it was against the law to remove brush or the conduct of the fire department—or the vice mayor phoning in a bomb threat. 

So, when the mayor was gone, the vice mayor was under arrest. There was nobody in control of the city. Nobody wants to talk about the highest taxes on gas in the nation, the highest income tax. Nobody wants to talk about one-third of all the welfare recipients here. Almost half the nation’s homeless are here. 

The high-speed rail, $250 billion boondoggle without a foot of track laid. Probably $250 billion wasted in various government entitlement frauds administered by the state. I could go on and on, but when Spencer Pratt tried to mention these things and ask them why you did this or what … They don’t want to talk about it. 

They don’t want to talk about because for 20 years, they’ve had a supermajority in the Legislature in both the Senate and the Assembly, and it’s been 20 years since a Republican governor. So, almost all the judiciary, both the federal judiciary under Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s nominees, but mostly the state, Superior Court, Appellate Court, Supreme Court, have all been nominated and approved by Democrats. 

And so, there’s no one else to blame. That’s why they will not talk about it. And their argument is essentially, we have this huge $13 to $14 trillion Silicon Valley, of which now they’ve turned on with their millionaire and billionaire taxes, and that runs the whole state. That’s their argument. 

Every time Gov. Gavin Newsom is presented with a critique of his leadership, he said, “We’re the fifth-largest economy in the world.” He never says that I’ve driven out oil refineries. I prohibited pipeline construction. I drove out the timber industry, and that I, as a San Francisco County official, as a mayor of San Francisco, as a lieutenant governor of the state, and as governor, I’ve had over 32 years, and no one is more responsible for California as it is today than Gavin Newsom. 

No, he won’t talk about any of these problems. He just talks about Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. He has these nasty sort of Truth Social people who use capital letters, foul language, and threaten people. I’m gonna hit Trump in the mouth, or people in Europe got on their knee pads, kind of foul imagery, thinks it’s really neat. 

He gives these interviews where he kind of wiggles his shoulders, but he doesn’t talk about his record. So how did we get here if they didn’t tell us? How did a state that was well-governed and had a natural paradise and was the envy of all 50 states in matters of energy production, defense, production, tripartite higher education system, a solid K-12 educational, system, great infrastructure— 

Why would the American Trucking Association say, “I don’t want you driving on the 99 or north-south lateral”? Most dangerous highway in the nation per miles driven. What happened? Well, how did these people come to power? The first thing was that we had an explosion in technology in the 1970s and ’80s, and due to the location of Stanford University and UC Berkeley, in between was Silicon Valley. 

And that boomed as the creators of everything from computers to iPhones to iPads to Adobe to everything. Now it’s AI, and that has now ballooned to $14 or $15 trillion in market capitalization, and it’s left-wing. At least it was until recently. The state has turned on them. We’ll see what happens. 

But when Gavin Newsom says we’re the fifth-largest economy in the world, he doesn’t talk about anything he’s done. He’s saying that despite our efforts, these people are multibillionaires, and they’re anchoring our entire agenda and paying for it and subsidizing candidates, donating to candidates. 

Second is when this thing started, high taxes, very little in return from it, we were losing 200 to 300,000 people a year. So, the proverbial Dalmatian Pete Wilson, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger voter doesn’t exist. He and she are in Montana. They’re in Nevada. They’re in Florida. They’re in Tennessee. They’re in Texas.  

And they’re making those states redder and redder, but they’re gone. And then we had the highest level of illegal and legal immigration of any other state. So we probably had half of the original 11 million illegal aliens that were here, maybe up to 20, before the Biden influx. We don’t know how many they are. 

When Karen Bass was asked specifically, “Would you allow illegal aliens to vote in California elections?” She wouldn’t answer the question because she knew she’d have to say yes and get some criticism from people on the stage, one person on the stage maybe. And so, 27% of the state residents were not born in the United States. 

That’s an enormous task of acculturation, assimilation, integration, language fluency, civic education. We didn’t do any of that. And those are powerful lobby groups, and they feel as newcomers they are not as affluent, although many are, as the existing resident population, and they should have repertory entitlements, and they should run them. 

And so, you put all of those things together and California is what it is. What can save California? What will save California?  

Well, if the people who got their wish, and that’s the people, 60% of the population who continually vote in the Karen Basses and the Gavin Newsoms, and they approve of that agenda. 

And yet gas is now about $8 on the coast, and here it’s about 6.50 a gallon in California, $2 at least higher than elsewhere. Electricity runs from 30 to 45 cents a kilowatt, and we’re gonna have shortages. There’s not enough water anymore because of the releases into the bay.  

My point is that there’s so much regulation, and there’s so much bureaucracy, and there’s so much diversion of key monies from infrastructure to illegal aliens or to subsidize the 50% of the state who’s on Medi-Cal, if you have all of that, who can stop it?  

The only answer is it won’t work anymore. It’ll reach collapse. It will be unsustainable. What can’t go on, as the old proverb says, won’t go on. And then people will say, “Well, where’s my dialysis clinic?” Or, “It’s too dangerous to drive to San Francisco from Fresno. 

“A DUI person hit my daughter on the highway and left the scene of the accident, and we don’t know where he is. And if we do know where he is, he’s gonna be out with no cash bail.” 

 So, when it starts to hit a majority of the people, and we’re very close to that, then it won’t go on anymore.  

But the question I leave you with, when it’s no longer sustainable and people say, “I can’t take this anymore,” and they start voting in a different fashion, will there be a California left to save? 

‘It’s All According to Plan’ as Protesters Target Jewish Area in Mamdani’s NYC

 

person 2: All right, Victor, I’m going to just—I’ll just give a drop here on what happened, and please comment. And then I have a very—it’s a little long of a read of the councilwoman from New York City who’s explaining, in her view—she’s a Republican councilwoman, Vickie Paladino—what is this really all about?

So yesterday, on Monday, pro-Palestinian protesters marched through the streets of a Jewish neighborhood in the city, of course, carrying the banners, flags, signs, Hamas, Hezbollah posters, “River to the Sea,” etc. Five hundred police officers had to be called. This is the new New York City. Victor, what’s your take on this?

person 1: Well, I mean, it’s going according to [Zohran] Mamdani’s plan. I mean, he has Islamists come into [Gracie Mansion]. And he said that he would arrest [Benjamin] Netanyahu when he got there.

Most of the people that he has appointed, they have a social media history of being anti-Israel or antisemitic. He’s played race. He said he was gonna go after white neighborhoods. This is a white neighborhood. So, I guess he’s fulfilling his pledge, and that’s what the people wanted. And he’s unapologetic about it.

When he tapped on that Ken Griffith—you know, got his camera close—he was basically drawing the line and said, we don’t want you here. Get out.

And then if you’re one of the protesters, say if you’re here on a green card, a lot of them looked like they were immigrants or students from the Middle East—not all—but you would say, well, this is what Mamdani sent me. That’s what he wants me to do.

And the police are not allowed to even touch a person that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is going for. So, the New York PD, which is the best police department in the world, is now forbidden by Mamdani even to help the federal government.

So, they get the general impression that New York is on their side, and they look at the wider atmosphere in the United States and say, well, what is the Left doing?

Well, there’s this guy in Maine with a Nazi tattoo, and he’s just a nominee. That’s great. And then you’ve got “Benjamins baby,” you know, Ilhan Omar. And you’ve got Rashida Tlaib yelling and screaming about Jews all the time. And then you’ve got, pretty much, an antisemitic campus in the United States.

And then you look on the right and you’ve got Candace [Owens] saying the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk. You’ve got Tucker [Carlson] saying he wants Graham Platner on his show. And that he’s got a World War II revisionist that says you know who started the war and pushed Churchill and Roosevelt into it.

So, they get the impression that it’s not going to be—they won’t be culpable. There’ll be no consequences to go into a Jewish neighborhood and rough up—wasn’t that—you know New York so well, wasn’t that where Al Sharpton said we have diamond merchants in Crown Heights or something? He said that a long time ago. Crown something.

Crown Heights is a neighborhood. I’m not sure that that was—this may have been in Crown Heights last night. Yeah. I’m a little confused because—

person 2: That’s separate, isn’t it? That’s separate.

person 1: Well, there’s another—I mean, we’re talking on Tuesday, but I saw something on X about there’s expected to be another protest in another largely Jewish neighborhood, Midwood in Queens. So, this is very targeting and selective here.

I think people, Americans, they’re all united. They do not want illegal immigration. That polls 70%. But I think there’s a lot of people who say, you know, something’s wrong with legal immigration. We are not assimilating. We are not acculturating. We are not integrating legal immigrants. And we have 16% of the population was not born in the United States. And we have 27% of California not born—and we don’t ask anything of them. So, we give licenses to Indian truck drivers. They can’t read.

I just got off of a four-hour drive from Palo Alto to here to the farm, and I can tell you, driving behind—you know, my wife was driving—but driving and watching some big truck with 20 tons on it just fishtail going 70 miles an hour in front of you, it’s pretty scary. And you go by and then—I mean, they’re just out of control.

And then we have, in my neighborhood, we have cartels, and they’re from people who are not citizens. And they’re from people who are citizens.

So, I think it’s gonna—I think American people, they’re going to want people to have an ID to vote. And the SAVE Act that should have been passed. I hope it does. And then they’re going to say, we don’t want a million people anymore. We want 100,000 or 150,000 or 200,000. And we want to audit them. We want to make sure they know English. We want to know that they’re self-supporting. We want to know that they won’t be on federal entitlements, state entitlements.

Because it’s—you know, if the blue states don’t want that, then they should just handle—they should just, under the system of federalism, say, we want all the immigrants in our state. But don’t take federal funds for it. You pay for it.

And it’s so different than the people who came, the Greek American community, the Armenian American community, all these early—the Hungarian, the Polish—they were all immigrants.

There wasn’t a system that you were gonna—there wasn’t a sense you’re gonna come to the United States, and then you’re gonna be supported like the Somalis or the Afghan community. And then you’re going to be canonized as on the 30% ledger of the victimized, and you’re gonna get exceptions. And then you’re gonna immediately delve into politics. And, you know, it doesn’t make any sense.

And I think people are gonna demand a change. I really do.

person 2: The concept of, you know, “I pledge allegiance,” which the absence of the necessity of allegiance in many of these communities is just deeply troubling.

person 1: It is. It is. You saw that with that [Abdul] El-Sayed running for the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, when he said—I guess it was a hot mic recording—he said, now we have to be very careful about announcing any happiness with the death of [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei, in my district. You know, my constituency, they’re gonna be very sensitive.

But basically, he was saying, I’m gonna be elected in Michigan on a close vote, and I need every vote of a Muslim American who’s eligible to vote. And they are very strongly in favor of the Iranians beating the Americans. That’s what I got out of it.

person 2: Yeah. Yeah. Victor, let me read here, and please bear with me—you and to our listeners and viewers. This is a statement on X by Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, who is a Republican on the New York City Council.

And by the way, this last night was in Brooklyn—in Midwood in Brooklyn. Tonight, in a Queens neighborhood, there’s expected to be another such action where there’s ranting about globalizing the intifada, etc.

So, here’s what she wrote: “What’s going on across New York tonight is a disgrace, a sickening display that should embarrass every leader in our city government. A phalanx of 500 police officers should not be needed to protect a synagogue from a violent mob of masked jihadis carrying the flags of designated terror organizations. Make no mistake, this is exactly what Mamdani was elected to facilitate. It had nothing to do with free buses or public services or the working class or anything else lied about during his campaign. It was always about a revolutionary vanguard led by the Islamist Marxist alliance to bring chaos to their political enemies in naked power plays that are meant to clearly announce who’s now in charge here. When they say every issue is Palestine, this is what they mean. When they say globalize the intifada, this is what they mean. This is it. This is what New York now has to look forward to. And it’s going to get much worse for Jews, for homeowners, for businesses, for executives and banks and restaurants and everyone who isn’t part of their radical nexus. Nobody is safe. Everyone is targeted. And they will continue to escalate, likely until they start killing people, all as the mayor looks on and smiles.”

Very powerful and well-written.

person 1: Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to—they have majorities in these local blue-state enclaves. Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, New York, Boston. But the great majority of Americans don’t agree with what they’re doing. And as long as they keep in their enclaves, the people are live and let live. But once they go into other neighborhoods and try to terrorize people, or once they block—as they have stormed into airports—then you’re going to get a lot of angry people. And that angry group of people is the majority.

And how it works out to the midterms, if the war will end in two or three weeks, whether there has to be kinetic to end it, I don’t know. And he pivots to the economy and there’s a redistricting fight and these victories are in play. I’m not sure they’re going to win the midterms.

And I just think that there’s the counterrevolution of the MAGA people has not even ended yet. I know there’s been defections, but people are getting—there’s no alternative. You see, there’s no alternative to it because one party says, wind and solar, we don’t need to drill oil or gas.

Or crime—all these people have been getting out. They go down the street in Boston, they shoot, he’s been out. Somebody cuts the throat of a poor immigrant girl, he’s been out. All of them have been out. And the prisons are half full in some states.

So, that agenda does not work, and people are not going to support it. And we hear the loud supporters. They make the news, but they’re not the majority.