Nov. 3, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:25:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I gotta say, it is a little bit astounding to those of us from California to see a politician from that state run for president, because in the back of your mind, you wonder, when's someone going to ask her about the state she's from, which is the greatest disaster in the history of the United States, probably the greatest disaster since the fall of Rome, I would say. | ||
| It went from the greatest place, I think it's fair to say, on planet Earth, when I grew up in the 70s and 80s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, To a place that people are fleeing. | ||
| And so without blaming Kamala Harris for all of it, it's not all her fault, but someone should have to answer for that. | ||
| You've just written a book on this. | ||
| Bless you for doing that. | ||
| Are we taping right now? | ||
| Yeah, we're live, baby. | ||
| Everything you say can and will be suggested. | ||
| I had a Ron Burgundy moment. | ||
| Fuck you, San Diego. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| So, as a San Diegan, I've never forgotten that. | ||
| So, what happened to California? | ||
| Well... | ||
| There's a lot of reasons as to how we ended up in a one-party state, how we ended up in a state of decrepitude, and frankly, with elements of criminality that are so depraved and savage and dark that they are really unseen outside of the worst conflict zones in the world. | ||
| And that is characterized by... | ||
| Let's say, for instance, the rise of child soldiers, juveniles committing a lot of crime. | ||
| In fact, maybe driving the crime surge in the state, and certainly in Los Angeles. | ||
| Children. | ||
| Children as young as 10 being recruited by gangs to commit armed robbery, hijackings, and even murder. | ||
| Okay, so now we're just in Mexico. | ||
| You're basically describing it. | ||
| Worse than Mexico. | ||
| Worse than Mexico. | ||
| There are a million authors of this tragedy, but if you were to point to two or three big facts, big changes, big trends that created the dystopia you're describing, what would they be? | ||
| Well, so there's a legislative angle to this, and I think that's a really, really important part of the history and the pathway to destruction. | ||
| Well, that was influenced by a number of factors. | ||
| Principally, there was an important Supreme Court case in 2011 called Brown v. | ||
| Plata. | ||
| And in this decision, which was a 5-4 split, Kennedy was the deciding factor on the liberal side and wrote the opinion. | ||
| It was determined that the California state prison system was in violation of the Eighth Amendment, which is a cruel, unusual punishment. | ||
| And this was owing to the fact that prisons were operating at 200% capacity at that time. | ||
| And according to this ruling, California had to conform to a very arbitrary capacity ratio that was established by a federal bureaucracy of 137.5%. | ||
| So, if you were at 137.5%, you were no longer in violation of the Eighth Amendment. | ||
| So, as a result of this ruling, California did have to find ways to comply and took a number of steps to do so, a number of laws that I'll discuss. | ||
| But coinciding with this ruling and going back further is the emergence of the criminal justice reform movement. | ||
| Principally coming out of places like Stanford Law School and some particular individuals like a gentleman named Mike Romano, who was able to influence the legislature and executive-level officers in the state to embrace policies that were... | ||
| Part of the criminal justice reform movement and principally dedicated to the idea of reducing the so-called crisis of mass incarceration. | ||
| So, this meant that there was a force coming from the Supreme Court that was motivating this, and also ideological activist elements that pushed for these same reforms at the same time. | ||
| So, as— If I just notice, the formulation there, which I've never thought about until now, mass incarceration, which I don't think any normal person would be in favor of mass incarceration, but that's—you're only describing one side of the coin. | ||
| The other way to describe it would be the crime wave that we're living through that results—I mean, that results in people going to prison. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No one thought to address crime. | ||
| Well, so, California had, up until, let's say, 2011, One of the most stringent criminal justice systems in the entire country. | ||
| We, of course, were the force behind the three strikes law. | ||
| And three strikes put a lot of bad people away forever. | ||
| But it had problems too, to be honest. | ||
| And there were reforms applied to it to reduce, you know, potential injustices. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I support those. | ||
| But nevertheless, three strikes and also the introduction of what are called enhancements. | ||
| So special circumstance enhancements in which, let's say you use a gun in a crime. | ||
| You use a gun that adds 10 years additionally to your conviction. | ||
| If you use a gun and you shoot someone, that's 20 years. | ||
| If you use a gun and kill someone, it's life. | ||
| So that's an enhancement. | ||
| If you're a gang member and engage in whatever crime, gang enhancements would apply, and those would add to the sentencing. | ||
| These things were all eliminated and obliterated in big parts by directives that came from the so-called Soros DAs, the progressive DAs in 2020. But the dismantling started really following this Supreme Court case. | ||
| So the first law that was a big problem and put us on this path was called AB-109. | ||
| It's called the Public Safety Realignment Act. | ||
| And the idea was that to reduce the number of prisoners in the state system, you would transfer so-called nonviolent, non-sexual, low-risk offenders to county jails. | ||
| A problem, though. | ||
| And the problem and the sort of poison pill within it was the issue of what classified nonviolent, nonsexual, low-risk offenders. | ||
| Because under AB 109, the only offense that would be considered was the last offense for which you were convicted. | ||
| So, in other words... | ||
| Inmates with long and violent criminal histories, who happened to be in jail, in state prison, because of a non-violent offense, were eligible for this system, and they were transferred out, 27,000. | ||
| Even with that, we still didn't meet the capacity threshold of 137.5, but this was one of the steps to do so. | ||
| Here's the other challenge. | ||
| Do you even think of building more prisons? | ||
| We don't have the money. | ||
| California was bankrupt at that time. | ||
| Actually, Jerry Brown, to his credit, did a lot earnestly to try and straighten the ship of California's fiscal situation, but these kinds of policies specific to jailing were totally ill-conceived. | ||
| So with AB 109, all of these prisoners go into county jails, but the county jails don't have the resources to house them. | ||
| They don't have the funds to staff them. | ||
| And so the outcome is that many are just released into the communities. | ||
| Kamala Harris is elected attorney general in 2010, narrowly beating... | ||
| Steve Cooley, who is probably the last great district attorney of Los Angeles, a Republican. | ||
| By the way, he's the only Republican she's ever run against, other than Trump. | ||
| And he lost to her by just a few thousand votes. | ||
| And this is kind of an interesting coda, is that there were also kind of odd circumstances around that election. | ||
| Steve was ahead, and then... | ||
| You know, kind of in 2020 fashion, there was a surge of her votes, but anyway, she's elected to California Attorney General in 2010, and her first big task is administering AB 109, Because as the head of the California Justice Department, she really has the most, you know, | ||
| highest level of presence in for sure understanding the budgetary constraints of the counties and what everyone was warning her, highest level of presence in for sure understanding the budgetary constraints of the counties and what everyone was warning her, including the California District Attorneys Association, police And she supported it. | ||
| She did nothing to try and, like, bring more resources to these county jails. | ||
| And this is a theme, actually, we'll see over and over again in California where the state has some failure, some bureaucratic, you know, incompetency or shortfall in the budget or some issue. | ||
| And the strategy at Sacramento is to simply move that problem, shift it to localities, to counties, to manage, which are also struggling. | ||
| So it's kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul and nothing changes. | ||
| So after AB 109 went into effect, the next year, property crimes went up 9%. | ||
| And moreover, 61% of those offenders who were eligible for this program, and by the way, it's retroactive, 61% are arrested within a year, and 41% are convicted again. | ||
| Clearly, the recidivism rate created by this law was a major problem. | ||
| Fast forward to 2014, and the worst of them all comes out of political strategy consultant firms in San Francisco, who, by the way, backed Kamala Harris to a great extent. | ||
| And this is called Prop 47. So Prop 47 was... | ||
| It's marketed to Californians, and I should say for people who don't understand California politics, we have this system that allows for really important legislation to be put forward directly to the voters, and that's how a lot of very, very big laws in California have come to the effect. | ||
| The initiative system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Like Prop 13. Exactly, and Prop 27. Exactly. | ||
| Which we can talk about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Prop 47. This was the stealing legalization. | |
| It was called, euphemistically, the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. | ||
| And the idea behind it was we would, again, address the mass incarceration problem, reduce the prison capacity by shifting... | ||
| Again, nonviolent offenders out of state prisons and treating thefts under $950 as misdemeanors. | ||
| Prior to this law, thefts at $400 would be felony grand larceny, and this law changed it such that it would have to be above $950 to become a felony. | ||
| As a consequence of this, oh, there was also, as another factor of Prop 47 was, that drug possession would no longer be a felony. | ||
| It would be treated as a misdemeanor. | ||
| And this has also exacerbated the drug and homeless problem. | ||
| In fact, I think in the years after, right after Prop... | ||
| 47 went into effect. | ||
| The number of ER overdose cases was up 25%. | ||
| So this is the law that legalized stealing and drug use. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| So I remember this very well. | ||
| And I think I remember Rob Reiner, who's an enemy of civilization, being one of the many celebrity backers of this. | ||
| But it was quite popular. | ||
| I mean, like a lot of famous people were behind this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, Kamala Harris wrote the... | ||
| wrote the law that appeared on the ballot. | ||
| Kamala Harris did? | ||
| Yes, because in California, the Attorney General of the state will write the language and the title for every proposition put before the vote. | ||
| Harris is the one who wrote the Legalized Stealing Act. | ||
| Yes, and I will tell you, Steve Cooley calls it fraud by misrepresentation, and there is a poison pill within Prop 47 that is quite shocking, and she was actually called out for it by the Sacramento Bee. | ||
| And that is that these reclassified offenders would no longer be subject to mandatory and standard DNA testing. | ||
| As a result, DNA testing for across the state went from 15,000 a month to 5,000 a month. | ||
| And DNA testing is super, super critical for the solving of cold case homicides, rapes, and other violent crimes that are typically associated with people with track records of crime. | ||
| So these nonviolent, you know, larceny type offenders are, you know, are very likely or, you know, or at least, you know, it should be investigated whether they have some kind of connection to other crimes as we've seen, you know, everywhere. | ||
| A small number of people commit the overwhelming majority of crime in every society. | ||
| So Kamala Harris' description in the ballot for 47 basically obfuscated this issue of the DNA testing. | ||
| And the Sacramento Bee called her out on it and said that this was effectively a misrepresentation, a failure on her part to omit this information from the voters. | ||
| Or the authors of this are... | ||
| Like, taking the side of rapists over the population. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And, well, I'll tell you also... | ||
| She was not alone in writing the language. | ||
| I mean, Kamala Harris doesn't do anything, right? | ||
| She's a facilitator and an opportunist, and everything, every action, really, she has taken in California has been on the basis of what is good for Kamala Harris. | ||
| But what I have heard from my sources, who certainly would know... | ||
| With Prop 47, it was significantly influenced in terms of the language by prominent figures from the criminal justice reform movement and even entities affiliated with George Soros, who's always been a funder of criminal justice reform. | ||
| So they sold this as, like, good for the California budget, good for the safety of your neighborhood, sort of the opposite of the truth, well, literally the opposite of the truth. | ||
| And people bought it. | ||
| What was the margin? | ||
| 60%. | ||
| 60%? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Committed civilizational suicide without knowing it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We sowed our own demise. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we did so because our leaders manipulate language. | ||
| Nonviolent offender, for instance, is not nonviolent offender. | ||
| In fact, in the next law that came about that was, again, on our pathway to destruction, Prop 57, which passed in 2016, that law, again, which Kamala Harris wrote the language for and which she was excoriated by other Democrats when which Kamala Harris wrote the language for and which she was excoriated by other Democrats when she was running for | ||
| Prop 57 was, again, to address mass incarceration and would offer... | ||
| Additional parole opportunities for offenders that were deemed to be, quote, nonviolent. | ||
| But what is nonviolent under Prop 57? | ||
| It is anything that is not one of 23 specific crimes that is in an obscure section of the penal code. | ||
| So nonviolent could be drug trafficking, human trafficking, rape by intoxication, some forms of assault. | ||
| Financial crimes, serious financial crimes, and basically these offenders under this provision would have opportunities for parole and also parole administration was also passed down to the county levels who, again, didn't have the resources to handle this new burden. | ||
| So, there's a striking example of... | ||
| This was a ballot initiative also. | ||
| Ballot initiative also. | ||
| Passed, again, I think by a pretty good margin. | ||
| And not as famous, infamous as 47, but, you know, very destructive. | ||
| There's a case of an offender released under this who went on to kill like four or five people in a mass shooting. | ||
| Gang-related, like, within two years of release. | ||
| Because, of course, when they go into the parole system, the parole system is completely incompetent at the local levels. | ||
| Again, they do not have the resources. | ||
| And there was a participation rate of offenders of 9% in rehabilitation programs. | ||
| And the cornerstone of 57 was, we are taking these, you know, People that, you know, they are nonviolent and they can be redeemed, right? | ||
| But it's really just a gimmick that is driven by, again, this mandate by the Supreme Court, but also by the influence of criminal justice reform advocates. | ||
| Natural disasters, wars, political conflicts, the recent threatened... | ||
| Dock workers' strikes at ports around the country. | ||
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| That's Jace, J-A-S-E dot com, promo code TUCKER. So now is the time to get to motive. | ||
| What would be the motive of a so-called criminal justice reformer of George Soros? | ||
| Kamala Harris's motives are always political, so we already answered that question. | ||
| But of the sincere believers in this stuff, the idea that the criminals are the real victims, freedom, stealing should be legal, etc., etc. | ||
| What's driving them? | ||
| Well, I think there are those who are pushed for these initiatives. | ||
| Who are just pure sociopaths, and they are not really committed ideologically. | ||
| They galvanize around it because it's in vogue and it allows them access to money, like Soros money. | ||
| George Gascon is probably the greatest example of this. | ||
| Not an ideologue, by the way. | ||
| A very bad, stupid lawyer, from what everyone says, but not an ideologue. | ||
| A sociopath is how he's been described to me. | ||
| As have some of these other rogue prosecutors. | ||
| But then there's the true believers. | ||
| And within criminal justice reform, I think it's fair to say there's a spectrum of radicalism. | ||
| Some initiatives, I think, have good intentions. | ||
| We do want rehabilitation in society. | ||
| We do want the opportunity to... | ||
| Build one's life back by a bad choice. | ||
| That's a Christian value. | ||
| But it goes much, much deeper than that. | ||
| And I think that as you peel back the layers of criminal justice reform and look at what they're specifically advocating for, it ranges not only from mass incarceration solutions, but also, frankly, defunding the police. | ||
| Pacifying the police through, you know, ideas like community policing, in which police are sort of characterized now as social workers rather than law enforcement. | ||
| Emasculating them. | ||
| Of course emasculating them. | ||
| Well, literally emasculating them. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| I mean, women now make a huge portion of overall cops. | ||
| And, you know, there's... | ||
| The cops I've talked to who are like, you know... | ||
| Serious, serious, like, threatening figures, but good guys. | ||
| They see the police today as an absolute joke. | ||
| And I can tell you, and I'll get into it, about how bad it's getting at the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, but through erosion because of these policies and morale erosion. | ||
| But back to criminal justice reform, I think that it's really important to strip away euphemisms. | ||
| When I was evaluating the tenets of this movement, it became apparent to me that not only did it place the offender above victim, it fundamentally resulted in the diffusion of crime and the spreading of suffering. | ||
| As a policy choice. | ||
| So, as laws like... | ||
| So, trying to wreck other people's neighborhoods, safe neighborhoods, affluent neighborhoods, white neighborhoods with crime on purpose because they were orderly, affluent, and white. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I can tell you, like, for instance... | ||
| So that's not a figment of the imagination. | ||
| That's an actual choice, you think? | ||
| Well, for sure, BLM activists say that mass stealing of retail stores is a form of reparation. | ||
| I call this crime equity, this concept. | ||
| And it's not even something said in jest or flippantly. | ||
| It's actually a very deep and dark... | ||
| I think particularly pertinent would be what happened in Rhodesia, where criminals are released from prisons en masse and sent on essentially government-sanctioned theft of white farmer land and other property. | ||
| And this is a form of, you know, kind of anarchic tyranny. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, this is crime as a means of totalitarian control and as a tool of racial grievance. | ||
| It is a crime as a means to redress historical grievances through collective punishment. | ||
| So, we're mad about what your ancestors did, so we hope your daughter gets raped. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's about as evil as it gets. | ||
| And I will give you some example. | ||
| The second in charge at the L.A. County District Attorney's Office, the Chief of Staff, a woman named Tiffany Blacknell, who is proud to have been a rioter and looter in the 1992 Rodney King. | ||
| Was a prosecutor? | ||
| She came from the Public Defender's Office. | ||
| Gascon has filled the... | ||
| Wait, but she is currently a prosecutor? | ||
| She is Gaston's chief of staff. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| She was a rioter? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's written about this. | ||
| During the race riots of 92. Correct. | ||
| Where people were murdered for their skin color. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Asians in particular. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And whites. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But lots of Koreans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we'll get to the issue of Asians being targeted because that's another phenomenon that's taking place. | ||
| But Tiffany Blacknell, Is a avowed racist. | ||
| She wears a t-shirt that she's posted on Instagram that says, like, police are trained to kill us. | ||
| And she is effectively number two at the DA's office. | ||
| When Santa Monica and the west side of Los Angeles was being firebombed during the George Floyd riots, and citizens were bemoaning this. | ||
| That's the white part of town, just for those who weren't from it. | ||
| Tiffany Blacknell said, oh, go cry me a river. | ||
| Out loud? | ||
| She posted on Twitter or Facebook. | ||
| That's really scary. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is who Gascon has surrounded himself with. | ||
| So Tiffany Blacknell is a great example of a true believer. | ||
| Gascon... | ||
| No, he's too stupid to believe her. | ||
| Like Kamala Harris. | ||
| I find it very ridiculous when people say Kamala Harris is a Bolshevik, because to be a Bolshevik, you actually have to know about philosophy. | ||
| You have to know about dialectics. | ||
| You have to make it through Das Kapital. | ||
| Kamala Harris only knows Kamala Harris, although she doesn't even know that because we can't figure out what her name is. | ||
| She's a child, obviously. | ||
| She's a tool of greater power. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| I mean, she went up there by accident because of her skin color. | ||
| So the laws continue to get worse from there. | ||
| And in 2020, that was the catalyst. | ||
| So the George Floyd... | ||
| But just to be clear, I just want to linger on this for one second. | ||
| Just to be clear, you believe that crime is not an accident. | ||
| Crime is a result of intentional policy. | ||
| Crime is the point of the policy. | ||
| And part of the aim is to punish people for their skin color with crime. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, not of course. | ||
| That's the sickest thing I've heard this year. | ||
| Well, it's extremely evil and it is demonstrably the case because these laws were so obviously negligent and reckless. | ||
| Everyone knew. | ||
| All the law enforcement agencies, all the district attorneys came out against these kinds of initiatives. | ||
| Saying that the result is going to be dangerous criminals on the street. | ||
| Dangerous criminals on the street. | ||
| This is our future. | ||
| And they passed it anyway. | ||
| Voters passed it. | ||
| Kamala Harris wrote the language. | ||
| And again, Prop 47 is called the Safe Schools and Neighborhoods Act. | ||
| So the idea is that the funding budget savings from not classifying these larcenies as And thereby being misdemeanors, which are not ever, ever enforced or prosecuted, would save millions of dollars that would then be redirected to schools. | ||
| Did the schools get great in California? | ||
| The schools are worse than ever. | ||
| Are the neighborhoods safer? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| LA is not quite as violent as it was. | ||
| During the 1990s, which was at the peak of the drug war between the Bloods and the Crips. | ||
| However, we're getting there. | ||
| And the difference between now and then is that back then, gangsters were killing each other. | ||
| They were killing each other for who owned what street corner to sell drugs. | ||
| Now the violence is turned against all of us. | ||
| The taxpayers, the people who created the society and sustain it with their labor. | ||
| So that is how I sort of... | ||
| Because the gangs did not create Los Angeles or the United States or anything of value in this country at all. | ||
| They create nothing. | ||
| They only destroy, just to be clear. | ||
| And so while all of us are equal in the eyes of God and all of us are equal as American citizens, we're not all equal in our effects. | ||
| Some of us are creators and others are destroyers. | ||
| And you're saying that the destroyers are now killing the creators. | ||
| I'm saying that destroyers run California. | ||
|
unidentified
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Man. | |
| And I can tell you, that's not hyperbole. | ||
| And really, in many ways, California is actually under the sovereignty of the Mexican drug cartels. | ||
| And this happened primarily... | ||
| California is under the sovereignty of the Mexican drug cartels? | ||
| One power exerts influence on another and allows some autonomy of the subordinate power. | ||
| It's often been used in geopolitical analysis to, for instance, describe how a Roman Empire administered Gaul. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So there's a semblance of autonomy, but there is still ultimately a power that is answered to. | ||
| And the reason that the Mexican drug cartels, I think, qualify for that is because sometime around 2010, all this bad stuff happened in 2010. And if I may even say, like, you know, when we last spoke about the trans issue, that also really got into effect in 2010. It's peak Obamaism is what it is. | ||
| But in any event... | ||
| So I think in retrospect, we can say that Obama was a destroyer, that the intent was to subvert and destroy the United States, and that some people called that early. | ||
| They were derided as crazy or racist. | ||
| They weren't either one of those things. | ||
| They were prescient. | ||
| I always took him completely deadly serious when he said he was going to change America. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Maybe forever. | ||
| But in any event, around 2010... | ||
| There was a hostile takeover of the narcotics distribution market in California, which had been otherwise the domain of black gangs. | ||
| Native-born black people. | ||
| Legacy black gangs had run narcotics and dope trading. | ||
| Can I just say, at least, you know, even if they're drug dealers or gang members, they're still Americans. | ||
| Oh, let me tell you something. | ||
| And we share a common history. | ||
| Actually, actually, they're... | ||
| They have principles. | ||
| That's kind of the point I was making. | ||
| At least they're part of this country, for sure. | ||
| I'll tell you in a minute how principled they are. | ||
| Maybe we even agree with them on some things. | ||
| I suspect we're voting the same way this November. | ||
| Just throwing that out there. | ||
| When the cartels moved into California, they said to all the black gangs, if you sell dope without our permission, we will, quote, cut your head off. | ||
| And they meant that literally. | ||
| They meant that literally. | ||
| So every black gang had to then find an alternative revenue stream or get their dope supply from the cartels, from Hispanic gangs, because all Hispanic gangs in California kind of operate as an extension of gangs above them, which are based in prison, and that's another issue. | ||
| The highest level gang in California is called the Mexican Mafia, and it's a prison gang. | ||
| And this gang is the ultimate authority, really, on all Latino gangs in the state. | ||
| There are 200,000 to 300,000 gang members in California. | ||
| 63%. | ||
| 200,000? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| For reference, the U.S. National Guard has 250,000 members. | ||
| There's 1.2 million gang members in the United States. | ||
| And in California, 63%. | ||
| That's bigger than the active duty U.S. military. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think so. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And 63% are Latino. | ||
| So as a result of this volume and numerical advantage, they control the prisons. | ||
| So the Mexican Mafia, which is actually like... | ||
| You know, a legacy organization. | ||
| It has a long history. | ||
| Oh, a long history. | ||
| 50 years, anyway. | ||
| And they are incredibly powerful. | ||
| And as it was told to me by this incredible L.A. County Sheriff, Sergeant, who, and I'm not going to mention the names of any of my sources for their protection and safety, but this gentleman... | ||
| He said to me that he was head of Major Crimes Bureau for the LA County Sheriff's and 25-year veteran of the force, now in private security. | ||
| And he said to me that the prisons rule the street. | ||
| So effectively, the criminal economy of California, which is in tens of billions, maybe 100 billion, passes through California state prisons. | ||
| So, that is a prima facie indictment of the failure of our prisons, because from prison, the Mexican mafia is ordering hits, running drug trades, human trafficking, you name it. | ||
| And they do so as proxies of the Mexican drug cartels. | ||
| In Mexico? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they're not in Mexico. | |
| They're in California. | ||
| But this is exactly what destroyed El Salvador. | ||
| And has wrecked Mexico and Guatemala is drug gangs operating, their leaders operating from prison. | ||
| With impunity. | ||
| With impunity. | ||
| So let's ask you, just a side note, because I can't resist. | ||
| So in Mexico, Guatemala, and Salvador, and probably other countries as well, the drug gangs are effectively religious organizations based on Satanism. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Is that true in California as well? | ||
| Well, I will tell you that the law enforcement and prosecutors that I talk to would say that The illegal alien gang element is characterized by extreme violence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like extreme. | ||
| Like ISIS violence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unnecessary violence. | ||
| Not just shooting people to death as the black gangs historically do. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons for that. | ||
| I mean, in my research, I couldn't help but sort of trace the anthropological and historical. | ||
| We're back to the Aztecs, aren't we? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, of course. | |
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Of course, because you have to consider the fact that we've seen so-called narco-terrorists, narco-empires many, many times since the 70s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, they killed a lot of people, but they shot them, or they used car bombs, or basic kind of mafia-style hits. | ||
| And that is also the case for the Italian mafia. | ||
| The Genoveses sold heroin. | ||
| They didn't behead anyone. | ||
| And that's the case for the triads. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's the case for the Russians, even. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But in Mexico and in Central America, what we see is what I call cultural atavism. | ||
| And it's the notion that there are certain cultural traits and practices that survive the generations and are amalgamated into a new society. | ||
| And Mexico is a very, I mean, it's a wonderful place in many, many ways. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But it is a fusion of indigenous people and Spanish Catholics. | ||
| And European. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And many of those traits that survived the generations. | ||
| The Aztec period. | ||
| And I will tell you, the level of brutality of the Aztecs is beyond belief. | ||
| They killed 200,000 people a year, at least, in sacrifice. | ||
| The Aztecs were so committed to human sacrifice, and not just sacrifice, but the torture of living people unto death. | ||
| And children, by the way. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And not just the Aztecs, but the Maya and the Inca also. | ||
| That it does, in the end, as much as you sort of hate the conquistadors because they were brutal and all that, you root for the conquistadors with everything you have. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I will tell you, the Aztecs worshipped a lightning and rain god called Tlaloc. | ||
| And when there were droughts, they would sacrifice their children. | ||
| And they believed that the tears of their children, as they walked up the steps of the pyramid to have their hearts ripped out, Would be taken by the gods and transformed, transmogrified into rain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, this is the culture. | ||
| You see this with in some Native American cultures in North America as well, where it's not simply a matter of killing people, but of prolonging their suffering as an offering to the spirit world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's not a guess, by the way. | |
| The cartels emerge from this. | ||
| From this kind of amalgamation culture. | ||
| And they have alters. | ||
| They have alters with human skulls and other kind of icons that are indigenous to Mesoamerica. | ||
| There's even a cartel icon, or idol, I should say, called Santa Muerte, which you see on a lot of cartel tattoos and so forth. | ||
| And MS-13 is even more demonic. | ||
| Although that was born in California, in Los Angeles, by the way. | ||
| Like, it came from Los Angeles and El Salvador and destroyed El Salvador. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, but witchcraft is at the heart of this. | ||
| And I don't think that's incidental. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Animism. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Or, exactly. | ||
| But it's a religious cult as well as a business organization. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's why I feel it's so critical to understand this dynamic. | ||
| It's not just a historically interesting facet. | ||
| But the fact is that we have brought in millions, 12 million migrants, many of them coming from this triangle, right, in Central America. | ||
| And it's really important to understand who are these people? | ||
| And especially, let's say, the 2 million gotaways, which is often cited as the... | ||
| Pure criminal element amongst the migrant invasion. | ||
| And because there was all migrants that are looking for economic benefits or whatever, they turned themselves into ICE. And Tom Homan told me this directly. | ||
| They turned themselves into ICE. And under the Biden administration, ICE, as Homan put it, has been reduced to, instead of enforcement, changing diapers and making sandwiches. | ||
| But for those... | ||
| Two million that evade ICE, they are doing so that they are not put into the system and they are pure gangsters. | ||
| And they're coming from cultures that display heads on bridges and skin people alive and boil people in acid. | ||
| And this is part of their sport. | ||
| And it is seeping into California. | ||
| We've traveled to an awful lot of countries on this show, to some free countries, the dwindling number, and a lot of not very free countries, places famous for government censorship. | ||
| And wherever we go, we use a virtual private network, a VPN, and we use ExpressVPN. | ||
| We do it to access the free and open internet. | ||
| But the interesting thing is when we come back here to the United States, we still use ExpressVPN. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Big tech surveillance. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| It's not just North Korea that monitors every move its citizens make. | ||
| No! | ||
| That same thing happens right here in the United States and in Canada and Great Britain and around the world. | ||
| Internet providers can see every website you visit. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| They may even be required to keep your browsing history on file for years and then turn it over to federal authorities if asked. | ||
| In the United States, internet providers are legally allowed to, and regularly do, sell your browsing history everywhere you go online. | ||
| There is no privacy. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Well, we did, and that's why we use ExpressVPN. | ||
| And because we do, our internet provider never knows where we're going on the internet. | ||
| They never hear it in the first place. | ||
| That's because 100% of our online activity is routed through ExpressVPN's secure encrypted servers. | ||
| They hide our IP address, so data brokers cannot track us and sell our online activity on the black market. | ||
| We have privacy. | ||
| ExpressVPN lets you connect to servers in 105 different countries. | ||
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| This was the promise of the internet in the first place. | ||
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| Those didn't seem like they were achievable, but now they are. | ||
| ExpressVPN, we cannot recommend it enough. | ||
| It's also really easy to use, whether or not you fully understand the technology behind it. | ||
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| So if you want online privacy and the freedom it bestows, Get it. | ||
| You can go to our special link right here to get three extra months free of ExpressVPN. | ||
| That's expressvpn.com slash Tucker. | ||
| Express, E-X-P-R-E-S-S, vpn.com slash Tucker for three extra months free. | ||
| So you said before I sidetracked you into a really interesting cul-de-sac, thank you for that, but that... | ||
| They're the single most powerful force in the state of California, Mexican drug cartels. | ||
| Insofar as that they control, ultimately, through proxies, the entire criminal economy of California. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Now, there's another factor of this. | ||
| So it displaced, so black crime that people fretted about for years is not a thing anymore. | ||
| No, it went somewhere else. | ||
| They had to find other alternative revenue streams, other verticals. | ||
| And what was the... | ||
| What was the safest alternative and also highly lucrative? | ||
| Residential burglaries and retail theft. | ||
| So all of the retail theft that you see, that we see in the media of these Nordstroms being looted by hordes of thieves, that's not just incidental individual acts of larceny. | ||
| That is all organized by gangs. | ||
| And the market... | ||
| For the resale, the fencing is called, in California, maybe just even Los Angeles, is like $10 billion. | ||
| Nationwide retail thefts are $100 billion. | ||
| Where's it resold? | ||
| It's resold through fencers. | ||
| eBay? | ||
| Yeah, eBay. | ||
| It's, you know, like pawn shops. | ||
| But I think primarily on the internet or to, you know, even perhaps other companies. | ||
| You know, it passes through multiple layers, right? | ||
| And, you know, so these fencing operations are extremely lucrative. | ||
| So there's that angle to it. | ||
| And it's resulted in the emergence of trends within these kinds of burglaries. | ||
| Flocking is a term that refers to penetrating a safe neighborhood, blending into that neighborhood, targeting a particular person that they've perhaps... | ||
| Through social media identified as potentially wealthy and then going on missions into these neighborhoods to rob them, tie them up, home invasions, whatever. | ||
| But what's quite interesting is that there are some gangs that have become so good at it that they now actually act as consultants to other gangs to teach them how to flock. | ||
| So what does that look like from the victim's perspective? | ||
| Well, it could look like getting tied up. | ||
| It could look like you're not home and you come home and everything's gone. | ||
| A knock-knock burglary is just like what it sounds like. | ||
| Criminals will knock-knock on a door if someone's home. | ||
| Maybe they don't proceed with a crime, but sometimes they do. | ||
| And I can tell you a story that I heard. | ||
| It really, truly shocked me. | ||
| It took place also in Santa Monica, which is where I'm from, that there was a case of a single woman in her home. | ||
| It's in a nice part of Santa Monica. | ||
| And these two guys, gangsters, attempt to knock-knock on her. | ||
| And they breach the door. | ||
| And her dogs attack these guys so badly that they... | ||
| The altercation moves into the street and they are wounded by the dogs. | ||
| She calls the police. | ||
| Police show up and the gangsters claim that their dogs attacked them and the cops called animal control. | ||
| And she moved out to Texas after that. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But it's also kind of in miniature the bigger problem, which is in California, the state is on the side of the criminal against the citizens. | ||
| Well, so if I can turn it to like a personal anecdote, about a year ago, my home in Santa Monica, which it's an affluent neighborhood, but like my house is for sure the most dilapidated on the block it's been in my family. | ||
| Through my great-grandparents, my brother and I live there and own it. | ||
| And in September of last year, we were subject to two home invasion robberies in a row. | ||
| Although I should say, technically, these are what's called a hot prowl burglary, which means that... | ||
| Residents are in the property when the burglary takes place, but don't necessarily confront the burglar. | ||
| If they confront them, it's like a home invasion. | ||
| So there's a little distinction. | ||
| Wait, there was someone home? | ||
| My brother and I were home asleep in the house when the burglar came in. | ||
| And we were kind of naive because we thought Santa Monica is the greatest place in the world, right? | ||
| Our alarm system was not on, and the back patio door was unlocked. | ||
| So how he knew that, I don't know. | ||
| But it was a well-lit house. | ||
| There's houses on either side, signs indicating an alarm system, and yet that did not stop him. | ||
| And so we woke up the next day. | ||
| And my brother was in the main house. | ||
| We have a little casita, kind of converted garage, where I happened to be during when this took place. | ||
| And I came into the house and the back door was wide open. | ||
| And I went up to my room and my entire room was destroyed. | ||
| Every valuable item I've ever had in my life was taken. | ||
| Heirlooms from my grandparents, gifts from my parents for graduation. | ||
| Really just, like, really, like, token memories, you know? | ||
| And so it was pretty devastating. | ||
| And we called the police, Santa Monica police. | ||
| They showed up 12 hours later. | ||
| They said that when they finally came, that the delay was due to the fact that they're dealing with so many homeless overdoses. | ||
| So... | ||
| They dust for fingerprints and say, yeah, this is going to be, this is a serious crime and we will take it seriously and don't worry. | ||
| Well, the next night, it happens again. | ||
| The next night? | ||
| The next night, yeah. | ||
| The next night, he dismantles a window in our dining room, which is also my office, and he... | ||
| He took whatever was left, which was nothing. | ||
| There was nothing left. | ||
| The guy would steal things like Easter eggs, like sunglasses, like a letter opener, in addition to really valuable stuff. | ||
| I believe he came back a third night because I saw a car lurking in the middle of the night outside of our house. | ||
| And I saw a figure in this vehicle that ultimately matched the description of the perpetrator who was caught about a month later. | ||
| And the story behind this is, I think, really quite interesting and was the reason why I undertook the research that I've done. | ||
| Because the guy who did this to us was an illegal alien, a dreamer actually, an MS-13 gang member with a convicted felon who had done seven years in prison, in California state prison for violent crimes. | ||
| He was deported by Trump administration, Homeland Security immediately after getting out of prison. | ||
| In fact, he notes, I read the whole police report of this in the course of my trying to understand what took place. | ||
| And it's funny, he comments to the cops during his interrogation that... | ||
| As soon as he was released from state prison, ICE immediately picked him up and deported him back to El Salvador. | ||
| Immediately. | ||
| And while he was in El Salvador, he had his MS-13 face tattoo removed. | ||
| And he was in El Salvador for about a year or so, and then went back, then traveled to France. | ||
| I don't know, for whatever reason. | ||
| The guy had a—his day job was as a carpenter. | ||
| And, you know, actually, his primary language was English, so I guess we can be thankful for that. | ||
| Thank you, Lindsey Graham and the DREAM Act. | ||
| But he sneaks back into the U.S. in 2021 during the Biden wave of migration. | ||
| And he proceeds to go on a rampage. | ||
| He does have a kid, too, at this time, so we now have a U.S. citizen to deal with. | ||
| And he robs a dozen houses in the same manor all over L.A. County, but also in Ventura County. | ||
| He robs the home of a judge, a very well-respected criminal judge who presided over the Michael Jackson death trial. | ||
| It's funny, the police report notes that he took the judge's small-wristed Seiko watch. | ||
| The guy took anything and everything. | ||
| I saw the police reports and he was taking wedding rings. | ||
| He took a Catholic rosary box. | ||
| There was nothing that was above limits. | ||
| Again, he stole memories from people. | ||
| And he did so callously and with impunity. | ||
| And he was eventually arrested in Simi Valley, which is in Ventura County, which is tougher on crime overall than in LA County, but not by much. | ||
| And when he was arrested... | ||
| By a joint task force in the middle of the day, he was in his vehicle with his wife and child in the back seat. | ||
| The police found on him a loaded stolen Kimber handgun with hollow point bullets. | ||
| They found body armor, which by the way is a federal crime because he's a convicted felon. | ||
| You cannot have body armor as a convicted felon. | ||
| It's a federal crime. | ||
| They found strange things like a bachelor's degree diploma from Armenia, currency, foreign currency, knives. | ||
| It went on and on and on. | ||
| He was clearly, clearly a violent person. | ||
| And when he was brought into interrogation, the officer assigned to him started by saying, thank you for not opening fire on us. | ||
| We really appreciate that. | ||
| And he said, don't thank me because I was planning on killing you and for sure, quote, going Eric's on you, whatever that means, and taking my last stand had it not been for the fact that my wife and kids were in the car because he said, I'm never going back to jail. | ||
| So fast forward to his arraignment in Ventura County. | ||
| He's convicted on one count of one of these charges, maybe two counts. | ||
| But in any event, he's sentenced to Two years in jail and a $300 fine, and he'll probably serve less than that. | ||
| $300 fine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you get any of your stolen goods back? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The way I was notified was because he had my driver's license and credit cards. | ||
| And so, as part of the investigation, they called all the other victims. | ||
| They also relayed this information to Santa Monica police. | ||
| Santa Monica police, despite the fact that they had a... | ||
| Forensics team come in and swab and take this really seriously, like CSI-style stuff. | ||
| The assigned detective on my case has still, more than a year later, not even called me or attempted to interview me. | ||
| They have no interest. | ||
| And I've followed up many, many, many times. | ||
| They just don't care. | ||
| They don't care because there's no incentive to care because these crimes are considered property crimes in Los Angeles County. | ||
| Even though you were asleep in your home when this guy with a history of violence enters your home with you in it. | ||
| And if my brother had been awake and woken up, I think there's a high chance of a violent interaction that would have taken place. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure he had a gun or a weapon on him when he did this. | ||
| There's absolutely no reason to doubt that. | ||
| So it's a miracle, actually, that we're okay. | ||
| But I was so shocked by what happened. | ||
| And of course, after the second night, you just lose sense of reality. | ||
| How is this happening? | ||
| Am I being targeted? | ||
| And the cops really had no explanation for this. | ||
| I think that this guy thought we were an easy mark because it's an old house. | ||
| There's still a handicapped parking sign in front of the house. | ||
| It's from my grandparents' time. | ||
| So he probably presumed there were old people living in the house and predators go for the weak. | ||
| So in an attempt to try and intellectualize and frame this experience, which still haunts us to this day, I mean, you never feel quite the same in the home. | ||
| And it's a terrible thing when a home that's been in your family for almost four generations is stained and violated. | ||
| It almost feels like an assault, like a sexual assault even. | ||
| It's a very, very strange feeling. | ||
| I mean, burglaries gut you. | ||
| It's made all the worse by the fact that victims are re-victimized by the justice system in California. | ||
| And so as I started to talk to prosecutors and law enforcement officers about how this could have happened, what is going on in the state, is this common? | ||
| How could it be common? | ||
| Very, very well-respected victims' rights advocate and veteran deputy district attorney for L.A. County, a liberal, by the way, named Kathleen Cady. | ||
| And in the course of my interview and telling this story, she said, what's so important about your story is that it's so relatable. | ||
| And I said, relatable? | ||
| How is this in any way relatable that an MS-13 gang member, convicted felon, dreamer, illegal alien, could break into your house brazenly two nights in a row, probably armed, threatened to kill police officers, and get two years in prison? | ||
| And this is relatable? | ||
| So if that is the case, then the system... | ||
| It's fundamentally broken. | ||
| And in fact, I would go so far as to say that the entire... | ||
| Look, civilization is based around the social contract. | ||
| And the tenets of the social contract is that we surrender certain freedoms to the government, to the state, which is supposed to have a monopoly on violence. | ||
| The state, in turn, provides protection to us from the anarchic state of nature, as Hobbes put it. | ||
| So, right, not just in turn, but in exchange for. | ||
| Yes, it's a transaction. | ||
| It's a transaction. | ||
| We're buying safety and peace of mind in exchange for our money. | ||
| And some of our autonomy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that contract has been breached and broken in California. | ||
| So at that point, it's just theft. | ||
| Well, it negates the entire legitimacy of the government. | ||
| Well, that's exactly right. | ||
| Well, how's this for crazy? | ||
| Has there ever been a more volatile time in American politics? | ||
| Not in our lifetimes. | ||
| No one alive has ever seen anything like this. | ||
| But long before things started to really fall apart, the Heritage Foundation saw it coming. | ||
| Heritage has pulled together a coalition of over a hundred right-leaning groups to develop a comprehensive plan for day one that would include detailed policy proposals on the most pressing issues, the big ones. | ||
| Securing the border, controlling inflation, cracking down on election fraud, protecting the rights of the individual, and saving the nation from being crushed by woke anti-human ideology. | ||
| The team at Heritage has also developed a plan to dismantle the deep state that keeps this nonsense going and reclaim this nation from the small group of technocrats that's broken everything. | ||
| Heritage is also running a training and vetting program to identify effective conservatives to serve in the next presidential administration. | ||
| People who will share your values, this country's values, and actually do the job. | ||
| It can't just be the same pool of discredited people from Washington populating every administration. | ||
| Heritage has a long head start, and they put in a lot of work already, but they need your support to finish the job and to support the incoming president. | ||
| You can go to heritage.org slash Tucker and contribute to this important work today. | ||
| A lot depends on it. | ||
| Heritage.org slash Tucker. | ||
| So let me just now maybe a time to ask a question about like just the change in who lives in California. | ||
| So I lived in LA as a kid. | ||
| I think it was overwhelmingly white, the city, and now it's overwhelmingly non-white. | ||
| That's not a racist statement to acknowledge. | ||
| It's a fact. | ||
| And it's taken by the Department of Census every 10 years. | ||
| And it's a massive change. | ||
| It's an incredibly abrupt change. | ||
| In fact, it's a bigger change than probably any civilization ever in history has experienced except during war, except during invasion. | ||
| That's a meaningful fact. | ||
| And how'd that happen? | ||
| Well, I'll give you a statistic. | ||
| In the L.A. school district, L.A. USD, 195,000 students are English learners. | ||
| There's 90 languages officially spoken in L.A. USD. 27% of California is foreign-born. | ||
| Of the whole, 27%? | ||
| Of the entire state is foreign-born, mind you. | ||
| That doesn't mean like, you know, first generation, which adds, probably makes a majority at that point. | ||
| In 1990, it was 20%, which is still high. | ||
| That was very much because of the Reagan amnesty from the 80s. | ||
| 86. 86. But today it's 27%, and the national average, I think, is like 13%. | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Maybe a little higher? | ||
| Much higher now. | ||
| Much higher now. | ||
| Because they're illegals. | ||
| But California is by far has the greatest foreign, you know, presence in the state. | ||
| And I think that, you know, the reason for this is that we long ago, you know, and long before these laws that I've been discussing and will discuss, enacted policies that incentivized I will tell you, | ||
| the junior prosecutors I talked to for this research say that under George Gaston, and this also is applied to other jurisdictions, including actually under Kamala's policies, | ||
| but In L.A. County, illegal aliens who commit certain crimes are given special plea deals that would never, ever, ever be given to a U.S. citizen for the specific purpose of protecting them from ICE. So, to me, that's a due process violation. | ||
| So I do think anybody who advocates for not just illegal immigration or mass immigration, but... | ||
| Any immigration of any kind has to account first for California. | ||
| So here's a state in which it's been tried to the greatest possible extent, and it went from the best state to the worst state. | ||
| Now, maybe you could say immigration had nothing to do with that, but you can't say immigration didn't change California, and the fact is California has become a much worse place to live, and the immigration numbers from California prove that. | ||
| Six million have left California in the last ten years. | ||
| Okay, so these are... | ||
| $27 billion in revenue the state has lost as a result of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So these are not, like, opinions. | ||
| This is not, you know, crazed right-wing ideology. | ||
| These are just... | ||
| These are just numbers about our biggest and most important state, the biggest economy in the United States. | ||
| Part of that also, Tucker, is the de-industrialization of California. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| There are lots of factors. | ||
| I'm just saying, if immigration is good, then how about you explain California before you impose any more of it on me? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| California is a warning, not just to the nation, but to civilization. | ||
| And what's the warning? | ||
| The warning is... | ||
| That oligarchy is always at your doorstep and in reach, and if it's not vigilantly guarded against, it will consume you, it will terrorize you, it will control every aspect of your life and reduce you to a state of misery. | ||
| Because California has now stratified into something that, you know, I think Victor Davis Hanson has very eloquently We've discussed over the years, which is that California has actually regressed into some kind of political economy that is reflecting neo-feudalism, | ||
| even, where you have a very small, extremely rich, the most powerful, super rich in the world, and an underclass of serfs. | ||
| And the middle class, Have left and are leaving more and more costs of living, other reasons, de-industrialization, you know, the overall disintegration of the state, which the elites are insulated from, of course. | ||
| They have private security. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And private schools or tutors. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| And so the aristocracy rules the state, and yet in California, because language is manipulated, In almost Orwellian fashion, oligarchy has become to mean progressive. | ||
| Yeah, or quote, democracy. | ||
| Or democracy. | ||
| I guess what, and I've heard Victor say that thing, and I've nodded along as he said it, and not to be picky about it, but if I could just defend feudalism against what we're seeing in California right now, the idea of feudalism, while repugnant to the American mind, in my mind, Was still based on mutual need. | ||
| The guy who owned the property, the lord of the manor, was dependent upon his serfs as they were dependent upon him. | ||
| I mean, it was a symbiotic relationship. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So if the serfs died, he became impoverished. | ||
| Well, the symbiotic relationship here is that the serfs provide electoral hegemony. | ||
| For sure, but I guess what I'm saying is, over time, a feudal family had a built-in incentive to, at the bare minimum, make sure that their serfs weren't dying of fentanyl ODs. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Whereas I don't see that happening in California. | ||
| They have no skin in the game. | ||
| 2022 to 2023, there were 11,400 fentanyl overdose, the highest in the country. | ||
| In California? | ||
| California. | ||
| Yeah, I guess they don't, maybe to put a finer point on it, the people who, whereas the lord in feudalism needed the labor of the serfs, the lords of California do not need the labor of their serfs. | ||
| Of course not, because the industries are service industries or they're tech, and they require a very, very small number of people to do it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that's part of the deindustrialization, financialization of the state. | ||
| Which provided for middle-class jobs and opportunity that is increasingly fleeting and fleeing in the state, and especially in Southern California. | ||
| And as a result of that, especially the exodus of aerospace and defense industries from the state, we have, you know, Republican voters have left. | ||
| And LA County, which used to be a Republican stronghold, became a blue stronghold. | ||
| And at that point, California became a one-party state. | ||
| And one-party states are characterized by corruption, inefficiency, psychosis, I would argue, and all sorts of evils. | ||
| And ultimately, it is the antithesis of democracy. | ||
| And of course, that is exactly what these people claim that they are defending. | ||
| Democracy! | ||
| Yeah, no, the ironies are manifold. | ||
| Can you just back up one moment? | ||
| I never thought about that. | ||
| So you said one party states abet corruption, of course, inefficiency, all true, psychosis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why do you say that? | ||
| Well, I think because of the laws that we've seen put into effect. | ||
| The laws are so obviously going to engender criminality across the state. | ||
| It's like in law, in torts, the idea of negligence is the foreseeability of harm. | ||
| And that is what really triggers a liability. | ||
| You knew this could happen, but you let it happen anyway. | ||
| And so California's government and, frankly, uneducated voters have inflicted a grievous tort upon the state. | ||
| And I think that it is so reckless that, to me, it is psychotic. | ||
| It is a form of psychotic, sociopathic behavior. | ||
| And certainly many of the people implementing these policies are raving psychopaths. | ||
| A really impressive young deputy district attorney in Alameda County said to me, with respect to the kind of progressive DA of that county named Pamela Price, that she's, quote, a raging psychopath who wants to burn down civilization. | ||
| And I will tell you that every prosecutor that I spoke to, and I spoke to 10, Over the course of 30 hours of interviews, and I also spoke to, you know, equal number of cops. | ||
| But the one commonality that every single prosecutor I talked to mentioned was that there seems to be a motivation by the true believers of burning the system down. | ||
| They are Jacobins. | ||
| They are radical anarchists. | ||
| They want to hurt you. | ||
| They want to kill you. | ||
| I mean, I'm going right to the spiritual explanation for that, but is there another? | ||
| Like, what could motivate that? | ||
| I mean, look, if you're asking, I mean, of course, like, personal power, right? | ||
| So, like, George Gascon is not, you know, it's been told to me by people who would know him that he's not particularly ideological. | ||
| He was a lousy LAPD cop that apparently everyone hated. | ||
| He moved to Arizona at some point, got a law degree in an unaccredited law school, and through the machinations of the one-party state, which of course elevates people based entirely on, has this identity checkmark been met or not? | ||
| Kamala is the avatar of that. | ||
| But he ends up as... | ||
| District Attorney of San Francisco and appointed by Gavin Newsom and mayor, succeeding Kamala Harris. | ||
| And he follows the money, you know, Steve Cooley puts this very eloquently, he follows the money, the Soros money, down to LA to run for a district attorney in 2020. And it just so happened that, you know... | ||
| This was the perfect ripe opportunity given the riots of the George Floyd incident and the mood of the nation at the time, particularly in California, when the most radical policies and people could rise to positions that was otherwise unimaginable. | ||
| Gascon has absolutely decimated. | ||
| He has stacked his office with public defenders. | ||
| He has put in directives the first day of his tenure that include, of course, no cash bail, no enhancements, no juveniles tried at adult court. | ||
| Obviously, no death penalty. | ||
| And he has also, this is particularly insidious, there is a parole committee called JACE. I forget exactly what that stands for, but basically it's an opportunity for victims to appear with their offenders who are up for parole and to make a statement. | ||
| And then this committee will decide on whether or not to grant parole. | ||
| And under Gascon, prosecutors who typically would accompany these victims for this, frankly, an ordeal, seeing your perpetrator again in a rape case, you can imagine what a trauma that is. | ||
| Well, Gascon said, Prosecutors are no longer allowed to accompany victims. | ||
| And in fact, what the victims are now required to do is to write a persuasive essay submitted to the committee, and the committee is stacked entirely of public defenders. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| That's grotesque. | ||
| Can I ask something that occurs as you're speaking about Gascon? | ||
| So, you've said that... | ||
| All organized criminal activity in the state of California is run in effect by the Mexican drug cartels through prisons. | ||
| And I've heard people mention that before. | ||
| So let's just assume that's true. | ||
| Sounds like it is true. | ||
| You just wrote a book on it. | ||
| How could Gascon not know that? | ||
| I mean, Gascon... | ||
| It's not clear what Gascon knows of anything. | ||
| But I'm just saying, so in places where drug cartels run things, which is a lot of Latin America, they also run the politics. | ||
| Well, let me put it this way, even more maybe relevant to the time that we're in. | ||
| I would say, how did Kamala Harris not know that? | ||
| Because Kamala Harris, as Attorney General of California in 2012, Under the auspices of so-called budget cutting, budget reform, eliminated a 100-year-old agency called the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. | ||
| And it is widely held amongst law enforcement officers and on the prosecution side that this was a very important task force for fighting organized crime. | ||
| It had been doing so since Prohibition and then became a major force in disrupting narcotics trade in the state. | ||
| She disbanded it. | ||
| Well, because she's for narcotics. | ||
| She wants a drug-addicted population, obviously. | ||
| She does whatever she's told. | ||
| But I'm just saying, these drug cartels are powerful because they're ruthless, they're a cult based on witchcraft, but they're also really rich. | ||
| Of course, they're Fortune 500 companies. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, at some point, like in Mexico, they're in control still because... | ||
| They've paid off all the politicians. | ||
| Is that happening in California yet? | ||
| It's not clear to me whether that's happening to the extent I'm certainly, as expressed by Tom Homan when I spoke to him, he says that it's very hard often to distinguish the Mexican elite from the Mexican drug cartels. | ||
| There's an interwoven nexus. | ||
| And, of course, like in parts of Mexico, the cartels exert actual, like, authority and governance over certain regions. | ||
| Industry Madre, yeah, for example. | ||
| But it's not really clear to me if they are influencing politicians or, you know, through, you know, grift or through bribes or anything. | ||
| I'm not clear on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, if not, it's just a matter of time. | ||
| A director of the LAPD union said to me that the cartels are increasingly committing ransom attacks in San Diego of high-profile families, and this is not getting reported. | ||
| Kidnapping as is so common in Latin America. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They take him across the border. | ||
| And so special like security forces made up of X seals and whatnot have to go into Mexico and extract them. | ||
| This is now apparently rampant. | ||
| It's insane, but it shouldn't surprise us. | ||
| That's a fact of life in Mexico City. | ||
| Human trafficking is also a very serious problem in the state. | ||
| It's, of course, more lucrative in some ways than the drugs because they can be used over and over and over again as sex slaves. | ||
| It's like a recurring revenue stream. | ||
| Fentanyl should not be underplayed in any way. | ||
| Fentanyl produces like 200,000% margin. | ||
| And Fentanyl, according to one of the top gang enforcement detectives in LA County, based out of Compton, ex-Special Forces guy, black guy, incredible man, he said to me, Fentanyl, It's so ubiquitous, it's like salt. | ||
| And if you buy a pill off the street, it has fentanyl in it. | ||
| And that's why, you know, in fact, it's so deadly and so dangerous that even the cartels are thinking that maybe we need to come up with something not quite as lethal because we're killing our customers. | ||
| Can I just ask, since you mentioned Compton, so Compton was the largest black population west of the Mississippi since the Second World War. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| I was just there. | ||
| It's Spanish speaking. | ||
| So you've had, you know, the black population of huge parts of LA moved east into the Inland Empire, murdered in huge numbers. | ||
| By newcomers. | ||
| And I've never heard, and Maxine Waters supposedly represents Compton, though she doesn't live there, but I've never heard a single black politician in California mention the fact that illegal immigration has completely overturned life for a lot of black people in California. | ||
| Not one time have I heard anybody say that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why? | |
| What about your corrupt pigs? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously, but I think it's due to the fact that the power is now, the locus of power is with The newcomers. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| So it's not in their interest to ever comment on these things. | ||
| But if your job is to represent your constituents or your people... | ||
| When have Democrats ever represented black people? | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's shocking this could happen. | ||
| And everyone's watching it or people are paying attention or seeing it, especially if you're from California. | ||
| You're like, well, this is very different from what it was 10 years ago. | ||
| And nobody says a word. | ||
| You know what's interesting? | ||
| So in prison, the prison system, the black gangs, it's all obviously racially segregated, but the black gang is called the black guerrilla family. | ||
| And again, according to this gang enforcement specialist that I spoke to, He said, like, well, for the Mexicans, it's about money. | ||
| Money and power. | ||
| For the black guerrilla family, their enemy is the government. | ||
| And, like, they're political. | ||
| And I thought to myself, well, at least they have an ethos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I agree. | |
| It's just interesting. | ||
| You know, California state prisons are totally racially segregated. | ||
| In fact, they were ordered desegregated at one point, and then the prisoners complained. | ||
| The black prisoners complained, because there's so many that were getting killed. | ||
| I mean, look, the fact that this sort of level of criminality can exist within the prisons, it's such an indictment of the system overall. | ||
| I mean, it's a joke. | ||
| And, in fact, all these cops I talk to say, the gangsters laugh at us. | ||
| They have no fear of us. | ||
| They do not fear the state. | ||
| Then how are the prison guards the highest paid state employees in California? | ||
| Because public sector unions have enormous power in Sacramento. | ||
| But, I mean, if... | ||
| And I think that was always true. | ||
| Prison guards are always the highest paid. | ||
| I mean, it's a dangerous job. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I know prison guards. | ||
| I've always liked them. | ||
| But on the other hand, if your job is to guard the prison and you're getting paid more than anybody else working for the state in California and the gangs run the prisons and there's something wrong with that formula. | ||
| Look, obviously there's enormous corruption such that phones are smuggled in. | ||
| A communication network obviously exists because how are you able to manage a criminal empire from within jail? | ||
| How are you able to order executions and hits within jail? | ||
| So it's porous. | ||
| But I think the bigger issue, ultimately, and this is why I don't think it's the prison guard's fault, it's the state's fault. | ||
| Gangsters do not fear the law. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They do not fear the law. | |
| And they commit crimes with impunity. | ||
| They're committing increasingly gun crimes with impunity because gun enhancements, as we talked about, no longer apply in many cases. | ||
| So gun violence has gone way up. | ||
| Like, number of, I think, gun victims in the last three years has shot up in LA County like 63%. | ||
| But you've got very strict gun control. | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
| How hard is it for you to own a gun in California? | ||
| I don't own a gun. | ||
| I should at this point. | ||
| But I understand it's quite a difficult process. | ||
| And a lot of the guns that the criminals are using are all stolen. | ||
| They're not going to... | ||
| A sports shop and buying a rifle. | ||
| You can get a 12-gauge for like $400. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Mossberg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you thought about that? | |
| I mean, I'd love one of your beautiful hunting rifles. | ||
| I think you're better off with a 12-gauge. | ||
| Hard to miss in close quarters. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Easy to operate. | ||
| You know, actually, the cops say the best defense against these kinds of crimes is a big dog. | ||
| I have a cat. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| I think that cops lie a lot about guns. | ||
| Sorry, with respect to cops. | ||
| They don't want any competition. | ||
| They want to be the only armed people on the scene. | ||
| Well, they're getting competition. | ||
| Well, I'm very aware of that. | ||
| Cops tend, in general, to be against an armed citizenry. | ||
| I like cops. | ||
| I always defend cops. | ||
| But on this one question, there are employees. | ||
| They can keep their dumb opinions about guns to themselves, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And you have a right to have a gun. | ||
| And I have a lot of dogs. | ||
| I love dogs. | ||
| But a 12-gauge is more effective than a dog. | ||
| I'm just telling you that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I will tell you, you know, on the cop issue, another factor of this story is the erosion of the quality of cops. | ||
| Yeah, so what about that? | ||
| Who would be a cop in L.A.? Well, right now we're recruiting DACA, you know, illegal aliens into the LAPD. Actually? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's been five so far and a scandal actually. | ||
| Illegal aliens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're not allowed to own firearms, right? | ||
| They cannot have a firearm when they're off duty. | ||
| You have illegal alien cops? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So if we import 7 million military-age men into the United States illegally, which the Biden administration has done, it does raise the obvious question. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Is this a mercenary army for the ruling class? | ||
| It certainly seems like one. | ||
| And if they're making them cops, then it kind of... | ||
| Well, let me tell you a story that's not been reported. | ||
| It's a cover-up. | ||
| And it was conveyed to me by a senior director of the LAPD Union. | ||
| It's called the LA Police Protective League. | ||
| And this is also a... | ||
| 25-plus year veteran of the LAPD and a detective. | ||
| Both his daughters are in the LAPD. He is as plugged into this world as anyone. | ||
| In fact, he said to me in our interview, he says, I tell everyone, don't come to LA. We cannot protect you. | ||
| But on the DACA issue, apparently in February of... | ||
| Yeah, this last February, an off-duty LAPD detective encountered two members of the Serenio gang, which is a very violent, powerful Latino gang in Southern California. | ||
| They were attempting to steal his car. | ||
| So there was an exchange of gunfire, and the gangsters got away in their getaway car. | ||
| They were apprehended the next day, and it turns out that the car was registered to a DACA cadet in the LAPD, and the LAPD quietly shuffled her either out of the program or just covered it up entirely, but the LA Times did report on this incident. | ||
| Wait, so they're hiring female illegal aliens to be copped with gang ties. | ||
| So at that point, it's just they're... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's not a legitimate guy. | ||
| I mean, at that point, you're just like, you're begging to be overthrown. | ||
| Of course, right? | ||
| They have no legitimacy at all. | ||
| Cops are increasingly finding alternative revenue streams by becoming private security officers for the elite. | ||
| And a lot of the officers that I talk to are doing that because it's so lucrative. | ||
| California has the highest pay rates for private security and the highest demand for private security in the nation. | ||
| And in fact, I'll just tell you, this is a difficult thing to substantiate for a variety of reasons, but I think it's interesting, which is that I heard from this L.A. County Sheriff, former Major Crimes Bureau lead, and now in private security, that he believed it was quite, you know... | ||
| Well-known but quietly known in the private security industry that George Soros or his proxies were investing significantly in private security businesses. | ||
| This was also confirmed to me by a former head of federal security for LAX and one of the top traders on Wall Street. | ||
| So, again, George Soros is... | ||
| Portfolio and transactions are private. | ||
| It's a family office. | ||
| We really don't know where the investments are going. | ||
| But I think it's quite striking to think that there may be other incentives beyond simply undermining the law for some kind of sake of creating a new world. | ||
| A dystopia, of course. | ||
| Nevertheless, I don't think a trader, a financial trader, maybe one of the greatest in the world, stops becoming a trader, right? | ||
| No, the worship of money is a disease, and it's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, I guess you go back just a couple minutes. | ||
| So, you said that Kamala Harris dismantled the anti-narcotics task force that had been around since Prohibition. | ||
| I'm wondering, though, she has bragged publicly about dismantling the cartels. | ||
| That doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who's dismantling cartels. | ||
| How could she dismantle the cartels? | ||
| I just explained that the cartels run the state. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So when she says that, I mean, there's no truth in that at all. | ||
| There's no truth in anything that she says. | ||
| I mean, she is the avatar of moral bankruptcy that represents the state of California. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hollow, superficial. | ||
| Stupid, sociopathic. | ||
| And I will tell you, everyone that I know, Democrats who have worked with her, including a very elite consulting firm that tried to manage her campaign at one point, they say that she is lazy. | ||
| Steve Cooley also says that, by the way. | ||
| She's a lazy prosecutor. | ||
| And she is vicious. | ||
| And when she doesn't do her homework... | ||
| And gets caught in, you know, word salads because she doesn't know what she's talking about. | ||
| She then lashes out on her staff. | ||
| So she's kind of like an even dumber version of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And I think, fortunately, like, she's so inept that the country is starting to see that. | ||
| I pray to God, because if Kamala Harris rises to the level of the presidency, we now have basically exported. | ||
| California Nationwide. | ||
| And as I told you, in the name of my book, it is called Failed State, A Portrait of California in the Twilight of Empire. | ||
| I can't think of a sadder title or a more accurate one, and I just refer back to my own childhood in that state. | ||
| I mean, the distressing thing is it's not like wrecking, you know, I don't know, I don't want to be mean. | ||
| I can think of a couple states that, you know, whatever, who cares? | ||
| California was the greatest place on planet Earth. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But you know what's interesting about Kamala? | ||
| She actually did go after drug crimes, but she went after people who were smoking weed. | ||
| Yeah, the easy ones. | ||
| The easy ones. | ||
| Right? | ||
| A lot of black people. | ||
| Yeah, but she did not go after the cartels bringing in the drugs. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, let's talk for a minute about who runs California. | ||
| So, you're from Southern California, as am I. I spent most of my childhood in Southern California, which was, you know, by far the most dynamic, prosperous part of the state, by far. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Aerospace, you had some ag, obviously tourism, and then you had the creative industries, the movie business, the record business, both headquartered there. | ||
| It's all gone, except the ag. | ||
| But that's not the part of the state that runs everything. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And it hasn't for some time. | ||
| We haven't really had a true Republican governor since the mid-90s with Pete Wilson. | ||
| Pete Wilson put forward a very, very famous proposition called 187, which was supported by voters by over 60%. | ||
| And it effectively was to restrict any sort of social services except like non-emergency. | ||
| So we still allowed that to illegal aliens. | ||
| And you can't reward people who are here illegally with your money. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So we went from that to, let's say, I think a month or so ago, the legislature put forward a bill that would give illegal aliens preferential mortgages. | ||
| Gavin Newsom, to his credit, vetoed that. | ||
| Preferential mortgages? | ||
| They were very sweetheart deals. | ||
| Can I just say, because I can't contain my resentment, so ever since Prop 187 passed, and that was invalidated by a judge because it's a democracy where some judge gets to override the will of people. | ||
| It's also fake. | ||
| But ever since then, a certain kind of Republican consultant, and that would be the dumbest people I've ever met. | ||
| And I'm speaking specifically of Frank Luntz, the guy with the hairpiece, but there could be many others. | ||
| They've lectured Republicans about how 187 lost California. | ||
| It was a Republican. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| It's such a lie. | ||
| But it's a Republican state and Prop 187, which deny welfare benefits to illegal aliens. | ||
| That was hate. | ||
| That was racism. | ||
| Republican consultants and guys like Mitch McConnell and all the dumb people in the party bought that. | ||
| Well, and of course, because they're funded by the Koch brothers, and the Koch brothers want to bring in cheap illegal alien labor. | ||
| Simple as that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I think it was Lenin said that the capitalists will sell you the rope that we'll use to hang you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, sorry, I just can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But back to your question. | |
| We forget how reasonable that is. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Oh, it's beyond reasonable. | ||
| And California used to be a reasonable, safe, secure state with really tough laws that put gangsters away and following... | ||
| The three strikes law and other reforms that came at the late 90s and into the early 2000s between 2000 and 2010 roughly. | ||
| It was a pretty damn good place. | ||
| Like Steve Cooley in Los Angeles. | ||
| You know, cleaned up a lot of the mess. | ||
| Even his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, did a relatively good job, although she was chased out of office by BLM. She's black. | ||
| She was chased out of office by and literally harassed her home by BLM activists because she was not, you know, in line with their anti-police, anti-incarceration agenda enough. | ||
| And so we then have George Gascon. | ||
| Who received $2 million from George Soros. | ||
| That was enough. | ||
| For a DA race, that actually was an extraordinary amount of money. | ||
| It's interesting because Soros played money ball with these DA races all over the country because he realized that... | ||
| The district attorneys have enormous power because they can set policy about what crimes are going to be prosecuted, which are not. | ||
| Some of these other directives that I mentioned earlier about cash bail and so forth, although George Soros is actively, excuse me, George S. Stone is actively in violation of state law and just operates nonetheless. | ||
| But Soros understood that with a few million bucks, You could change a DA race. | ||
| Why would you want to? | ||
| Why would Soros, who's a foreigner, I beg your pardon, from Hungary, not from here, why would you want to wreck someone else's country? | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| Soros DAs have jurisdiction over like 75 million Americans. | ||
| Like, it's crazy. | ||
| What's the motive? | ||
| Like, why would you want, you're George Soros, you grew up in war-torn Europe, then you go to England, you helped destroy their economy, right? | ||
| Which he did. | ||
| And then you come to the United States, which is like the nicest country in the history of the world, and you decide you want to take your ill-gotten gains and use those funds to wreck someone else's country? | ||
| Like, what is, what's the motive here? | ||
| I talked to a lot of people about this, and, you know, initially, again, I didn't want to even go down the Soros, you know, rabbit hole, because I... Oh, you're not allowed. | ||
| You're not allowed, but also like... | ||
| It's cliche at this point. | ||
| It is cliche. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But the fact is that it's real. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| And it begs the question of why. | ||
| Is it simply he is an anarchist? | ||
| Is he a financial terrorist? | ||
| I would say yes. | ||
| But what is the motivation? | ||
| I think, again, you know, it... | ||
| I do not believe a world-class arbitrager, trader, ever kind of leaves that mindset. | ||
| It's always money that motivates. | ||
| So I think it's, you know, again, this is entirely speculation, but I would be very interested to see what is the portfolio of the family office of George Soros. | ||
| Is it real estate? | ||
| Because certainly the crimes surge in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have depressed real estate in these downtown districts by 25% at least. | ||
| And insurance premiums have gone way up. | ||
| So is there a trade there? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But as I said, there's people that I trust and who would be in a position to know that indicate that there is potentially other motivating factors, at least with respect to Soros. | ||
| So that being said, you know... | ||
| It's just crazy how little defense the United States has. | ||
| Like, we don't have moral defenses. | ||
| We build this amazing thing. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Greatest thing that's ever been built by any people in all of history. | ||
| And then a few, I don't know, evil figures like Soros roll in. | ||
| And we're totally incapable of saying, hey, foreigner, go away. | ||
| You're not allowed to do that. | ||
| You can't do that to us. | ||
| And by the way, we'll execute you if you try to do that. | ||
| I mean, a normal society would say, you know, we built this, you can't wreck it. | ||
| But we're totally incapable of doing that. | ||
| A normal society, okay, would have, given the kind of violent criminals that are endemic in California. | ||
| And that run prisons, right? | ||
| And commit murders in prison, literally, against guards even. | ||
| A normal prison, I think, would have capital punishment applied to these prisoners, you know, in the prison yard. | ||
| Hangings, right? | ||
| Something, whatever it takes to bring fear of the law and of the state to those who fear only the justice of the Mexican mafia. | ||
| That is who they fear when they go to prison. | ||
| It's not the state. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| So then the Mexican Mafia is the state then? | ||
| In effect. | ||
| In effect, yeah. | ||
| It's the final word. | ||
| If it is actually, yeah, yeah, they are the final arbiters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They are the final arbiters. | ||
| So then they're above the state. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| So, I'm sorry I keep interrupting you just because that's an emotional subject. | ||
| I think it's a really important subject. | ||
| It is an emotional subject. | ||
| It's really, really upsetting. | ||
| Well, you still live there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's deeply upsetting to see your home vandalized and, you know, just literally my home, but just my hometown. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But you're saying that Los Angeles is not where the decisions are made. | ||
| Where are the decisions made in California? | ||
| The decisions, the locus of power in California. | ||
| It centers around a very elite and small milieu in San Francisco, largely around an area called Pacific Heights. | ||
| Ah, that's where I'm from. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Originally. | ||
| Oh, that's so funny. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pacific Heights is the center of evil, huh? | |
| Pretty neighborhood, though. | ||
| Well, San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. | ||
| It used to be. | ||
| You know, like much of California. | ||
| In any event, the oligarchy that has been really in place for almost 100 years, starting with the Getty's involvement with the Newsom family and the Newsom's family involvement with Jerry Brown, goes back to the 1940s and 50s. | ||
| And the scions of each of these dynasties, all intermarried... | ||
| They were into business together. | ||
| Gavin Newsom's first big entrance into the scene was forming a restaurant group called Plump Jack, which was seeded by the Getty family and was also co-founded with... | ||
| Billy Getty, who is the son of Gordon Getty, who is the son of J. Paul Getty. | ||
| And the Eddies have funded Gavin's entire political career, and they've made that possible in the winery and restaurant group. | ||
| The success of that became a launching board into San Francisco city politics. | ||
| I think he was on the board of supervisors and then became mayor. | ||
| But always there was this commonality and nexus between Pelosi's family, Pelosi's husband, the Gettys, the Browns, and the Newsoms. | ||
| So they're the old money elite that have been running the state on or off since the 1940s. | ||
| I mean, of course, there have been Republican governors here and there. | ||
| It used to be, as we've... | ||
| We talked about a sort of moderate state. | ||
| Sometimes we voted for Democrats, sometimes we voted for Republicans. | ||
| Usually we voted for Republican candidates, presidential candidates. | ||
| The last one was George H.W. Bush. | ||
| But the accumulation of power amongst this circle really took hold after these changes that we've talked about. | ||
| In Southern California, the de-industrialization of Southern California, the exodus of at least 6 million middle-class Californians in the last decade, and the aerospace and defense leaving Southern California. | ||
| So LA then became a Democrat stronghold when it was once a Republican stronghold. | ||
| And power shifted to San Francisco. | ||
| And the other reason power shifted to San Francisco is because of the presence of tech, big tech. | ||
| Big tech is the new money, and the new money interweaves with the old money through VC investments and private placements and other sorts of social circles and Bohemian Grove, you name it. | ||
| So we then have a power structure of an industry that is made up of very few people, a lot of foreigners, by the way, of course, and these kind of dynastic, almost like ancient aristocrats in the manner of patron-client relationships that define this paradigm. | ||
| And they have formed an enormous, let's say, power block with tech. | ||
| And through that connection, California has been ruled by this oligarchy. | ||
| But it's just weird in the physical effects. | ||
| I mean, my mom's family got to California in the 1850s from Maine to find their fortune, and they did. | ||
| And so I've sort of gone there my whole life, was born there. | ||
| And it was, you know, I thought a nice city, liberal in some ways, very traditional in other ways, but kind of the same, like the city that saw the least amount of change. | ||
| And then after, during the tech boom, 99, 98, 99, all this money came in, not just the South Bay, renamed Silicon Valley, but into the city, particularly after 2000. And I thought, well, okay, San Francisco's really rich now. | ||
| It'll get better. | ||
| It was pretty nice, I thought, but it will get better. | ||
| The richer the city got, the dirtier it got, the more dangerous it got, the more chaotic it became. | ||
| The money made it way poorer. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's a paradox, and it's very interesting. | ||
| Well, it's bizarre. | ||
| When Twitter moved its head, because, you know, all tech was, again, south of the city, but then when the tech companies started moving into the city, like, oh, it's this beautiful city, it's our Cape Town. | ||
| And then it became like such a rich city, richest city in the United States. | ||
| It instantly became dirty. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| This is happening in Southern California too. | ||
| So in Venice, California, Google has established a big office. | ||
| And Venice is marred by just tragic levels of homelessness that are shocking. | ||
| Shocking. | ||
| Sites that I had only seen when traveling to the poorest parts of Guatemala. | ||
| Maybe worse in some ways. | ||
| But right around the corner from the Google office in Venice is a, let's call it a shantytown, a favela even maybe. | ||
| But tent after tent after tent and right next to Google. | ||
| It's a fascinating dichotomy. | ||
| And I was told by someone who would know in the private security sector and a former cop that he has observed, because he has done work for Google, that gang members, local gangs, extract tribute from each homeless tent every single day, $20 to $50 a day. | ||
| And this is happening, he claims, across the city. | ||
| There's 75,000 homeless in Los Angeles. | ||
| And if they cannot meet the tribute, they are forced to sell drugs or other crimes. | ||
| And by the way, thanks to, I believe this was a Newsom policy, cops require, have to get search warrants to enter any tents. | ||
| So the tents have become denizens of... | ||
| Dens, rather, of murder, of rape, of drug, the worst kind of drug trade, and other forms of depravity that shock the senses. | ||
| And it's right next to Google. | ||
| Right next to Google, yeah. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I think, obviously, I'm too simple to understand the modern world, but I always thought that the problem was poverty, and that people committed crimes because they were poor. | ||
| And the richer your society became, the safer and more orderly it became. | ||
| But the exact opposite has been true. | ||
| And it makes you wonder, like, is there some evil emanating from these tech companies? | ||
| Answer, obviously, yes. | ||
| That inspires chaos, depravity, crime, violence, and filth. | ||
| Well, I think that the answer is also structural and economic because tech is not based upon employing vast numbers of people. | ||
| It's not productive labor. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| I mean, it's like nine guys from India writing code. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| And so when that becomes the dominant economic power in the state and manufacturing leaves the state. | ||
| And where do the poor working class people turn to? | ||
| And housing crisis is also part of it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean, it drops the value of labor to zero. | ||
| So for the rich people, just to reply to your point about it's getting richer and yet worse. | ||
| Yeah, it's getting richer, but the areas where the rich people live, like Atherton, are looking real nice these days. | ||
| I was just in Atherton. | ||
| Atherton's great. | ||
| Malibu's great. | ||
| There are pockets of, I think Malibu still is great. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It's so far away that it can be great. | ||
| But I wonder if the city of San Francisco, though, is such a great example of the failure of leadership and the failure of the ruling class to be vested in the society from which they're taking their riches. | ||
| In a normal society, the rich people would say, hey, I live here. | ||
| My kids live here. | ||
| You can't do that shit. | ||
| Get off the sidewalk. | ||
| We're going to make the San Francisco Police Department the most efficient and highly endowed police department in the world. | ||
| We're going to have no crime. | ||
| The Saudis did that. | ||
| Why don't the tech barons do that? | ||
| Well, because we became a one-party state, right? | ||
| So when Steve Cooley was DA of Los Angeles, he was not about politics. | ||
| In fact, he says the job of a DA is not to... | ||
| Kind of bring politics into the administration of justice. | ||
| It is to go after bad guys and prosecute bad guys and send them away and make the city safer. | ||
| Yeah, using the laws of the elected legislators. | ||
| And in fact, local, you know, this was also the case even in San Francisco back in like the... | ||
| 2000s and the predecessor to Kamala Harris, a guy named Talanan. | ||
| Terrence Talanan. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And he was a liberal, but also one with a sense of duty to do the job. | ||
| But I think what happened is sometime around, again, around the late 2000s, when Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris really came into their power structures, especially San Francisco. | ||
| It became not about, let's make this city better. | ||
| Let's make this safer. | ||
| It's about, how do I get my next promotion? | ||
| You know, term limits in California, which I supported, were supposed to fix all this. | ||
| And they seemed to have made it worse. | ||
| Do you understand? | ||
| Again, this is one of those paradoxes that I don't fully understand. | ||
| I've just noticed. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, they didn't work. | ||
| I think we can say that, right? | ||
| I mean, clearly something's not working. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Again, yeah. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Maybe you don't remember, but maybe you're too young. | ||
| But like, Tremolins came to California and you were like, okay, this is going to make legislators much more responsive. | ||
| They can't live forever in these dumb jobs. | ||
| But it seems like they have lived forever in these dumb jobs. | ||
| They've just... | ||
| You know, I've also heard it's compared to, like, the fact that we have a full-time legislature versus Texas that has a part-time legislator, and that has a moderating effect. | ||
| I think that's, like, a good analog for comparison. | ||
| I mean, Sacramento is out of control. | ||
| There's supermajorities, Democratic supermajorities in both houses. | ||
| There's not a single Republican at any... | ||
| There's an administrative officer-level position in the state. | ||
| I think the last one was maybe an insurance commissioner. | ||
| There are no statewide Republican officeholders. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There haven't been for years. | ||
| And the Republican minority is so small in the legislative bodies that they're irrelevant. | ||
| And our Republicans are weak. | ||
| I mean, Meg Whitman... | ||
| It was pathetic. | ||
| She spent $150 million of her own money to run for governor in 2010, and she lost overwhelmingly to Jerry Brown. | ||
| Yeah, I went to her house in Atherton, speaking of Atherton, at that time. | ||
| What is it you would think that the Republican off-soldiers in the state, the few who remain, would be even clearer-eyed and more resolute, but they seemed even more cucked than they were? | ||
| Yes, I would say so. | ||
| I mean, the California Republican Party basically doesn't exist. | ||
| If you want to run as a – you cannot run as a Republican. | ||
| I mean, for instance, Rick Caruso ran for mayor recently. | ||
| He was a well-known Republican, but he had to switch – In Los Angeles. | ||
| In Los Angeles. | ||
| Against Karen Bass. | ||
| Yeah, against Karen Bass. | ||
| He switched to the Democrats' party to facilitate the run and give him a chance. | ||
| He still lost. | ||
| Has Karen Bass been a pretty great mayor? | ||
| I mean, the board of supervisors in L.A. have a lot more power in some ways than the... | ||
| Than the mayor itself. | ||
| The mayor of Los Angeles does not have the power of the mayor of New York City. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, Karen Bass did what she... | ||
| She has done the job she was tasked for, which is to have a black woman as mayor and fulfill an identity politics quota, in my opinion. | ||
| Is Gavin Newsom, who survived a recall effort, pretty serious, looked like a pretty serious recall effort, at least two terms now, Governor? | ||
| Is he popular? | ||
| You know, I haven't seen any recent polling on that. | ||
| Have you ever been at dinner and heard someone say, man, I'm just glad Gavin Newsom runs our state? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So, in a one-party state, it doesn't really matter. | ||
| Like, everyone's Brezhnev at a certain point. | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Whether people like what they're getting, they're getting it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The only thing that matters is the Democratic primary, of course. | ||
| And there is, like, internecine divisions within the party, just like in China. | ||
| Oh, big time. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And in fact, it's kind of interesting that, you know, Gavin is not, like, on the hard left of the Democratic Party in California. | ||
| I actually, in some ways, think he's probably much more reasonable and moderate than he has portrayed himself to be. | ||
| As someone who knows him, I can confirm that. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| Gavin Newsom is, I think, responsible in large part for what's happening in California. | ||
| There's no excuse for that. | ||
| He'll be held accountable for that on some level in some life. | ||
| However, just in point of fact, he is not some crazy left winger. | ||
| No, look, I'll be honest with you. | ||
| I like him personally. | ||
| Yeah, everyone does. | ||
| Yeah, I really do. | ||
| And I really wish he was a phenomenal governor. | ||
| I think if we do have to live in a one-party state, at least our leaders should be really competent within the machine. | ||
| And I think he had a lot of potential. | ||
| And certainly... | ||
| But he's also a slave and captured by this movement and this leftism that has cast this pal over California. | ||
| He's weak inside, there's no doubt. | ||
| So can I ask, there are still very powerful business interests, mostly the people making AI, planning our enslavement. | ||
| Why don't those people get together and just pay for a good government? | ||
| I will tell you that I have heard, at least from folks in the VC world, that there is a lot of quiet support even in this cycle for Trump. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| There is, and there's some loud support. | ||
| I mean, Marc Andreessen, who's the biggest VC in the state, has come out for Trump publicly. | ||
| So that's good, but I just mean within the state of California, as long as you're going to have a corrupt one-party state, as long as it's going to be Guatemala, okay, fine, that's what we are now, why don't the oligarchs get together and just say, well, we're at least going to have, I don't know, nice roads and functional schools, and your daughter's not going to get raped on the way to CVS. Like, why not just do that? | ||
| I think it's because these nobles do not have noblesse oblige. | ||
| Now we're cooking with gas. | ||
| That's exact. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you expand on that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the idea for societies that are stratified by class and where there is especially an aristocracy that has a political hegemony as well as social power. | ||
| There was a sense, I think, in those kind of societies in the past, even frankly, you know, within the United States, that there were certain responsibilities as a noble to your county, to your city, to your, you know, land, and so forth. | ||
| To your nation. | ||
| To your nation, of course. | ||
| But today we have a situation where there's a disconnect from that and it's entirely about the self and it's nihilism. | ||
| They all wear t-shirts and live on boats. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're totally disconnected. | ||
| They're completely removed from the bad schools, from the bad roads, from the crime. | ||
| They have private police force, basically. | ||
| Because they're not Christians. | ||
| That's the actual difference. | ||
| They're not believing Christians. | ||
| And a believing Christian feels a sense of obligation to the poor. | ||
| And the people over whom he exerts authority to the people below him. | ||
| I mean, that's just part of the religion. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| So, like, when we talk about neo-feudalism and maybe how that's not a perfect analog, I would add in support of your approach is, well, at least in feudalism, they believed in God. | ||
| Well, and that had certain obligations. | ||
| It actually structured the entire society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, this is a separate conversation, but I was probably 40 years old before I'm interested in history. | ||
| I realized... | ||
| That the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance were referred to as, quote, the Dark Ages. | ||
| And there's sort of very little conversation about that among people who specialize in European history. | ||
| And it's like, why? | ||
| Why are we dismissing a thousand-year period as the Dark Ages? | ||
| Because actually, it wasn't that dark. | ||
| Because actually, these were not societies built on debt slavery. | ||
| These were societies built on Christianity. | ||
| And that's kind of why they've been dismissed as dark and unworthy of... | ||
| Further study or, you know, conversation. | ||
| We have nothing to learn from the Dark Ages, and that's all like a huge lie. | ||
| Actually, they had a much more enlightened ruling class than we have. | ||
| I would say that, you know, if you're going to make historical comparisons to, like, let's say, are we in a new Dark Age? | ||
| You could argue that, you know, the so-called Dark Ages was characterized by a separation from... | ||
| Hellenism and classical ideas and literacy, right? | ||
| And so I think you could argue, frankly, that modern America, actually modern society as a whole, and this is especially true in California, is also disconnected from its history. | ||
| It is forgetting its history purposefully. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| And we're also becoming... | ||
| Ironically, we are subject to more information than we can absorb, and so we absorb nothing. | ||
| And maybe that's a kind of new illiteracy. | ||
| I think that's exactly right, and I think good weather plays a huge role in this. | ||
| Places with really good weather, you see this on Australia as well, allow people to sort of drift along in a state of content, numbness, and they don't ever, they're sort of content with... | ||
| You know, an ever-declining standard of living and an ever-shrinking basket of freedoms. | ||
| At this point in California, you have the right to have an abortion. | ||
| That's kind of your only right. | ||
| And they just are so... | ||
| Because it's 75 and sunny, they don't complain. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Whereas in, say, Romania... | ||
| They might complain. | ||
| Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see if things get so bad that it catalyzes action by the voters. | ||
| One of these prosecutors I talked to from Alameda County, we were discussing the broader implications of how we got to the place that we did. | ||
| And she said to me, she said, I blame you. | ||
| And I said, what? | ||
| I blame everyone. | ||
| She said, you, I mean the uneducated voter, right? | ||
| The voters that are susceptible to the marketing gimmicks of our politicians that reframe legalizing theft as Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. | ||
| And this kind of complacency has resulted in a significant way to the degradation of the state. | ||
| Well, it's just, look, this is just a dot on a continuum. | ||
| This is a moment in time. | ||
| And every bad thing that you described has been made possible by liberal whites. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And their bad, their decadent attitudes. | ||
| And California is a Latin American country basically now. | ||
| With some recognizable Latin America country problems, like rule by cartel and corrupt politics and the rest, one-party state. | ||
| But at some point, it's going to be characterized by another feature of Latin American society, which is fascist interludes, where you're going to have a military junta or some strongman takeover California, and all these new immigrants, they're not. | ||
| Rich white liberals, actually, they probably don't think theft should be legal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're going to get some Caudillo in charge of that state. | ||
| He's going to put an end to all this nonsense. | ||
| You know, maybe that would not be so bad. | ||
| I mean, it's preferable to what we have now. | ||
| I mean, would you rather have Gavin Newsom or Bukele? | ||
| Or Bukele, exactly. | ||
| That's not a hard choice. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's not a hard choice. | ||
| So that's very different from the state that you and I grew up in, completely different, which was basically an egalitarian state where even rich people, like, I grew up in a rich part of the state, and we didn't feel like we were a class apart, that everyone else was a serf, you know what I mean? | ||
| I didn't drive through the Central Valley feeling like, I have nothing in common with these people. | ||
| I feel like, well, they're Californians, just like me. | ||
| That's over. | ||
| You know, I wanted to mention something. | ||
| But don't you think we're in the chaotic middle period between one system and a new system? | ||
| Oh, yes, for sure. | ||
| In fact, Victor Davis- Right? | ||
| Victor Davis Hanson, who was very kind in helping me with some of the research for my book, made some incredible insights on the comparison of the late Roman Empire, really the period between 376 AD and 476 AD, and what we're experiencing now in California. | ||
| And that period... | ||
| Can I just say, thank you for saying that. | ||
| Because the 5th century is when we think of the end of Rome, but we forget that there was at least a century preceding that where it was like on the way to the fall. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And it was characterized by things that are eerily similar to what we're seeing in California. | ||
| So, of course, there is the erosion of borders. | ||
| There is the influx of... | ||
| Of migrants, about I think like one or two million from Germanic and Huns into Rome, not assimilated, breakdown of law at the county levels, a disconnect from the capital. | ||
| And a lot of those immigrants in Rome went into law enforcement, went into the legions. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And there was also cultural factors where the elite were, Hansen calls this, it's called Luxus. | ||
| And it was this notion that the elite at that time were embracing decadence, cult religions, hello trans, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Values that were antithetical to the martial values that built the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. | ||
| Decadent narcissism and Carmella Harris, whatever the hell she's calling herself now, is just the poster girl for that. | ||
| She is the personification of everything that is bad about California. | ||
| And it's not because she did all that. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| She actually doesn't have that much of a track record in California. | ||
| But that's the point, isn't it? | ||
| She is just a husk. | ||
| She is a face. | ||
| And she is the right face that qualified for, you know, hit the quotas that are necessary in California to advance. | ||
| And therefore, we see in her this shell of a person. | ||
| Always talking about herself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| That's the only thing she thinks about. | ||
| Right, but it's always... | ||
| You know her book's called Smart Crime? | ||
|
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|
No. | |
| Can you please use air quotes around the word book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, actually it was ghostwritten. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think? | |
| And plagiarized. | ||
| Both ghostwritten and plagiarized. | ||
| So even her ghostwriter was lazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| No, but it's so perfect. | ||
| It's just this Vesuvius of banalities about herself and me, me, me, I this, I that. | ||
| It's like, you know, if you're going to talk about yourself, there should be some requirement to be interesting. | ||
| But it's never interesting. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's always whining about microaggressions and I... You know, freedom and all. | ||
| It's just like, it's so banal. | ||
| You can just barely stand it. | ||
| I would rather have an interesting dictator, you know? | ||
| The chapter in my book on her, I call The Banality of Evil. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's perfect. | ||
| And it's the sense that these, like, these actions or inactions, rather, over time that seem incremental lead to outcomes that actually produce Incredible evil and violence. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And though she is not pulling the trigger, right? | ||
| She's not even passing some of the laws I hope I can get to, which are even more insane than what I've already told you. | ||
| But she nevertheless is part of this machine. | ||
| And she's also tied to the Gettys, by the way, just incidentally. | ||
| They all are. | ||
| Pelosi's, Getty's, Newsom, Brown's, like, it's all the same. | ||
| Willie Brown, too, of course. | ||
| And so there's nothing, there are no accomplishments to speak of, and nothing changed when she was vice president. | ||
| No, but this is what happens when girls become dictators. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They build nothing, they create nothing. | ||
| You don't even get, like, big... | ||
| Pretty buildings out of it. | ||
| And then they kill you by passive aggression. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd much rather... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not to make a gender thing out of it, but if we're going to have a dictator, at least he should be wearing a cape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And building a coliseum or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They can't even build light rail. | ||
| I'm trying not to use the F word in that darn state. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Let's get to the loss. | ||
| I've got to stop sidetracking. | ||
| So after Prop 57, 2016, that passes, we jump ahead to 2020, where I think everything broke down across the world, but especially in the United States and especially in California. | ||
| And as a result of the George Floyd riots, which, by the way, all of the law enforcement officers I've talked to who were there and were there for the 1992 riots say these two cannot even be closely compared. | ||
| Gangsters in L.A. | ||
| during the George Floyd riots were laughing their asses off because they didn't give a shit about George Floyd at all. | ||
| Everyone knew he was just a some armed robber drives with fentanyl. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He needed a revolution. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Oh, by the way, the guy who robbed us on his police report, it says, like, any drugs? | ||
| Are you on any drugs? | ||
| And he writes in, like, crayon, fentanyl. | ||
| He's on fentanyl? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Everyone's on fentanyl. | ||
| In the criminal world, it's like salt. | ||
| They're on fentanyl? | ||
| Yeah, it's like salt. | ||
| Well, he was taking it because he had been stabbed, like, a year or two before. | ||
| And so he takes it for the pain and to stay level. | ||
| It's so soul-killing. | ||
| Have you ever taken opioids after a surgery or something? | ||
| I mean, I love laughing gas. | ||
| I had that once. | ||
| Laughing gas is a totally different thing. | ||
| I'm not defending nitrous, but I will say it's a totally different gig. | ||
| But any opioid drug has the same... | ||
| It just takes your soul away. | ||
| Well, that's what we see. | ||
| That's why it's the zombie apocalypse, right? | ||
| Yes, that's it. | ||
| So after the riots and there was a momentous push for, again, I call it crime equity legislation. | ||
| And this took the form of two laws that have been absolutely devastating. | ||
| And I think that they probably will ultimately get thrown out by the Supreme Court because they're so egregious. | ||
| The first is called the Racial Justice Act of 2020. And the Racial Justice Act of 2020 allows defendants, and it's retroactive, To challenge their convictions based on the presence of bias or racial animus by, let's say, anyone involved in the trial or on the police side. | ||
| That doesn't have to have any bearing on whether or not the evidence supports their guilt at all. | ||
| These can be guilty people. | ||
| The evidence proved beyond a doubt. | ||
| But if there was a white racist involved at any level... | ||
| They can get their convictions thrown out under the Racial Justice Act or reduced significantly. | ||
| And this happened in the city of Antioch. | ||
| It's called the Antioch texting scandal. | ||
| Four young black gang members were on trial for attempted murder and murder and very clear that they did it. | ||
| Gang enhancements were applied to them, which would mean that they were going to face a lot more jail time. | ||
| But at the same time, it came out that the police officers in Antioch were texting so-called racist messages to each other in private. | ||
| Not as part of the job, not relating to even their involvement in the case, but just about these defendants. | ||
| And when this came out, the judge presiding over the case utilized the Racial Justice Act and threw out all the gang enhancements against these guys. | ||
| So they had no longer killed anybody because the cops were mean? | ||
| Let me tell you how much worse it gets. | ||
| Evidence, nebulous statistical evidence of racial disparity to support the case and satisfy their burden of proof that there is racial injustice. | ||
| So, for instance, if a jurisdiction is applying gang enhancements in greater proportion to black gang members than to some other group. | ||
| White gang members? | ||
| Yeah, whatever those are. | ||
| Under the Racial Justice Act, these statistical differences can be entered into consideration by the judge on whether or not to apply the RJA. That's just like the end of civilization. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| The same year, Sacramento passed AB 3070. AB 3070... | ||
| Took away the ability of prosecutors to apply peremptory challenges to prospective jurors on the basis of bias. | ||
| So, for instance, up until AB 3070, if a juror would say, my son had been arrested or I have a negative opinion of police, So on and so forth. | ||
| This would be a cause by which a prosecutor could use a peremptory challenge to remove the juror. | ||
| Well, under AB 3070, if this juror is a member of a protected group, which, by the way, includes gender identity. | ||
| So, like, training criminals? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, no, no. | ||
| Training jurors. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They can no longer use peremptory challenges against them, even if they say, I hate cops, because they're a protected group. | ||
| So the result of this is, as one of the top prosecutors in the entire state told me, is the proliferation of OJ juries. | ||
| And the OJ jury, by the way, never got the credit. | ||
| We never learned a single thing from that. | ||
| We spent our entire lives hearing about all white juries being bad, but here we had a jury that just let a guy get away with murdering two people because those people were a skin color that was fine for them to be murdered. | ||
| Another gang prosecutor in Alameda County told me that jurors have come up to her and said to her face, I will not convict a black man. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Well, now I'm officially depressed and just sad about the state. | ||
| So let's just end on a happy note if it's possible. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Do you see California getting better? | ||
| I mean, is this like a low point or is this just like... | ||
| You know, some of the cops I talk to say that they think this is cyclical and things will come back into some level of normalcy. | ||
| Detroit never came back. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Neither did Rome after 476. | ||
| It's still a crappy place as far as I can tell. | ||
| I mean, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I think that there are some problems that become so embedded and given the multifaceted nature of this dysfunction and the complexity of the problems and the entrenched interest groups that do not have any incentive to modify a system that has enriched them. | ||
| I don't know how, you will. | ||
| So I think maybe the lesson for me, just as a listener to this incredible story that you've just told, the main lesson is that civilization is really fragile. | ||
| You don't maintain it without continuous effort and vigilance. | ||
| And you really have to be radical in preserving it. | ||
| And once it goes away, it doesn't necessarily come back. | ||
| And you should not participate at all in unjust systems at all. | ||
| And you should fight like a wombat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, if we're talking about solutions, for me, for one thing, it is revoking these terrible laws that I've talked about. | ||
| That has to happen. | ||
| But how about shaming the people who supported them? | ||
| It's totally unacceptable. | ||
| I mean, I don't know anything about Bull Connor, but I'm sure his... | ||
| I would go further. | ||
| I think it's more than simply shaming. | ||
| I think if there is a way to hold these people liable for negligence, gross negligence. | ||
| Criminally liable. | ||
| Criminally liable. | ||
| So why should George Gascon be able to move to Tempe and just live out on retirement? | ||
| I don't think he should be allowed to. | ||
| Why should the politicians in Europe and in this country who facilitated the invasion of their countries and displacement and diffusion of their native indigenous populations as a form of let's face it, a form of ethnic cleansing? | ||
| Why should those politicians who enacted those laws not be subject to the same kind of standard that was applied in the Nuremberg trials? | ||
| Or how about as recently as the Yugoslav wars? | ||
| The NATO's war in Yugoslavia, I think Slobodan Milosevic died in prison for ethnic cleansing. | ||
| So Angela Merkel gets away with it? | ||
| How is that? | ||
| Look, the international laws related to these issues are not... | ||
| Robust enough to address this modern form of demographic inversion, demographic engineering. | ||
| But really, when I was thinking about this as a whole, is it really all that different from what the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang? | ||
| Like, yes, we don't have re-education camps yet. | ||
| Because we're not as straightforward as the Chinese. | ||
| But the idea of bringing the Han Chinese into... | ||
| Xinjiang to effectively erase those people. | ||
| Is that really any different than what's happening when 7 million people have come across the U.S. southern border with impunity and are going to most likely probably become citizens unless Trump, God willing, wins? | ||
| And reverse that? | ||
| I mean, times are very dark, Tucker, and I don't know if there's a positive message to be made, except I pray that our leadership, at least the federal level... | ||
| We'll write the ship and perhaps California over time can come back to some semblance of what it once was because it is the defacement of a grand work of art. | ||
| It is a work of art. | ||
| In Los Angeles and San Francisco, two of the prettiest cities, in fact, I would say the prettiest cities we have by far, both of them in their very different ways, but it is destroying art and irreplaceable art. | ||
| And as a birthright Californian who's living in his great-grandparents' house, You're one of the few in LA who can say that. | ||
| Like, what's your plan? | ||
| Are you going to stay? | ||
| You know, like, you've been asked this question, right? | ||
| And you've said, like, America's my home. | ||
| Like, I'm not leaving it. | ||
| I feel that way about California. | ||
| They're not, you're staying. | ||
| I mean, unless I get, like, another home invasion, that might, like, catalyze it. | ||
| But I feel very... | ||
| Tied to the land. | ||
| Good. | ||
| You should. | ||
| And I don't feel like it should be just surrendered because some assholes in San Francisco have decided to spread crime equity across the state. | ||
| It's like, we'll defend our home. | ||
| We'll defend our castle. | ||
| And that is, I think, you know... | ||
| What's one duty is to your ancestors? | ||
| Who had guns, so please buy one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Call me. | ||
| Chris, thank you. | ||
| Of course. |
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