Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on Thursday accused California of “going after” law-abiding citizens as crime continues to rise in the blue state.
Hanson appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” and said the state ordered 102-year-old California resident Victor Silva Sr. to pay more than $1,000 in fines or paint the vandalized fence. We discussed recent reports that he had given the order. The Fox guest host asked the senior researcher for his thoughts on California’s “priorities,” noting that is where Mr. Hanson currently lives. (Related: California’s economic woes are much worse than we think)
“Well, there are existential issues that we cannot or will not address,” Hanson said. “And because the government, the bureaucracy, and the administrative state are unable to deal with the serious crimes and the real causes of destroying the nation, they compensate by pursuing the petty crimes of law-abiding citizens. Now. [with] That strange asymmetry gives them a sense of psychological relief and a feeling that they are doing their job. But what’s happening is they’re bullying the middle class and the upper middle class. Remember, the 1% pays 50% of the income tax, the 5% pays 80%, and given that the income tax is 13.2 and what you just explained, they are at a rate of about 400,000 people per year. I am retired. ”
“We know what the problem is,” he continued. “It’s a classic Roman dilemma, as the great Roman historian Livy said, ‘If medicine is worse than disease, civilization declines.'”[s]. ” We know what we have to do. We have to institutionalize the homeless, we have to go after gangs, we have to lock people up. If they strike three times, we have to jail them for a long time. We must produce more energy and build more dams. We all know that, but the very idea of trying to do that when we’re 76 billion in debt, or shutting down our borders and not giving 500 million to illegal aliens, makes us feel… I’m afraid to do what I’m afraid of. It’s the other way around, and whatever the specific slur or slur is, we’re going to be racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, illiberal. ”
“So we are paralyzed. That’s how paralysis works, we go after innocent people and think they have resources – we attack them and we We tell everyone that we will enforce the law, even when gangs are running rampant in Oakland and people are being shot, murdered, and raped with impunity. But they… We don’t have a clue how to deal with it because we know what would happen if we did that,” Hanson said.
Silva Sr. said he has been covering graffiti for years, but said his age and need for a wheelchair made it a bigger problem. according to to the New York Post.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously insisted the state does not have a crime problem, but the growing problem has led major companies to close stores in the state. In January, the famous burger chain In-N-Out announced it was closing its Oakland, Calif., store, citing “ongoing crime issues” as the sole reason.
