Steve Hilton & Spencer Pratt: Fixing California, Cheaper Gas, Ballot Fraud & CA Republicans

The conversation opens by introducing a candidate for governor of California and calling him unusual on two counts: he is a Republican, and he is British. The guest is welcomed as Steve Hilton and is described as a former tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. The opening clips preview the main themes: complaints about Democratic governance, the claim that California already has the highest taxes in the country, a promise to make the first 100 grand of income tax-free, and the argument that doubling the state budget has not made services twice as good.

California means to America what America means to the world.

The stage introduction is urgent from the start. The crowd hears that there are "seven weeks to save our state." Asked why California matters so much, the speaker describes it as the biggest and richest state. He says he is an immigrant who moved there in 2012 and became neighbors with Chamath. He presents the state as "the absolute essence of what we love about America," pointing to innovation, ambition, hustle and a "rebel spirit." As evidence of that history, he lists entertainment, which began in Los Angeles more than a century ago, along with tech and what he calls the world's leading agriculture industry.

The speaker grants that California keeps real advantages: natural beauty, weather, startup energy, what he calls the best innovation ecosystem in the world, and great universities. Against these he sets a list of failures he blames on 16 years of one party in control. He says California has the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest unemployment rate, by far the highest cost of living, and the highest housing costs. He says millions of people are leaving. He also cites Chief Executive Magazine, which he says has ranked California 50th out of 50 for business climate in its annual survey of business leaders for more than a decade.

One participant asks how Democrats, once linked to "peace and love and permissiveness and openness," became "the rule police." The answer puts the cause in one-party rule as such, from either the right or the left. Such rule, the speaker says, produces "a kind of insular, self-regarding elite" focused on its own ideology and interest groups. He calls Sacramento one of the most corrupt systems in the country because of how much power donors such as unions and trial lawyers hold. He ties this to litigation risk, claiming a business started in California has a "90% chance you're going to end up in litigation."

The speaker backs the one-party claim with a list: Democrats hold all eight statewide elected positions, a two-thirds majority in the legislature, every big county and city, and a 6-1 Democrat-appointed majority on the state Supreme Court. He says the legislature passed 1,118 bills last year. When the campaign printed them out, the stack was "twice my height," which he uses to argue that nobody, including Gavin Newsom, reads them before they become law. The policy he announces is to cut the number of regulations from over 420,000 to under 200,000 by the end of a first term. The transcript renders these figures with dollar signs, which looks like a transcription error since the subject is a count of regulations. He says that cut would make California competitive with the rest of the country.

The sharpest challenge from the hosts' side is whether the same interest groups that control the legislature also control the electoral machinery: ballot harvesting, campaign operations, the unions and the votes. If so, outsiders may face a system that is "impenetrable." The speaker agrees that a "very powerful and corruptly funded machine" exists and says the campaign frames the race as "the people versus the machine." He argues that a majority of Californians nonetheless want change.

His evidence is the polling trend. On primary night, he says, the two Republicans together took 35% (25% for him and 10% for the other Republican) against 65% for all the Democrats combined, a 30-point gap. He says later polls showed gaps of 25, 18 and 14 points, and the latest showed eight. He calls the idea that Californians must either "put up with it or leave" a "very un-American attitude" and says this as a new American citizen.