Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson slammed California on Thursday for “going after” law-abiding citizens as crime continues to rise within the blue state.
Hanson appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” to discuss a recent report of how the state ordered 102-year-old California resident Victor Silva Sr. to pay over $1,000 in fines or paint over his vandalized fence. A Fox guest host asked the senior fellow his thoughts on California’s “priorities,” noting that it is where Hanson currently resides. (RELATED: California’s Economic Woes Are Way Worse Than We Thought)
“Well, we have these existential problems that we either cannot or will not address,” Hanson said. “And so the government, the bureaucracy, and the administrative state compensates by going after the law-abiding citizen for minor offenses because they can’t address the felonies and the real causes that are destroying the state. Now [with] that weird asymmetry, they feel psychological redemption or they’re doing their job. But what is happening is, they are picking on the middle class and the upper middle class. Remember, 1% pays 50% of the income tax and 5% pays 80% and they are leaving at a rate of about 400,000 people a year – given 13.2 income tax and what you just described.”
“We know what the problem is, you know,” he continued. “It’s a classical Roman dilemma when the Romans great historian Livy said, ‘When the medicine is worse than the disease, the civilization decline[s].’ We know what we have to do. We have to put the homeless in facilities, we’ve got to go after gangs, we’ve got to lock people up – if they have three strikes, we have to incarcerate them for a long long time. We have to produce more energy, build more dams. We all know that, but the very idea that we would try to do that or close the border and not give 500 million to illegal aliens when we’re 76 billion in debt then we’re afraid to do what we feel. That would be contrary – we’d be racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, illiberal – whatever the particular slur or smear is.”
“So we are in paralysis. That’s what paralysis does, we go after innocent people, we think they have resources – we’ll go attack them and we’ll tell everybody we enforce the law. Even when gangs are running wild in Oakland and people are being shot, killed, raped with impunity. But they don’t have a clue how to address that because they know what would happen if they did,” Hanson stated.
While Silva Sr. stated that he had been covering the graffiti for years, it has grown into more of an issue due to his age and need for a wheelchair, according to the New York Post.
While Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously claimed that the state does not have a crime issue, major companies have begun to close down stores across the state due to the rising issue. The famous chain burger joint, In-N-Out announced the closure of their Oakland, California location in January, citing the “ongoing issues with crime” as the sole reason.