Thank you.

That's California for welcome to a very special edition of Radio Free California Podcast.

I'm Will Swain, president of the California Policy Center.

You can find my colleagues and me at California PolicyCenter.org. You can find my friend and co-host

David Bonson right here. He's an economist, the host of the Capitol Record podcast. He's author of

full-time work in the meaning of life. And of course, he's founder of the eponymous investment firm,

the Bonson Group. And with us is Victor Davis Hanson, an American

classicist, military historian and conservative political commentator. He's been a commentator on

modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, The Wall Street

Journal, the Washington Times, and other media outlets. Also, Professor Emeritus of Classics at

Cal State University of Fresno, the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, visiting professor at Hillsdale.

I'm leaving out three quarters of the biography. I have printed out, Victor. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

So grateful. So, David, I'm going to let you carry most of the hosting responsibility here, but I just do want to introduce the subject, and that is that David, you and I talk frequently about why California just continues to vote for incompetent political leadership. We've discussed the sort of the financial power of government unions,

the power of environmental activists or other kinds of activists, psychological impulses,

historical, philosophical. You know, the fascination with Marxist and, let's call it,

deconstructionist or a Frankfurt school sorts of philosophy

in our universities. But Victor, maybe I can just start with the first question. What's the

matter with California? Why is it broken in these unique ways, I think? We're an outlier in the

United States. Yeah, I think to answer that question, we have to ask why in the last

60 years did they vote for 32 years of Reagan, Dick Mason, Pete Wilson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger,

and they don't do that today.

They have supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, no statewide office holders or Republican.

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