Well, I came to Los Angeles in 1988 and in the year since then I watched the air get much,

much cleaner and the politics gets much, much dirtier.

But it honestly took me the better part of 25 or 30 years for me to really understand

what's going on in California and not just in California, but in virtually every Democratic-run

city all around the country.

The patterns are the same and let's take a look at it.

Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Whittle here with Steve Green and Scott. And a gentleman,

sat there, watched for a decade or more, wondering how the people who were running the state of

California could not understand that their high taxes were driving the middle class tax base out of the state.

And I would say the, I would go around telling people that, well, here's how the California legislature works.

People are leaving the state because of high taxes.

That's reducing our revenue base, so the only solution to that, of course, is to raise taxes even higher. It's a death spiral, and it took me forever, really took me forever, to come to the understanding

that it's not that they don't know that that's what it's doing, that that is what they want,

that the destruction of the middle class in California and the, and the just kicking the middle

class out of California and out of these the, just kicking the middle class out of

California and out of these democratic cities like New Orleans and so on, siding with the

criminals, these, these DAs that let people back on the street, homelessness, crime, people

defecating everywhere, crazy people everywhere. All of this stuff says, well, why don't they do

something about it? They are doing something about it. They're doing this on purpose. They are trying to drive the middle class away from these areas so they can

cement their control. Now, whenever I start feeling a little blue about things, I'll pretty much go to

Victor Davis-Hanson because that guy has the ability to take the long view. And he said something about the middle class

that I had never heard before, and it was such an astonishing statement, it actually stopped me

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