TRIGGERnometry - How They Ruined California - Steve Hilton

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Steve Hilton is a British‑American political strategist and former Fox News host who is running as a Republican candidate for California governor. | Hypnozio: Expert hypnotherapy https://sponsr.is/hypnozio_Triggernometry Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Qualia Stem Cell. Go to https://Qualialife.com/TRIG for up to 50% off AND use code TRIG at checkout for an additional 15% off. - Go to https://sponsr.is/hypnozio_Triggernometry and use our code TRIGGER15 to grab 15% off your first subscription with Hypnozio Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 - Introduction 04:21 - California Is A Paradise But They've Driven People Out 10:16 - California Has Become A Laughing Stock 12:12 - How Steve Hilton Plans To Fix California 22:33 - Crime In California 30:35 - The Trump Administration's Crackdown On Illegal Immigration 44:09 - A Lot Of Money Will Need To Be Spent To Fix This 54:03 - The Bureaucracy Will Try To Prevent Change In California 58:59 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are a Republican running for governor of California, and you are currently leading the polls. Imagine that, exactly. What happened to California, mate? It's an amazing place being completely ruined, because we've had 15 years of one-party rule. For the last 10 years, California is 50th out of 56. We have the highest taxes in the country for the worst outcomes. People are sick of it, and they know that we need to change. Parents say, you know, they walk their kids to school, and they're literally stepping over dead.

who've OD'd from fentanyl. I mean, this is just unbelievable. Driven by the desire to push this decarceration agenda, downgraded a whole bunch of other crimes so that they wouldn't get automatic prison time. The r-of-an-conscious woman now downgraded. Trafficking a child for sex.

A whole bunch of child sex crimes. I know, I know, and this Carmel Harris pushed this. It just really really... captures the extent to which ideology has just taken over. If you are elected, if you are successful, how are you going to fix all that? Steve Hilton, welcome back to the show. Fantastic to be back. And this very lovely setting. Well, we wanted to present you as a man of the people.

I know, it's wonderful. This is positive populism, as I used to drive it on my show. Well, very much in the vein of positive populism, you are a Republican running for governor of California, and you are currently leading the polls. leading the polls. Imagine that, exactly. What happened to California, mate? Well, a lot of bad things. I think that's the point. This is an incredible state, as we can see, it's the most people. We're just talking about it. It's the most beautiful place in the world, as far as I'm concerned. I'm traveling this state all the time. It's magnificent. It's amazing. It's got this incredible spirit and soul and the energy. And it's all been crushed because we've had 15 years of one-party

rule, Democrats in charge of everything, the state legislature, all the statewide offices, governor, state attorney general, everything. If you look at the state legislature, it's actually 30 years or so, one party rule, total disaster. Literally, we have the highest unemployment rate in America, unemployment, California, enterprise innovation, highest unemployment rate, highest poverty rate, highest costs for everything that matters, housing costs, gas prices, electric, insurance, everything. The business climate, Chief Executive Magazine, does a survey every year, best and worst states to do business. For the last 10 years, California is 50th out of 50 states. US News and World Report, I think it was then someone did a survey just recently on opportunity,

putting together all the measures for that. 50th out of 50 states. School results, you know, everything, homelessness, obviously. And that's the thing, especially for people watching outside of California or even America. There's all the kind of highly visible things that have gone wrong. People can see the homelessness and the crime and the videos of the retail theft. All of that is true. But underlying that, the basics of living here, just a nightmare for regular working people. And so it really feels to me like all that stuff that people say, oh, a Republican can't win. It's such a Democrat state. You're never going to do it. I just think that's not true. People are sick of it. And they know that we need to change. And that's

what I'm running on. And so far so good. I think that, you know, it's a long way to go. The primary is next June, general election next November. So this is far from being in the bag. It's the opposite of that. I'm fighting incredibly hard. But the idea that we can't change, that's not true. It really, really is a classic thing, time for change. And people know that. There's a majority. Last thing I'll say, if you look at those, like, political people, when they're looking at elections, they often say, you know, the indicator, if, if, if, if, whether you're going to get a change of regime and an incumbent party or candidate is going to lose, is that question is the state or the place or whatever it is going in the right direction,

wrong direction. So in the last two years, very firmly, clear majority wrong direction, California. It's 60%, 65%. So the conditions are there. I actually really think we can pull this off, and it'll be a real revolution when we do. Well, we've just come from Austin, and it's fascinating talking to people. Austin is like the refugee city for people who've left California. And what people, I think, understand is just how much of a paradise California is, it is incredible. Right. The climate is incredible. The nature is incredible. You've got access to amazing food like you talked about businesses. It's an incredible place. And to chase so many talented, driven people out is quite an

achievement. You know, this house is not ours. It's an Airbnb, right? We looked up how much this house. I was curious how much it costs. Yeah. We looked it up. The price of this house is dropped by 40% in the last years. Yes. Because wealthy people have left. Exactly. This is the thing. Like, I actually say this. I'm on the road the whole time. It's a political campaign, speeches, all the time. And there's a kind of basic thing I say, which is why would anyone leave an amazing place like this? It's because it's so badly run. And it's impossible to live here. And they chase you out. I mean, the business, you know, I used to run businesses, started companies here and back in England, and just including restaurants. I mean, just basic, you know, these businesses that are so precious to, you know,

the heart of a community, bars, restaurants, all that. Just, it's a nightmare. It's the end. I mean, there's so many stories. I get them the whole time. Every day you collect because people tell you their stories. A woman who tried a restaurant owner in Wine Country near where I live up in the Bay Area near San Francisco. She tried to, well, she did eventually expand. She built an extension to patio for more guests to increase the number of guests from 35 to 50 need a permit and to go through a process it took six years and a million dollars what in fees lawyers inspections you have to pay for the inspection environmental report this that it's typical i mean there's something called this is going to sound obscure but it's a really good example of the insanity uh just in terms of

just regular, you know, operating anything in California. You've got something called PAGA, the Private Attorney General Act, passed in 2004. It outsources the enforcement of state labor law to just regular lawyers, attorneys, instead of the government. It's become a total racket for lawyers, trial attorneys, as they say, who are, by the way, the second biggest donors to Democrat politicians. That's why it's happening. Number one, donors are the unions. That's why the unions run everything. Number two, the lawyers, private attorney general has turned into an extortion racket for lawyers and the government. So the tiniest infraction, like, that's made up, you know, you spell someone's name wrong on the pay stop. Your break, if you're on a restaurant,

after every five hours, you're supposed to give, you know, have a certain number of minutes a break one minute late and you're hit with a lawsuit and these are costing businesses they have to settle because you don't want to go through the process going to trial 60 grand 70 grand 100 grand bigger businesses millions a year just a cost of doing business just insane i mean there's so much over the years of this one party rule it's just become this ridiculous bloated nanny state bureaucracy all paid for through higher taxes they just keep spending money they just keep spending money they doubled the budget of the state of California in the last 10 years, everything's worse. I mean, nothing works.

California isn't working. And so you're right. It's a beautiful place. I mean, the famous bits are well-known, but I'm just on the road the whole time. It's huge. And you go up north just this weekend. I was up north. It's like you've got everything here.

It's like the west and there's ranches and cowboys. And you go up to the sierras and the beautiful mountains, Yosemite, the people know. but it's incredible. Everywhere you go, the coastlines magnificent. It's an amazing place being completely ruined. I mean, my last book was called Califalia, reversing the ruin of America's worst run state. Look, I'm in agreement with you on that.

I remember I came to California the first time in 2002. Summer of 2002, I looked around and I thought, this is a paradise. Yeah. This is a paradise. And then you go to the places that I went for the first time, Santa Barbara. and it's a completely different place.

It looks downtrodden. It looks defeated. Disgusting. I mean, it's disgusting to me. You know, the lack of pride. You know, you've, these, and it's not just the big cities, but the squalor. That's the right word. You cannot believe it.

The filth everywhere, trash everywhere. Of course, homelessness, that's very visible. Everything that goes with that, we literally have plagues of rats now. Like, that's not an exaggeration because of the squalor and then actually, it's actually a really good example because they've banned a certain kind of rodenticide. So you go to the Central Valley. When I drove here from

there just to be with you here today is the greatest agricultural area in the world, the Central Valley of California. That's being ruined because they won't give farmers water because of their climate ideology. They've banned a rodenticites and there's plagues of rats. I mean, it's just a joke.

But it's a warning to everyone. Because this is what happens when the ideology of the left just is allowed to run without constraint. It's a real warning. It's the worst run state in America. And you've got Gavin Newsom, the governor, sort of running around lecturing everyone on social justice and compassion and cruelty, whatever. Meanwhile, we have the highest poverty rate, as I said, one in three Californians can't afford to meet their basic needs, food, shelter, healthcare. I mean, it's a total failure.

And it's a really good indication that once you go down that road of today's leftism, This is where it leads. It's a disaster. But also as well, look, it's a tourism, but let's be honest about it. You get the politicians you deserve. When we were talking about the excesses of wokeism and people going completely off the deep end, California was a literal punchline to many comedians' jokes, and for good reason. Yes. Are you saying you mean people voted for this crap?

Yes. Yes, and I think that because everyone said, like, how's it been allowed to happen? Well, partly because it is so nice here. So you can put up with a lot. I mean, some people, you know, business people say, well, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, you know, like, you put up with all this crap to be here, because it is so amazing. But I think it's got to the point, well, I'm, you know, my plan is that it's got to

the point where that is it, no more, we are going to change because we can't take it anymore. And actually, there's, I just want to come back to the economic thing, because you've got this situation where, again, the governor, Gavin Newsom, runs around saying, well, everything must be great. because we're the fourth biggest economy in the world. And statistically, that's true. It's a big economy. Fourth biggest in the world, great.

But beneath that big number, which is driven by a lot of really, especially in the Bayer, these big tech companies that are just making huge amounts of money, but actually don't employ very many people. At the same time, yeah, fourth biggest economy in the world, but highest unemployment in America, highest poverty rate in America.

So that is not a well-balanced, healthy economy. And I think that's what is really, you know, coming home to Roos now for them, which is that the people that they claim to speak for, you know, regular working people, particularly Latinos, especially now the majority in California, just been completely screwed by this stuff. And that dream of, you know, the California dream and, you know, good job where you make enough to raise your family in a home of your own. It's all gone.

I mean, it's just, and I think people are getting sick of it. And they just need a positive alternative. That's what I'm trying to provide. And that's the question, really, is, I mean, you talk about the excesses of this kind of new version of the left and when it's taken to its logical conclusion with no challenge, no pullback, no contest of the ideas, no feedback from reality. Yes.

And you're describing England the way that it is today. Everything you're talking about, business can't run, you know, homeless people, crime, all of these things, right? But the question is, I think, for many Western countries now and for California, including, is how do you get back from how far you've gone? Yeah. When you've got homeless people everywhere, drug addicted people everywhere, the regulations that you've talked about,

like it's in a really bad way. Yes. How do you, how do you, if you are elected, if you are successful, how you're going to fix all that? A while back, I pushed myself in training because I'm a bit of a legend, but ended up with a back strain that took far longer to recover from than it ever used to. Nothing dramatic. Just one of those moments where you realize your body isn't snapping back the way it once did. And as you get older, those moments start adding up. Turns out there's a real reason for that.

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Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend. Only on Netflix May 8th. For those who are interested in, you know, how the government works here is just a mirror of what you get at the national level. You've got the executive branch run by the governor and you've got the legislature like Congress. And the legislature is churning out all this crap. I mean, all the time.

And they have a super majority, the Democrats. We have two-thirds majority, which, by the way, is not legitimate. It's the product of gerrymandered maps. Let's not get into that. Whatever, it exists. That means they can pass. anything they want without any kind of input from Republicans. And they're just passing a ton of, I mean, apart from anything else, it's just the amount of it.

Like, I just did an event in Sacramento, the state capital, just highlighting the sheer amount of legislation. Like this year, this calendar year, the session, they passed 1,117 bills. We stacked them up. We printed them out just to see. I mean, I know I'm short. It was literally double my height, okay? And every year, more, more crap, pushed by lobbyists and all the specialists, all that stuff. So you can't really do anything about that as governor. You can't just unwrite laws. But what you can do is deal with the bureaucratic aspect of that.

You run the government. And there's a number of things. So let's just take the regulations. I'll give you a really couple of specific examples. So one of the things that's most insane about this current ideology, actually, if you look at what's causing the most damage, if you have to single one thing out, it's the climate extremism, actually.

When you look at like the real driver of the cost of everything being so high, including housing, is this climate, I call it climate elitism, because the people who are paying the price for it are working class Californians. And that, a ton of that is not legislated specifically is the way it's implemented by these endless agencies. We've got 200 plus state agencies like CARB, the California Air Resources Board,

that are just churning out these new rules and everything from trucks. And, you know, they have this thing called VMT vehicle miles travel. That gets in the way of building anything because if you want to build anything, you have to do a calculation of vehicle. How many vehicle miles traveled will be the result of you building a new housing development? A guy who runs a lovely, just sweet, exactly the kind of business I love, right? It was an artisan gin distiller in the central coast of California, beautiful young entrepreneur. You know, he's a lovely business.

He was telling me that he's doing really well. And he wanted to build a second still, like whatever, you know, I think that's the right. And they had to go to all the crap. And it was denied because of VMT, vehicle miles travel, because it would increase vehicle miles trap. Yes, that's called growth. That's called progress. like more development, more great, and they don't want that.

But that stuff is coming out of the bureaucracy. So what, as governor, you can do, you appoint thousands of people to hundreds of these agencies. Another example is, in the same sort of area, oil and gas. So we have abundant oil reserves in California. I mean, you know, not just kind of behind us in Kern County, 70 miles or so. And, I mean, not as big as some of the states, but I think we have the fifth biggest in America. We used to produce most of the oil and gas we're using California from within California. Because of their war on fossil fuels, the climate warriors are shutting it down.

So we now are in the ludicrous situation. We're using about the same as we ever did. But instead of producing it in Kern County near Bakersfield and it coming on a nice clean pipeline to the refineries here in L.A. and up on the coast. In the Bay Area, we're now shipping it in on giant supertankers, the most polluting form of transportation on the planet. They run on bunker fuel, which is like the most dirty, spewing out carbon emissions. Our number one supplier of oil now, it used to be California, used to be from here, is Iraq, where they produce it in a terrible, dirty way, terrible human rights record, but that's what we're now doing. And also our gas

prices. We have abundant oil reserves, now higher, the highest in the country, higher than Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's just insane, right? And again, I want to come back to the, you know, the man of the people point. Yes, because the first pledge I made in the election campaign, I've been working all this stuff for years, but as a candidate, it was $3 gas, which to some people around the, I mean, may not mean much if you're not watching in California, but like we have, it's $5 and it's heading up to $6 and 7 because refineries are closing because of all of this. And that really hurts regular working people who are driving two, three, four hours a day to get to and from work because in their cars and trucks, that's like $100 or so a month that you save with $3 gas. How will I get that done?

Actually, you put people into these agencies, the Air Resources Board, to be very precise, in terms of oil and gas production, CalGEM, geologic and energy management. And the way they're shutting down the California oil and gas industry is not, there's no legislation that did that. It's the bureaucrats in that agency who are refusing to issue permits to maintain existing wells, to expand them, to drill new wells in existing oil fields. All of that can change, almost overnight. So I can't do everything. But if you understand how the government works and you really have a detailed, plan, a little bit like Trump this time around compared to the first Trump administration.

This time, they were really well prepared and they kind of knew what they wanted to do, the people they wanted to put in, the executive orders, all of that. So that's, so on not on everything, but on a lot of these things, you can make a big difference. I'll just quickly do homelessness because you asked about that. So the thing about homelessness is that it's totally avoid. It should never have happened. It's completely avoidable. And the way I always put it is we would never allow someone we love to live.

like that. So why do we tolerate this for people we don't know? And the fact about homelessness is that it's illegal. It's illegal to sleep on the streets. These homeless encampments are illegal. They've always been illegal. And all these cities and county government, you know, local government in California, they've just sort of put up with it because there was a super, there's a court case I don't know, years ago called the Boise ruling. They said, well, you can't move people off the streets unless you have adequate shelter available. And they hid behind. that and said, well, and define shelter as what they call permanent supportive housing, which is an apartment unit that costs like $700,000 or going higher.

That's not what that meant at all. They could have put people off the streets, taking them off the streets, put them off the streets, put them in shelter, got them into treatment. But the law says you can't require sobriety or abstinence. I mean, 80 plus percent of people who are homeless have drug or alcohol addiction or mental help problems. So it's just this mess that they haven't dealt with. The state, as governor, you have state law enforcement resource.

You have a police force you can use. And so I say very clearly, if they won't enforce the law, I will. And I'll provide shelter and treatment and get people into what. There's so many great organizations that's just ready to do that. But they've got this attitude, this mindset of what they call compassion, which is you can't force people to do something. And the result is this squalor and danger. And parents say, you know, they walk their kids to school.

and they're literally stepping over dead people. We've OD'd from fentanyl. I mean, this is just unbelievable. To me, one of the major issues that California lost its mind was crime. It effectively seemed to legalize crime. And I remember watching this going,

this is completely not is it only bonkers. It's completely unsustainable. You've just... The Democrat government effectively legalized shoplifting. I mean, if I'm talking, out on my proverbial, please correct me. Okay, do you want me to, I'll get into it, but it's a,

it's a terrible sorry story. It's what we do at Trigonomit. I know, I'll get into it. So, okay, it actually goes back to something that I really can do something about as governor. So it's worth really understanding the sort of detail here. So it goes back to prison over crowding. And there was a Supreme Court ruling, this is like in the early 20, I can't remember exactly when that said, California's jails, prisons, state prisons are overcrowded. It's inhumane. You've got to do something about it. So instead of doing what I think most sensible people say, right, well, let's build some more.

So we have room for the criminals that we need to put it. Say, oh, no, let's let everyone out. And that's the way that you deal with it. So there was this whole process for a few years where the goal, and it's a big part of what they call criminal justice reform, was decarceration, decarceration, taking people out of jail. And as a part of that,

there was a whole combination of things and the big one that related to the point you make about shoplifting was a ballot initiative in 2014 called Proposition 47. And that was the one that famously is associated

with Carmelha Harris, because she was state attorney general. But to be accurate and fair, it wasn't her. thing. It was a ballot initiative that was put together by, you know, leftist activists, supported by the then-governor Jerry Brown, very strongly supported. And she said she was neutral, but actually, as Attorney General, she wasn't at all the way the language was written on the ballot initiative was basically selling. It was literally called something insane, like, not the name of it, but the description and then all the marketing was the Safe Neighborhoods

and Schools Act. And that's where you got this thing, which is up to $950, a day, you could steal per day. And it would just be a misdemeanor, like a parking ticket, basically, not a felony, so no jail time. The goal was to stop people going to prison. That was the purpose of all of that. And then behind that was not just the original impetus, which was the Supreme Court ruling or overcrowding, but also the ideology, which is prison is bad because it's racist. So it goes back to the race woke thing. Because, and you hear people, talk like that today still, right, that we should shut all the prisons because it's racist. Why? Because there are disproportionate numbers of black people in prison, in jail, and especially

young black men. And as the woke ideology states, any racial disparity is always the product of racism. Hence, the prisons are racist, so we have to shut the prisons. So you've had this, but that's the first thing that happened, which was Prop 47, and that had the legalized shoplifting effectively. And a bunch of other stuff as well, that was the main one. Of course, what does that do? All the people that need to steal to feel their drug, fuel their drug habit, and then you get this massive explosion of retail theft and car break-ins and car theft, all of that stuff just exploded. And there's nothing you could do because they said, all you get is a, you know, just a sort of nothing of a sentence. It's basically legalized.

And there were a whole bunch of other things. There's another one in a way even more absurdly egregious, which was less discussed, which is Proposition Prop 57, which is two years later. And this one, Carmelah Harris, I would argue, is more directly responsible for. And that one, again, driven by the desire to push this decarceration agenda, downgraded a whole bunch of other crimes so that they wouldn't get automatic prison time. And they claimed it was only, it was non-violent offences. They weren't touching violent offences. But if you look at the list of crimes that they downgraded that could no longer qualify for automatic prison time, literally one of them is domestic violence. Like it's in the name

of the thing. But they said it was non-violence. So domestic violence, the rape of an unconscious woman now downgraded. Trafficking a child for sex. A whole bunch of child sex. A whole bunch of child crimes. So that's what happened. And it's just gone on and on. And it was driven by this ideology of we can't have anyone in jail because jail's a racist. So when they said the rape of an unconscious woman, do they mean that, so effectively somebody who puts a drug in a woman's drink? Yes. She becomes unconscious. He then goes on and rapes her. Yes. That's not a jail sentence. Correct. Not automatic. Correct. I know. And this Carmel Harris pushed this. As stated, Attorney General. She's more responsible for that than, I mean, in the whole sort of national

conversation, and actually that first one I mentioned, the $950 Day, that was mostly reversed last year in an initiative that was passed called Prop I'm sorry about all these numbers, Prop 36. That kind of reversed most of that. But the other stuff, in Prop 57, the downgrading all these unspeakable crimes, that they wouldn't. You could still. get the jail sentence, but not automatic, was the Republicans in the state legislature have been battling for years, literally for years, to pick them off one by one, to try and reinstate them. And the definition is serious and violent offense. It's a definition in the legal thing that means that if it's in that category, if it's called a serious and violent crime, it automatically

gets jail to. And you've literally, if you follow what goes on this state legislature, the last two or three years, friends of mine in the state legislature, a woman called Shannon Grove, particularly has been strong on this, has been, you know, year by year trying to get child sex trafficking upgraded to a serious and violent crime. And it was blocked by the Democrats, time after time. One year, it completely failed. She had to come back the next year.

It's insane. It is. And only in the end, and again it happened, And there's about two or three of these examples. And I can't remember the exact details, but variants of unspeakable, disgusted, the worst crimes involving children and sex, sex with a minor, you know, selling a child for mine, sex. And they battled to actually, you know, give them the appropriate sentence.

And it was only finally that Gavin Newsom, as the government was so embarrassed. He's running for president. I mean, just this year had to step in. they voted it down. She was telling, Sharon was telling me stories about she would have victims, victims in the, to the committees in the state legislature to give evidence, victims of child sex trafficking. And they wouldn't let them speak because they didn't want to hear it.

Because they're so, and I think it really, actually I'm really glad we got into this because to me, probably more than anything else, it just really captures the extent to which ideology has just taken over. Ideology over all else. And it's this ideology of decarceration, criminal justice reform, prison is bad, can't send anyone to jail at all for anything. It's crazy. And one of the other things I wanted to ask you about is he mentioned President Trump.

Obviously, in his second term, he is having a real go at dealing with illegal immigration. Yeah. And the bulk of that seems perfectly normal and reasonable and good. and right, but there are some excesses and people are pointing out. There were, of course, protests here in LA. Yeah. Where do you come down on the way that the border and deportations and illegal immigration are being handled?

Well, let's just talk about the issue for a start. I mean, you've got, I mean, I hear this story the whole time. And I want to put a few things together. Going back to what I was saying earlier, highest unemployment rate, highest, poverty rate, all of this. So you've got, there's a story. that is told, which is we need illegal immigration because we have a labor shortage and who's going to do these jobs. And that's particularly strong in California, some of the industries that, you know, like agriculture and construction and all of this.

Well, I mean, all the time I come across story. I was at the California State Fair in Sacramento, went up to a couple as I do just saying, hi, I'm Steve. I've got into a conversation. and it was a family, it was the mother and a couple with their three children. And we just started chatting. And I said, what do you do? He said, well, I work construction. Oh, I used to work construction. Why do you say, well, I can't get a job anymore.

Why not? Well, they don't want to employ people like me. And he didn't want to say it. And I said, what do you mean? He said, local people. And what he meant by that, and we got into it was, and the mother chimed in as well. And how you can't get a job is now living with his mother. humiliated, right? He's a man. He's a provider for his families now ended up living with his mother

who's, and the point they made was because it's, they want to hire illegal immigrants because it's cheaper. They don't have to pay the right level. And then a really big one, which isn't talked about enough. They don't, and the mother chimed in with this. There's a video, by the way, I'm not, you can watch the video. People can Google it on X. Steve Hilton, State Fair, you'll see the conversation. And the mother said, health and healthcare. They're going to pay health care for illegal immigrants, which is a big cost for an employer.

And then at that moment, you just see it all come together because you've got employers who are, it's basically a subsidy to employers, this whole thing. It's a scam. Because while all that is going on, and Gavin Newsom has been first introduced it and has increased it, guess who does pay the healthcare for illegal immigrants?

A taxpayer. Because he's giving free healthcare to illegal immigrants. other states don't do that. And it's a big amount of money. It's like this budget year, he just increased it from, I think, $9.4 billion to $12.1, $12 billion, just for illegal immigrant health care, just for that. And so the whole system is broken. And then another thing, and you look at the welfare payments as well,

and this idea that we don't have enough workers, and we have to import the workers. And that's why it's ridiculous. Because part of the argument about the immigration enforcement, okay, you get the high profile incidents, but there's this thing, people say, well, you're going to, who's going to do the jobs? If you do this, well, I was at a dairy in Hilmar, in the top part of the Central Valley. It was the biggest cheese factory in the world. So one thing is I love about California, everywhere you go, like the biggest this in the world or the most, well, biggest cheese factory in the world, I was talking to some of the guys who work on the dairy.

and they don't make a ton of money, they make like 45, 50 grand. And they were saying, work full-time in the dairy. And they were saying their girlfriends make more money from welfare. So you've got this crazy system going on where people don't work, and you have people who do want to work who can't because of the legal immigration. So it's a mess. And the people who are losing out from all this are regular working-class people. And by the way, this argument isn't true.

Like in the market economy, this is something Eric Weinstein mentioned in a private conversation we had, is obvious fact, in a market economy, other than some very niche areas, you can't have labor shortages that you have to fill with illegal immigration because all you have to do is raise the price to a normal wage and the local people, quote, unquote.

Yeah. And also reduce the ability to live on. I mean, here's another one. I mean, I can't keep track of it. It was someone who runs a hotel, owns a hotel, just one, I think maybe two, near Sacramento, he'd hired someone from Afghanistan who was actually brought in by the U.S.

government. And the whole story was amazing. I mean, he was, this Afghan guy was, he hired him to drive the shuttle bus to take guests to him front. He's an airport hotel. And he said, the guy from Afghanistan was telling him about his experience. He'd been flown from Afghanistan by the U.S. government, first of the business. Virginia, then moved to Sacramento, given a house. They stocked his fridge. He couldn't,

didn't know which bit of the government. And it was, and the guy was told, we're going to send you groceries by delivery because you shouldn't go to the grocery store because Americans are racist and you shouldn't go shopping. Like, imagine that, the government's saying. Anyway, he's then, he's there, he's working as the shuttle driver. He says to the guy, after two days, can I go, can you pay me cash. And he said, why do you want to do that? So, well, if I, if I'm on payroll, then I lose my benefits, my welfare benefits. How, what do you, how much is that? $7,000 a month. What? 84 grand a year? Yes. Seven, that's what he said. So like, when you are, so it's just bullshit. The whole thing, the whole thing is bullshit. So it needs fixing, but my question to you was

about the way it is being fixed. Okay. So first of all, you can't have this, without just pointing out the extraordinary success of the border thing, like closing the border. It's just an incredible example of when people say government doesn't work and government, like incredible government action that it just basically stopped. You know, this flow of illegal immigration basically stopped to zero. Just with firm action that everyone said couldn't be done for decades and it's just done. Just because there's someone who's really committed to doing it and has a team that was well prepared and did it. So that's good news.

Then you've got the problem of millions of people here, and no one has an idea how many who are here illegally. And the whole argument is from the administration, which is the worst go first. We target criminals who are, of course, every illegal immigrant is a criminal in one sense because they've broken the law by being here illegally. But on top of that, another crime.

And Tom Homan, who runs, who's the border size, a friend of mine, I've known him for years, and he points, he makes this argument, which is that the reason that we have these kind of tough confrontations and the kind of pictures and the video that cause people to be upset and sometimes have provoked protests and violent clashes or whatever is entirely because we don't get cooperation from the local and state government where we're trying to find people. And here in California, it's called it, it's a sanctuary state. It was a law that was passed in 2017, SB 54, that said you can't cooperate with federal law, federal immigration enforcement. So literally you have someone in jail for some, in custody, in some sense, in the system in California who's an illegal immigrant and has committed a violent crime or any kind of crime. And they actively refused to tell that person, to tell ICE, immigration and customs enforcement that that person's there. So they could just hand them over and say, here's this person.

So that means that they have to go into the community to find them where they're hiding out after they've been released or whatever. And that is what causes both the confrontation, but also non-criminal illegal immigrants to be swept up in the whole process. So their argument is if we had proper cooperation, we wouldn't need any of this. this. That's the argument. I mean, look, I don't know. I mean, I actually, it's a federal issue, federal immigration, so it's not something that I spend too much time on other than to say, as governor, I would, I think it's important to cooperate. It's federal, it's the law. Congress passed

the law. They're just enforcing the law. I think there's, you know, this idea that we can just pick and choose just on a mask air. Well, we're just not going to, we're just going to, we're just to ignore that. I guess the counter argument might be, I mean, we had Sam Harris on the show recently, and he talked about this in very different terms to you, in terms of ICE agent not identifying themselves, grabbing some guy off the street, you know, getting physical, all of this stuff. And then he also talked about the fact that there are people whose kids are American citizens, for example, these people are being. And look, voters will have different views on that. I'm just curious to know what your views are. But how many?

A small number, I imagine. Like, I don't know, five, six, national, it's a tiny number. Yeah. I mean, nationally, I think the total number of American citizens or permanent residents that have been, according to the data is about 170, the country of like 300 million or whatever, you know, like this is, and so, again, that could, even that tiny number could be avoided if you had proper cooperation. And the people you're talking about are criminal, you know, I mean, just look at the, the crimes that they've committed.

These are sex offenders. This is what's amazing to me. You have people on the left who are now literally taking the side of rapists and wife, that famous guy, what's his name, Garcia, Diego, whatever guy. He became a sort of, you know, a national case. I can't remember the name. It's a wife-beater, domestic violence, and he's the era. You have Democrat, U.S. senators flying down to wherever it was to sort of hang out with him.

Because they're on the side of the domestic violence. perpetrators. It's just incredible. Why? Because they want to stick it to Trump. How does that make? I mean, that's what's ridiculous about this. And it could all be avoided if we just had a bit of common sense and cooperation. And they just don't want to do that. And even within the sanctuary state law in California, they keep saying you have these, you know, local leadership and sheriff's and whatever of saying, we can't cooperate because it's the law. I've read the law, even within the law that was passed in California, there's a long list of crimes where if the illegal immigrant is involved in one of these, over 200, ranging from, you know, what you'd expect,

an incredibly serious murder and whatever, to actually, you know, drug possession, illegal firearm possession. The word is, it's in the bill, discretion. There's discretion to cooperate. If only they did that, so much of this could be avoided. You wouldn't need to do it in their way. And you talk about the masks. Why do they wear masks?

Because of the doxing. These are people with families. They're literally, they've been aggressive. You have very well financed, you know, illegal immigration groups that are actively targeting law enforcement. Who are doing the job that they're enforcing the law that Congress passed. And they're being doxed so that they're, and you have many stories of their families of their families families being threatened. So that's why they wear masks. Steve. By the way, these people who are now passing laws, as they did in California,

it is a little bit of an irony that, you know, after forcing us, pointlessly to wear masks for these years, they literally now pass the law saying you banning mask wearing. Well, I mean, nobody expects that side of the political spectrum to be entirely logical. At the start of a new year, everyone talks about resolutions. But most people try to brute force change with willpower alone and burn out by February. But have you ever thought about hypnosis as a solution? Hypnosis gets a bad rap, but it's not a gimmick. It's a legitimate therapeutic tool backed by research,

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there is no way in any shape or form they should be on the streets. And you can say they've got drug addictions, and I'm sure many of them do. But they also profoundly mentally, or we're talking schizophrenia or other types. So they're going to need to be housed somewhere. And many of them, they can't afford to pay. So it's the state that's going to have to pay. You're looking at, you've already spoken about the fact that penitentiaries were full to overflowing. We're going to need to build more prisons here.

That's part of my plan. Yeah. So let's talk about that because that's also going to cost money if we're going to be honest. Yeah, but look at what they're spending money on. I mean, okay, they've doubled the budget of California in the last 10 years. It's gone from 160 billion to just over 320 billion. Okay, where's that money going? Let's just narrowly look at the homeless issue.

So this is, and the mental health costs associated with that. So their solution, I touched on it earlier, there's this thing they call permanent supportive housing. So they build apartment units for homeless people. Because it's the government, they layer on everything that you'd expect. So it's just unbelievable when you actually dig into it, how it's like Britain in the 1970s. The unions run this state. So you have massive, you know, crony deals with the unions. So these apartment units, I mentioned $700,000 earlier,

in the Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, now they're costing a million dollars each. You know, to build, that money is from the same pot, right? I've got a friend who built. apartments using this new technology mass timber where you can you put timber it's a really amazing new building material and it's very innovative and it's whatever building apartments without all the bullshit regulations it's a quarter of the price it costs four or five times as much to build anything in California as in neighboring states so that's so that's all the all the the cot that's where the budget's going so you look at the money there's an audit done not that longer 24 billion dollars on homelessness with no discernible impact the

problem just got worse. So the money is, it's not like we need to spend more money. We need to cut the budget of California, not spend more money. So there's two things I want to do, is like reduce the budget because we've got to cut taxes. That's the other, we have the highest taxes in the country for the worst outcomes. We've got to cut taxes for a start, and then we've got to spend the money where it needs to be, specifically on mental health. Let's look at that. So exactly as you say, a lot of the people are low income. So we're, when you talk about mental health care, it's part of the health care system. And for low-income people, that means it's Medicaid, which is Medi-Cal in California.

And that is federally reimbursed. It's very connected to the federal healthcare system. Most of the money spent on that in California is actually federal money. And there's a massive scam that I don't even want to get into where it's classic California. They've got this medical provider tax that they've brought in, which increases the cost of everything in order that they can attract matching funds from the federal government. It's just unbelievable. And of course, their donors are the medical, the healthcare industry who benefit from.

Taxes go up, nothing gets better. But one thing that's amazing about Medicaid and mental health is that when the system was set up in the 60s, they put in place this thing called the IMD rule, institutions of mental disease. And it's all based on that attitude of we can't have these big mental asylums, it's inhumane, one flow of the cuckoo's nests, all of that stuff. So there's a limit that was put in. To get Medicaid reimbursement from the federal government, you can't get it if your mental health institution has more than 16 beds.

It's a very specific limit, 16 bed limit, which is insane. Imagine if hospitals had a 16 bed limit, how inefficient that would be. That's what we have for mental health, for reimbursement from Medicaid. So the first Trump administration put in place a waiver, so states could apply for a waiver so they could ignore that limit. Other states have taken it up. California hasn't. So just there's all these things you can do to make things work. It's just there's no, the people in charge are clueless idiots who are just machine politicians who don't understand how anything works. They've no clue how to make anything happen. So within that massive budget, so I don't accept for a second that you need to

spend more money. We need to spend less money. And then what's left after the reduction in spending so that we can cut taxes, you've got to spend it better in sensible ways where you actually put outcomes based on what you're spending. So you get results for it. You're just putting it into this corrupt pot. There's so much corruption around this. I mean, I've mentioned the unions. There's this whole scam, which is the unions filing lawsuits.

That's the other massive problem in California, not just over regulation, over litigation. There's something called secret, the California Environmental Quality Act. It's in the 1970, Ronald Reagan when he was governor, signed it. It was supposed to stop polluting factories or whatever. Nice. Environmental protection, we love it. Over the years, it's been expanded to cover everything. The courts expanded it, not the legislature,

including housing. 70%. And then they granted this thing called the private right of action. Anyone can file a lawsuit. It's a bit like that private attorney general thing where you can just get all these nuisance lawsuits. 70% of lawsuits under Secret are filed to block housing. Most of those lawsuits are filed by the unions.

The unions use them as leverage to get what they call project labor agreements, where they get deals from, and they negotiate. The two components of a project labor agreement are what they call skilled and trained workers and prevailing wage, both of which sound very innocuous. Skilled and trained is a euphemism for union members only. It's the closed shop, which we banned in England with Mrs. Thatcher back in the 80s. That still exists in California. It's amazing. And prevailing wage, and of course, it's much more expensive. I was talking to someone in the Central Valley. They're doing a housing development.

Carpet fitters. You put the carpets in, you need to have union labor, mandatory. There weren't any union carpet fitters in anywhere nearby. They had to bust them in, from San Francisco, put them up in hotel. I mean, just mad, right? Prevailing wage sounds very nice. This guy was telling me that he had a team of plumbers doing a job that was market rate, $25 to $40 an hour. The same people on a prevailing wage job, the other side of town, $95 to $120 an hour.

And for the same work, which actually, by the way, they spend three times as long doing the prevailing wage things, they get more money. So there's just incredible amounts of cost inflation built into the system because for years, no one's taken a look at it. And it just goes on, they pass these laws, the unions run everything. So to your point about when you say you have to increase spending, no, you have to get into all this. Like it should, it's caught, you know, we're spending money on apartment buildings that are four times what they should cost, public money. So there's plenty of money there. And also, but it's going to cost a lot more to build penitentiaries, Steve.

To build and staff penitentiaries, that's going to cost a lot more. Well, they've shut far, four, and there's a fifth that's about to close, Gavin you. So I've pledged to reverse that. You need to increase prison capacity. But again, don't tell me you can't find money in the budget for that, for savings. I mean, the amount of bloat is just astronomical. And also, by the way, you can do, I mean, this is what I'm. One of the things I tried to work on back in the day when I was in the UK government is payment by results

where you actually put contracts in place. We don't just got hand out money. You get paid in exchange for results. And so for the prisons, what you want, the actual goal of it, of course there's an accountability aspect. You've got to punish people, hold them accountable for their crimes. People are going to rehabilitate them because like what nearly half of the crime is reoffending. So you want to reduce that. And that's how you reduce crime and that reduces costs.

So there's all sorts of things you could, it's just to have common sense, practical people. I just want to tell a story, if I might, about the kind of bullshit that's been going on in California, and it's to do with the fires here in L.A. And it's a little story, but I think it tells so much about the kind of people you've had in charge.

It's Karen Bass, the mayor of L.A. And a few months into the recovery from the wildfires this year, and there's all this, you know, focus on permits and rebuilding and why isn't anything happening and it's all so slow. And I saw a post on social media and it from Mayor Karen Bass. It said, I have just signed an executive order streamlining, permitting for rebuilding in LA.

It's great. It's four months too late, but whatever. I'll take it. And then it was above a clip from the press conference, a video clip. So I thought, I'll watch what she actually said. What she actually said was I remember it very precisely. I have just signed an executive order. asking agency heads with developing paths forward to streamlining permitting.

And to me, that captures it all. These are bullshit people. They're processed people. They don't know how to make anything work. They just spend money, spend money. Nothing happens. And that's why you have this total mess on every front. Steve, last time we had you on one of the things we explored is you mentioned your time

in the UK government. And you talked about the challenges any leader of Britain, has getting any of their policies implemented because of what we in Britain call the civil service. I imagine the institutional resistance to a guy like you in this state is going to make that pale in comparison. So you're going to have the entire institutionalized bureaucracy

100% sticking sticks in the wheels of your whatever metaphor is. And lawsuits. I mean, that's what I'm really... So how are you going to deal with that? You've got to be prepared. I mean, I'm doing the work right now. I'm going through it.

You know, I've got a strong, you know, It's like running a campaign like this. It's a startup. You know, we're trying to raise money. There's no, it's not, you don't inherit any kind of party resources or infrastructure, anything like that. So it's not like we have unlimited. Far from it, hardly any resources.

It's very much a shoestring operation. But I've got really good volunteers. I've got someone, you know, like great legal people work. Because I think the lawsuits are going to be a big part of it. You've got to be really clear about how you make things happen. And you just got to be really well prepared. you've got to have on day one, think through how they're going to repose it, but there's no substitute for just cutting their number.

I mean, that's where, that's the conclusion I came to in the UK. There's just too many of them. And so that's where all the bloats is coming from, and you've just got to, you know, reduce it massively. I mean, here's an example. You just saw Gavin Newsome in the budget this year where we had a deficit in California. So all this spending, and there's still a deficit. deficit of $12 billion in the budget.

Estates can't have a deficit. It has to be, you have to balance the books. And so, $5 billion they did with accounting traits, shuffling money to future years or whatever. And then the $7 billion, he took from the Rainy Day Fund, which is supposed to be like a savings thing for something going badly wrong or when you're in recession, $7 billion.

In the same budget that he was stealing from the savings that are supposed to be for something completely different, he increased spending on the beauty. bureaucracy in California by the same and by seven is exactly the same number, seven billion dollars, increasing the number of bureaucrats and increasing their pay and pensions and all this. Why? Corruption. Because he's running for him. And the union, the government unions, he wants their endorsement and their money when he runs for president. Right. And so you just got to, I mean, you've just got to be direct about it and take it on.

Well, speaking of Gavin Newsom, you mentioned him a number of times. he looks great. Great hair. Great hair. Well, as I say, no offense, mate. No, I'd say, it's time for a governor with less hair. That is what we need in Calais.

We've had enough of the hair. But Gavin Newsome, I mean, he strikes me, I don't agree with a lot of the things he says, he strikes me as a very capable politician. What does America get if it has a president Newsom? I mean, the worst governor in America. Like a total failure on every front. I mean, everything is a design.

And so his record, I think, is going to be totally disqualifying. He's got nothing to point to, nothing. I just think that the more that comes out and the more details of that come out, I don't think he's got a chance because people will just look at that and say, you know, that, I mean, remember that years ago, that classic ad on Michael Dukakis, but don't let Michael do, he ran in 1988. He was governor of Massachusetts, and there was very effective ad with just some, you know, filth and pollution in Boston Harbor or something.

I can't remember. And it was just, don't let Michael Dukakis do to America what he's done to Massachusetts. It was a killer. And I think there's just a lot of material from California. I agree with you. He's good at the politics, but that only takes you so far. You've got an actual record, and it's a total disaster. And I just think that he's been able to skate because he hasn't had real challenge to that. He hasn't really been taken on in a debate or, you know, I mean, he's had a couple of debates, but not really with anyone who can really get into the record and expose the complete calamitous failure. So I think that, you know, Hill is obviously running, he's been running for 20 years, people say. It's all he's really been focused on. But I think

it's just the scale of the failure. It's not just middling. We literally, the line I used all the time is we're top of every list you want to be the bottom of, and bottom of every list you want to be the top of. It's a total failure. And so, I don't know, I can't see it. I just can't see the country voting for, you know, looking at what's happening in California. Yes, please, we'll have more of that. Well, Steve, if you are successful in the election next year, you will, it will be a political earthquake. I mean, there's no understanding that. A Republican getting elected as governor of California, it would be quite incredible. So one of the reasons we were interested in having you on this early

just to watch the journey and see how that unfolds. That would be fascinating. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters, a lot of them at residents here in California in a second. Before we do, though, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I want to say something about how amazing it is, how amazing this country is, actually.

You've been here too long, man. No, no, no, I understand. I can sort of show up here. and, you know, be in this position. Yeah. I was thinking about that. It's actually amazing. And it's beautiful. You're a first-generation American running for governor of California.

We moved in 2012, my wife, my two sons. And I taught at Stanford University, and I started a business and hosted a show on TV and I'm running for government leading in the polls. It's amazing. You know, and I love this country. And I became an American 2021. And actually, I've taken a step further. I've renounced my UK citizenship.

which I didn't realize this is a bureaucratic process you go through. You also have to pay. I didn't realize that. I've just paid the exit fee, which is £482. So I'm all in for California and America. Steve Hilton, thank you very much for being here. Head on over to Substack where Steve is going to answer your questions. What are California's greatest resources and how can executive policy immediately impact the employment of them without waiting on the legislature?