Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler: Speaking of war, Victor, Spencer Pratt says it’s war.  On Friday, two things happened. One is his business mysteriously burned down.  Victor Davis Hanson: I know it, it did. Not so mysteriously. I think some of his political opponents’ supporters did it, but who knows?  Fowler: Yeah. But he also put out a concession video.  I’m going to read this now. This is from RedState: Watch it. They’ll wish the mail-ballot fraud scheme to elevate [Nithya] Raman had never taken place.  Pratt says he’s moving on from the campaign phase of his mission to save Los Angeles to the next, more interesting phase, reminding people that his goal wasn’t to become mayor but to expose the corrupt machine and that he’s laser-focused on just that.  “Do you think they can really get rid of me that easily?” says Pratt. “Hey, morons, I didn’t get into this for political power. I got into this to expose the corrupt machine. Nothing’s changed. You enjoy your worthless meetings in City Hall. I’ve been lighting you up every single day, and now I don’t have to worry about offending CNN viewers.  “I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war.”  He made threats. He’s got some videos and documents that are going to be very harmful to one of the two candidates.  Victor, I think he’s here to stay. I don’t know. What do you think?  Hanson: Yeah, I think so. I think what he’s referring to is that every would-be whistleblower or discontented person is sending him material. He’s the person to do it, and he will air it, and that’s going to give him a lot of exposure and clout.  But when you run for office in Los Angeles, or California in general, what he’s basically saying is this, the subtext is this: Is it so hard to say that if you want to be a voter, then you don’t just go to get a building permit or apply for disability and give your name, and they mail it to you?  You just register to vote. You go to a state office, and you take the initiative, and you register. Then you give an address. You show a California driver’s license, which is now not required. You should have to have a driver’s license or a state-issued ID, one or the other.  They mail it. You give them an address. They check it on a computer to see if you’re actually at that address, and they mail you one ballot.  Then you take that ballot, and if you want to fill it out, we could call it an absentee ballot. Maybe you would be ill. But more likely, you should go to the polls, and you should show your California driver’s license again.  And we don’t do that.  But we do if you want to get disability. I must have been to 40 medical procedure appointments for this latest bout with cancer. I’m talking about blood draws. I’m talking about X-rays, CT scans, and lung-volume tests.  Every place I went: “Can I see your ID? Can I see your ID? Can I see your ID?”  But not to vote? Not to vote?  That’s just crazy.  So, what he’s saying is, you people conduct elections, and you have no idea who’s voting. You give licenses to people here illegally, and that license is used to get a registered vote, but you don’t even check if they’re at the address. You don’t even check if they know English.  Nobody has to know. How could you vote and not know the language of the country? By making an X. You can do that in California with a witness.  And then what’s so hard? India, you’re talking about India has 1.4 billion people. They don’t take a week to tally the ballots.  And what’s the good of saying, “Well, we authenticate”?  Well, you have to authenticate it because you have so many laxities built into this corrupt system. And even then, when you did that in the 2024 election, you only rejected 0.09% of the ballots. So, you’re not really auditing them. You’re letting them go right by you.  I think the election exposed that California has reached critical mass at this point. People said to themselves, “This state is dysfunctional. It can’t conduct honest, transparent elections with readily tabulated votes. Nobody trusts it anymore. It has no confidence from the population, and we understand what’s happening.”  300,000 to 500,000 people are leaving every year who are taxpayers in the middle- and upper-middle-income brackets.  When they go, then we have more entitlements, and more people come into the state, either legally or illegally, who are impoverished. And there’s less and less money to pay for more and more people who want federal, state, and local help in California.  And therefore, we’re going to do what? We’re going to raise the gas tax. We’re going to raise the income tax. We’re going to raise the property tax.  Then more people are going to go, and more people are going to come in to get more benefits. That’s where we’re in a doom loop.  And it’s not going to get better.  It is a Third World country. It’s falling apart.  And when you add $250 billion of fraud and stolen money—and I must say, trying to be as objective as I can, I’ve been following that story—I would conservatively suggest that, based on what’s in the paper and the names and online pictures of the people who have been arrested, 60% to 75% are immigrants.  So, that’s not a good look.  People come over here, and instead of kissing the soil and saying, “Thank God I’m in the United States. I owe so much to my host,” it’s, “Oh man, there’s nobody here. These people are stupid. They give away stuff. I’m going to get mine.”  That’s the wrong attitude.  Fowler: Hey, we flew them over here, even at our own expense, so they could then rip us off. It’s easy to connect those dots.  There’s an online publication out of Fresno, Victor. I coincidentally saw it the other day. I think it’s GV Wire. And it had an article by two nonprofit leaders from a Catholic organization.  They’re trying to do the Lord’s work, and we’re hurting in the Central Valley now. There are fewer donors, and the reason is people are leaving.  Hanson: They’re leaving. Just last week, two people that I would say are in the high-income brackets—they pay a ton of taxes—basically said, “I’m done.”  As one person said, “With the federal income tax and Medicare and the Obamacare and California’s 13.3% income tax, I pay 58% of my income. And I get the worst roads. I get gangbangers. I get high crime. I get filthy streets. I get homelessness. And I get elections like they have in Los Angeles.  “And we’re sitting on a bonanza of gas and oil, and we have $6.50 gas. We have the second- or third-largest forestry industry in the country, and we let it burn down. We have 60 million trees that burned up, and we drove everything out except maybe two companies.  “We have rare-earth minerals. We have everything. It’s the most richly endowed state in the country and the most beautiful, and it’s the most ill-governed.”  So, they’re leaving.  And I don’t know what’s going to happen. You get the impression that people want them to go. It’s like the Seattle mayor said, “Bye-bye.”  In “The Dying Citizen,” I quoted an immigrant who said, “We’re so happy you people are leaving because you’re making room for us, and we’re taking over.”  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.