#2542 - Steve Hilton

Steve Hilton, a former senior adviser to David Cameron who later taught at Stanford and hosted a show on Fox News, is now running for governor of California against Xavier Becerra, who served as Biden's health secretary. The first post-primary poll showed Becerra at 61 percent and Hilton at 36 percent, but a more recent poll has the gap under 10 points. Rogan was skeptical Hilton could win, saying California would have to be sufficiently broken for that to be possible, while Hilton insisted he is a genuine candidate rather than someone using the race as a platform.

California's total budget is just over 350 billion dollars this year, up from 170 billion dollars ten years ago, while outcomes have worsened across nearly every measurable category. The state has the highest unemployment rate, highest poverty rate, and worst business climate of all 50 states, with Chief Executive Magazine ranking it last for business conditions for roughly 12 to 13 consecutive years. Democrats have held a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative chambers for more than a decade and have controlled every statewide office for 16 years. The state Supreme Court has 61 Democrat appointees. Hilton argues Sacramento legislators routinely pass bills written by lobbyists that they never read, and notes the last time the legislature overturned a governor's veto was 1979.

At least 24 billion dollars went to homelessness spending with no audit accountability, homelessness increased over the same period, and the governor vetoed audit attempts twice. Permanent supportive housing units cost between 600,000 and one million dollars each to build, while a private developer told Hilton apartments could be built for roughly 250,000 dollars per unit without government requirements. The cost gap is attributed to union contracts, material mandates, and environmental rules that funnel contracts to a small group of crony developers. A policy called housing first makes it illegal under California law to require addiction treatment or job training as conditions of receiving assistance, and homeless individuals placed in housing often return to the street because addiction goes untreated. Rogan noted that one homeless nonprofit executive received a salary of 1.6 million dollars and another received 2.6 million dollars. Proposition 64 cannabis tax revenue was sold to voters as funding for substance abuse prevention but instead flows through a single nonprofit distributing grants to roughly 500 other nonprofits that Hilton says use the funds for voter registration and ballot harvesting.

California has the highest gas prices in the country, roughly two dollars above the national average even accounting for the Ukraine war effect, driven by the state gas tax, refinery regulations, the low carbon fuel standard, the cap-and-invest program, and importation of approximately 80 percent of its oil from Iraq and the Amazon rainforest on bunker fuel ships, while abundant in-state reserves in Kern County sit roughly 100 miles by pipeline from refineries in Long Beach and Torrance. California electric bills are double the national average. High-speed rail was originally budgeted at 30 billion dollars with a 2020 opening date, has spent 15 billion dollars, and now carries a projected total cost of 230 billion dollars with completion potentially pushed to the end of the 2030s. The current plan requires a bus connection between Bakersfield and Los Angeles because the train cannot cross the mountains without four tunnels totaling up to 28 miles across the San Andreas Fault.

Hilton described systematic failures under Becerra at HHS involving unaccompanied migrant children, including the dismantling of vetting procedures, strike teams instructing case workers not to check documentation, and the firing of workers who raised flags. Roughly 330,000 unaccompanied migrant children are still listed as missing by HHS, 40 died under HHS oversight, and 200 were sent to an address that turned out to be a front for traffickers. Specific cases included a child placed with a woman wanted by Interpol, a teenage boy who ended up in a meat packing plant and had his arm ripped off, and a girl forced to work 20 hours a day while sleeping on a floor. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. characterized Becerra as having turned HHS into the largest child trafficking operation in history.

Hilton and Rogan discussed Fauci's role in gain of function research, with Hilton arguing Fauci was the main global champion of the practice rather than a passive funder, and that Fauci co-wrote a piece around December 2011 with Francis Collins explicitly arguing that engineering potentially dangerous viruses in the laboratory is a risk worth taking. Obama placed a moratorium on gain of function research in 2014 covering projects already in progress. Hilton claims Fauci broke the Trump-era review protocol that replaced the moratorium and also enforced the narrative that calling COVID a lab leak was racist. Fauci's leaked emails showed he was aware the case fatality rate was far lower than what he was publicly promoting. Biden's preemptive pardon of Fauci covered a ten-year period with no specific crimes enumerated, and Fauci subsequently pleaded the Fifth despite recipients of presidential pardons not being supposed to do so.

Hilton's proposed policy platform includes no state income tax on income under 150,000 dollars, cancellation of high-speed rail funding and free healthcare for illegal immigrants, and an Operation Zero Waste reorganization of state agencies.