Victor Davis Hanson Exposes Oakland’s Lawlessness

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Victor, let’s start talking about Oakland, which I know you’re very familiar with, and you probably had to dodge the bullets there or whatever.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. I have to drive through there to Santa Rosa once or twice a year, and if I get on an off ramp, you know, I am very leery. Yeah. 

Jack Fowler: Well, yeah. Lock the doors. So here’s an article, really interesting article from City Journal, Sanjana Friedman. It’s called “Oakland’s Experiment in Anarchy.” I’ll read here quickly. “What would happen to a city if its government effectively stopped enforcing laws protecting public space and private property? 

“Oakland has been testing this proposition. You know, its violent high crime rate is four and a half times the national average. But in addition to that, in recent years, the city has also struggled to enforce laws against illegal dumping, burglary, car break-ins, and squatting. As a result, much of the city is buried under trash, according to a recent government report, which found that the city collects some 20 million pounds of illegally dumped debris. 

“Also, Oakland has the highest level of property crime of any large city in the U.S. It solves these crimes at a rate of just 0.1%, not 1%, 0.1%, meaning that one in every 1,000 property crimes is reported to the Oakland Police and it results in arrests. City’s also become home to a shadow industry of squatter removal services, including one whose sword-wielding operators promise to help landlords reclaim homes from unauthorized occupants. 

“Why? Because the city’s sheriff’s office takes months to act.”  

This is what becomes and has become of a major American city. Victor, your thoughts as a Californian or just as an American on this?  

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, this is a lab test. We have candidates that are running as I speak, not as you will hear this, but I am talking on Monday afternoon, and they have told us that if you defund the police, if you don’t— you had cash bail, if you don’t arrest people for breaking the existing laws, if you feel that empty houses that are either up for sale or their second homes are not really the owners’, but they are the communal property in which the dispossessed have a right to go squat, even though that’s against the law. 

And if you believe AOC or Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani, who said he was going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods, AOC said the chief existential threat in America, it’s white supremacy. Ilhan Omar trumped her on that and said white racism. But the point I’m making is that this is what you want. 

This is what people vote for. It is—if you’re a leftist Democrat and you’re a socialist, you say Oakland’s our place. There’s very few white people. There’s no white rage, no white supremacy, no white privilege, because there’s no white people there. Essentially, I mean, there are some up in the Oakland Hills in Piedmont, but that’s a separate, almost a separate enclave. 

But Oakland itself is a DEI city. It has all minority police, basically. It has minority civic government. It has minority executive branch, minority mayor, and more importantly, they’re all left-wing and socialist. So they did defund the police. They don’t arrest people. They feel squatters have a right, and this is what you get, and people are going to be voting on that. 

So really, Oakland’s on the ballot, and this is their utopia. And they would say, not like you and I or our listeners, they would say, well, you’re just an old white guy, and, you know, come to Oakland. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a people city. And yeah, we get our hair mussed up now and then, but, you know, homeless people are homeless people. 

They have a right to be in the sidewalk, and they defecate and inject and urinate, but that’s not a big deal. And property is not really property. It doesn’t belong to people. It’s communal. And we here in Oakland are a communal city, and we believe in green energy, and we believe in open borders, and we don’t allow ICE here. And look at the result. 

And the result is that no one would really want to live there. And those that do live there would like to move. How close it is to insane wealth. And yet it is such a, you know, pre-Detroit type of city. Oh, I mean, yeah, if you go across the freeway into Piedmont… I had a very strange experience. 

I was asked to speak at a country club near Piedmont, and there were wonderful people there, but I had to get gasoline because I was trying to… So I made a left turn coming into Oakland Piedmont into a service station that was completely closed down. So then I went further into the neighborhood, and I found one, but the person from the Middle East that was in the window had so many bars and tinted glass, I couldn’t even know who it was on speaker. 

And two of the gas pumps were not working, so I was in line, and it was pretty scary. There were people coming up to me and asked for $5. Then I got out and went across on-ramp, and I went up to the Piedmont area, the hills to the east of Oakland. And when I was looking for a parking place in beautiful homes, it’s not very big, but I parked, and within, I would say, 10 seconds, a private security guard said, “You do not have a sticker. 

What are you doing here?” And I said, “I’m trying to find this person. I’m supposed to give a lecture at his house.” “Oh, I know who he is. Follow me. Get in your car.”  

So then I drove, followed him, and then he said, I showed had to show him my ID, and it was like wonderful in the sense… So there were two different antithetical communities right next to each other. 

There was no middle class that I could see of, but that’s what we— 

Jack Fowler: I had one experience in Oakland, Victor. I picked somebody up at the airport, and then he was hungry. So we went to a Denny’s, and I don’t—I believe the Denny’s has been closed, is now closed, but I thought I was in some kind of security operation. 

I’ve never been in a restaurant that seems so concerned about thievery or likely thievery. And then around it, there were chickens everywhere running around the outside of the Denny’s. And I thought, “Is this a major American city?” I mean, there’s nothing wrong with chickens, don’t get me wrong. And I’m sorry—but we’re attacking Oakland because I know the former governor, Jerry Brown, who was also the former mayor there, occasionally listens to this show, and he might get— 

Victor Davis Hanson: I think he was, more or less, as mayors go, successful. I think it was a different place when he was there. But he doesn’t represent the Democratic Party anymore. It’s moved way beyond Jerry Brown liberalism. It’s into insanity right now as we’re—I’m thinking about what these people are running on. 

Basically, you got to remember the Democratic Party is an anti-Semitic party. It really is. 

Hasan Parker was right about that. No Jewish candidate could be nominated for their party nomination. If they did, they would have a civil war in that party. It’s just not going to happen. And no one could say that they were for fossil fuels or fracking or a closed border or deportation or supported ICE, period. 

They will cut the military. They would do all of it. That’s who they are. And Oakland is their model city. It really is. They don’t want to live there themselves. Bernie Sanders doesn’t, with his three homes. And Spartacus, who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood, wouldn’t want to live there. And Kamala Harris, I guess she moved from Brentwood to Malibu, $20 million home, something like that. 

She doesn’t want to live there. And Hillary Clinton in her mansion and Barack Obama in his fort, they wouldn’t want to live there, but they support the idea of Oakland for other people. 

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