Steve Hilton

“My parents are Hungarian. They were refugees from Communism. And I grew up in England in a town called Brighton on the South Coast. My stepfather is also Hungarian. He had an amazing story. He was a refugee as well, but literally ran across the border. He grew up in a small village on the west side of Hungary. In 1956, when he had the Soviet invasion. And he tells this amazing story they heard on the radio. The Russians are coming. And he and his brother and some friends from his school, he was 14 years old, like one year younger than my youngest son right now. And they just ran. They literally ran for this right. We want our freedom. They ran to the border, barbed wire fences, minefields, got shot out by the guards, all that. Half of them were killed.”

“There are so many things I see in California today that are exactly like the UK in the 70s. You've got the massive dominance of the unions in policy making. You've got a slurotic economy. You've got massively high taxation. At one point, I think the top rate when you add in the wealth taxes in the UK was literally 98 percent, but you had that confiscatory taxation and top rate of 60 percent and so on. Very very similar.”

“That first part, first 100 grand tax free, actually in many counties in California today, the official definition for low income is 100,000. That number may sound very high to people in other parts of the country. It's actually the definition in a lot of counties of low income. So you've got people earning 70 grand, 80 grand, 90 grand in California. They are paying 9.3% state income tax. That rate is higher than the top rate in most states in America.”

“One billion dollars over the last 10 years, 100 million every year since 2015 This is from the Climate Change Mitigation Fund, which is part of the cap and trade system. 100 million a year was allocated to be spent on climate change mitigation. In this case, it was solar panels for low-income apartment buildings. Of that one billion total in 10 years, the actual amount spent on the purported benefit here, solar panel installation was 72 million. 928 million actually went to non-profits doing all the usual Democrat associated bullshit, frankly, voter registration, environmental justice campaigns, all that kind of stuff.”

“There's one meeting I had with the legislator who was described to me as good on housing. We had a great meeting. They said, this would be transformational. I said, great, let's work on it together, bipartisan, you're Democrat, I'm Republican, that'd be great, people like that. Oh, I couldn't support you publicly. Why not? Well, the unions would hate it. We were sitting in an office, you could see the state capitol down below, high up. They just wave their arm around like this and said, yeah, the unions run this place.”

“We are now importing nearly 80% of the oil that we use. But the difference is, we used to produce most of what we use in state. Now we are importing nearly 80%. And that has driven up the cost. You have to strip it for halfway around the world. Our number one provider is Iraq right now. That's the number one source of oil.”

“You see a lot of attention now on Mississippi, rightly so, because for one third of their spend per student than California, their results are spectacularly better. It's really happened in the last 10 years, and there's some simple practical things that they do. Number one is how you teach kids to read. There's a technique called phonics. It's a way to teach kids to read, and it's totally clearly established as the most effective. It's barely used in California schools at all.”

“Last year, even the Democrat legislature passed a bill called the Sober Housing Act, which would have taken a certain proportion of homeless spending and allocated it to a shelter where you had a requirement with sobriety. Newsom vetoed that bill. It's unbelievable. So we got to have a 100 percent sober requirement for any kind of state services on homelessness.”

“In 2024, in the presidential race, President Trump in California, without even campaigning here or spending money on ads or anything, wasn't a targeted state, got 6.1 million votes. In other words, there's more than enough. People have just voted Republican for President Trump. Now, of course, you're not going to get 100 percent of a presidential year turnout in the midterm election. But the reason I make that point is that the votes are there, actually, even with just Republicans.”

“My parents are Hungarian. They were refugees from Communism. And I grew up in England in a town called Brighton on the South Coast. My stepfather is also Hungarian. He had an amazing story. He was a refugee as well, but literally ran across the border. He grew up in a small village on the west side of Hungary. In 1956, when he had the Soviet invasion. And he tells this amazing story they heard on the radio. The Russians are coming. And he and his brother and some friends from his school, he was 14 years old, like one year younger than my youngest son right now. And they just ran. They literally ran for this right. We want our freedom. They ran to the border, barbed wire fences, minefields, got shot out by the guards, all that. Half of them were killed.”

“There are so many things I see in California today that are exactly like the UK in the 70s. You've got the massive dominance of the unions in policy making. You've got a slurotic economy. You've got massively high taxation. At one point, I think the top rate when you add in the wealth taxes in the UK was literally 98 percent, but you had that confiscatory taxation and top rate of 60 percent and so on. Very very similar.”

“That first part, first 100 grand tax free, actually in many counties in California today, the official definition for low income is 100,000. That number may sound very high to people in other parts of the country. It's actually the definition in a lot of counties of low income. So you've got people earning 70 grand, 80 grand, 90 grand in California. They are paying 9.3% state income tax. That rate is higher than the top rate in most states in America.”

“One billion dollars over the last 10 years, 100 million every year since 2015 This is from the Climate Change Mitigation Fund, which is part of the cap and trade system. 100 million a year was allocated to be spent on climate change mitigation. In this case, it was solar panels for low-income apartment buildings. Of that one billion total in 10 years, the actual amount spent on the purported benefit here, solar panel installation was 72 million. 928 million actually went to non-profits doing all the usual Democrat associated bullshit, frankly, voter registration, environmental justice campaigns, all that kind of stuff.”

“There's one meeting I had with the legislator who was described to me as good on housing. We had a great meeting. They said, this would be transformational. I said, great, let's work on it together, bipartisan, you're Democrat, I'm Republican, that'd be great, people like that. Oh, I couldn't support you publicly. Why not? Well, the unions would hate it. We were sitting in an office, you could see the state capitol down below, high up. They just wave their arm around like this and said, yeah, the unions run this place.”

“We are now importing nearly 80% of the oil that we use. But the difference is, we used to produce most of what we use in state. Now we are importing nearly 80%. And that has driven up the cost. You have to strip it for halfway around the world. Our number one provider is Iraq right now. That's the number one source of oil.”