RUSH: Victor Davis Hanson was on The Ingraham Angle last night with Laura Ingraham. He’s a senior fellow, brilliant man at the Hoover Institution’s campus at Stanford, Palo Alto. He’s a farmer in the California Central Valley. Question she asked him: “The left never lets a good crisis go to waste, Victor. You and I have talked about this before, but will people see you through some of these schemes? Will they ultimately recoil and resist them?”
HANSON: People are advocating to manipulate the crisis and, more importantly, to enact an agenda that didn’t have 50% support. We saw that in the Democratic primaries. Nobody wanted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All or open borders. This desire to manipulate this crisis for an agenda that does not have popular support and would transform or reject the status quo before the virus — which was the best economy we’ve had in decades — doesn’t make any sense.
RUSH: Right. His point here is that the left must always force what it wants on us, because it’s never popularly supported. The left did not win the White House running on this agenda. Crazy Bernie, running on this agenda, did not win the Democrat nomination — and so they’re gonna force it. They’re going to take the occasion of the crisis of the coronavirus to force this communist, progressive agenda on everybody through the spending bills and through the other efforts to restimulate the economy.
The next question he got from Laura Ingraham: “Well, you gotta imagine the policymakers, at some point, will hear from the people who are suffering with these job losses — and these businesses — and say, ‘Hey, you know, we’ve got lives as well. We have to somehow preserve them. We need to get back to work.'”
HANSON: I’m sitting in a state that’s the fifth largest economy in the world that’s completely shut down, and we’ve suffered less than 250 deaths and we have about three million people, three people per million that have died. We have twice the population of New York, and we’ve suffered one-tenth the deaths. We have three people per million die. And that’s just a fact of life. When we have 760 people in California dying every day, and during this crisis we’ve got about four extra on average.
RUSH: I want to go through this again ’cause this is the point. I have been trying to focus on California all week. Aside from the stark, shocking impact of these numbers, is what they mean. Let’s go through this. California, the fifth largest economy in the world. It is completely shut down. Forty million people live in the state of California, and they have suffered less than 250 deaths from corona. Three people per million have died, and they have shut down the state because of it. Three people per million population have died. California has twice the population of New York and yet they’ve only suffered one-tenth the deaths. Three people per million die. It is a fact. It’s not opinion.
Do you know 760 people die in California every day from various things — traffic accidents, cancer, old age, you name it? And I’ll tell you, there is something else that’s happening that you better beware of. The authorities are assigning coronavirus as cause of death to people who may be dying from other things. They are invested in the stats because the stats equal money. Stats equal attention. Stats equal federal bailouts.
But these numbers in California are striking. Why in the world, with all of the people from China who have flown in and out of California, five to 7,000 a day since December, why are these numbers so low there? I maintain to you that it is herd immunity. I think they’ve immunized themselves. I think the people in California had this disease in December, January, didn’t know what it was, many people lived through it, got better, built up antibodies before anybody knew what coronavirus was, before anybody knew it had escaped China. Because social distancing cannot explain the low numbers. They only started social distancing two days prior to New York, two days of a lead of social distancing will not explain the great disparity in these numbers.
Again, 40 million people in California. The state economy is shut down, 40 million people. They have less than 250 deaths from coronavirus. Three people per million have died. They’ve got twice the population of New York. And yet one-tenth the number of deaths. Three people per million dying, 760 people die in California every day. They’ve shut down the state because 250 deaths have happened from coronavirus. Victor Davis Hanson, we’ve had about four extra on average.