MEGYN KELLY: [California Democratic gubernatorial candidates] were basically owning that last night. So, Rob, basically being like, look, Katie Porter, I think, was the one who said it. Like, the only the only new people who are coming here are illegals. So, yeah, we need to take care of them. I mean, again, thank you for saying it out loud.
SOHRAB AHMARI, UNHERD: I would say there’s one broad observation to make about this. And maybe it’s me trying to see the silver lining. But if you compare this to what Democratic internal debates were like in, say, 2020, it’s remarkable how much of it was focused on what you might call material questions like health care, like a living wage, and less so about bracket the question of immigration aside, less so about policing or trans or stuff like that.
So to some extent, even in the California Democratic Party, it has filtered down that the craziness of 2020, what we’ve come to call the woke kind of peak woke era, didn’t work for the party. And so they can talk about other things. However, the kryptonite to that is immigration, the thing that undoes everything else.
So I think about myself. In a different universe, I could be a 1990s Democrat because probably unlike the two of you, I think labor unions in the private economy are a good thing.
KELLY: I was a 1990s Democrat.
AHMARI: Fair enough. Or support for, just broadly speaking, the New Deal programs. I think those are achievements of working middle-class people in this country. However, they don’t work if you have infinity immigration, right?
Because first of all, undocumented migrants, the reason big business loves undocumented migrants is because they put downward pressure on the wages of native-born workers. Obviously, they put- Of course, they’re cheap. And they put pressure on public services.
So the fact that they can’t let that part of what I consider 2020 era madness, which is infinity migration, the fact that they can’t let it go in a way is a tragedy. And look, California has huge problems. It is still, I think like the eighth or ninth largest economy in the world if just taken by itself, but that’s changing.
Hollywood is increasingly moving to Atlanta. A lot of tech is no longer bound to Silicon Valley. And a lot of this has to do with these kinds of lifestyle governance at which Democrats are really bad, right?
Democratic cities, especially on the West Coast and especially in California, have come to be associated with tent cities and just this atmosphere of lawlessness. And that’s the sort of stuff they need to be talking about. Not what I consider a very millennial style of campaigning, which Katie Porter especially exemplified, but it is all the other candidates where it’s like me.
