Exclusive—Victor Davis Hanson: California Is a Confederate Society with 'Sick Fixation' on Race

California is a neo-Confederate state with a “sick fixation” on ethnicity and race, historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson said in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.

California’s hemorrhaging of residents to states with more freedom and prosperity is exacerbating the state’s social stratification in terms of wealth, Hanson stated. He said the state’s volume of illegal aliens further amplifies the wealth divide.

“The middle class has left,” he said. “About ten million people left California in the last 40 years, and we know where they went. They went to Nevada, Idaho, Texas, Florida, Tennessee. We have half of all the undocumented illegal aliens in the country. Twenty-seven percent of Californians were not born in United States, whether they’re legally [here], or residents, or citizens.”

Hanson characterized California’s polarization based on wealth as resembling the Antebellum South’s racial segregation.

“That is the nexus: great wealth, great poverty. But the way I look at it is — they would not want to hear this — but just think of the old Confederacy or the Antebellum South — one party, Democratic — this is a one-party state. They had Big Cotton. We have Big Tech. Big Tech runs the whole state, just like Big Cotton [ran the Antebellum South].”

He continued, “The Old South, we had the plantationist class. [Today], these are the people that live in Woodside or Berkeley Hills or Palo Alto, then you had everybody else: black slaves, and you had the poor, what they called ‘white trash.’” There was no middle class. When I go to Stanford, I see all these wealthy kids there, and then I go along El Camino, everybody’s living in a trailer.”

“I go to the Apple or Google or Facebook campuses, and people are living in the streets that work there,” he added.

Contemporary racial agitation pushed by Big Tech’s management and the broader left is reminiscent of racial segregation in the Old South, Hanson said. He noted how today’s left-wing fetishization and commodification of imaginary victimhood based on ethnicity and race resemble the focus on racial designations within the Confederate States of America.

He remarked, “The other thing about the Old Confederacy, they were obsessed with race, and it was the one-drop rule. Everybody was trying to figure out, when a baby was born, what the precise percentages [were], and then they were a ranked society. When I get my email in the morning, it’s all about one thing: race — race, race, race, race, race. I turn on the television: ‘white privilege.’”

“Can Elizabeth Warren pass as a minority? Can Ward Churchill pass? Rachel Dolezal? It’s like African Americans in the South trying to pass as white people.”

He concluded, “It’s just a sick fixation on our superficial appearance. It’s a very Confederate society, California. It’s medieval, feudal. There is no middle class anymore.”

Hanson is the author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

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