Steve Hilton at the Scottish Rite Center

Steve Hilton has a plan. He calls it “Califordability.” 

He also has a vision. It’s called “Califuture.” 

Maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe these are just words he speaks, some concepts of an idea, en route to the preferred Republican manner of governing by sneering at the opposition. The audience of about 300, predominantly white, mostly older people who came to see him at the Scottish Rite Center by the Lake took the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s terms seriously enough that they didn’t laugh at them, but they didn’t cheer, either, as they did at some of his other comments about tearing apart government bureaucracy and cutting taxes on people making less than $150,000 a year. (The flier says $100,000.)

Before we could see Hilton, though, a staffer led us in the pledge of allegiance. The Scottish Rite Center, a century-old place that feels like the height of “school auditorium,” and where I remember once seeing a Christmas concert, was already patriotic enough to have a flag on a mast on one side of the stage. As we pledged, people mostly put their hands on their hearts; the hats, including at least one MAGA hat in the front row, stayed on. 

After the pledge, Gloria Romero warmed up the crowd: once the Senate Democratic majority leader, she switched parties in 2024 over gas stoves, Covid lockdowns, and gender matters, endorsing Trump and declaring RFK, Jr a “personal hero.” The fliers that her people left for the audience note that she was the first woman to lead the Senate—a role in which she advanced legislation that she now plans to overturn and invalidate.

“I am really excited because most people have no idea what is a lieutenant governor,” she says. She asks how many people know the person currently holding the position. Four people raise their hands. 

The Lieutenant Governor is officially in charge of education in California, she explains, before offering a familiar spiel about the state’s schools. She adds, like she and countless other state-level Democrats before her have said, that reading and math proficiency is worse among Black and Latino students, though she doesn’t offer any remedies for the problem. Looking down at the flier in my hands, I see that Hilton’s education plan says something about firing teachers. 

Then Hilton walks up the aisle, holding a crown-shaped balloon and some flowers, trailed by staffers and fans with camera phones. The crowd loves it. Romero’s birthday was yesterday, and after shaking some hands en route to the stage, he hands the goods over to his running mate. 

“No kings in America, but maybe queen for a day?” he says. The crowd sings happy birthday. 

Hilton, a US citizen since 2021, is from England originally, and only went over from two citizenships to one last year. The outsider status has a way of burnishing his credibility as someone who came from afar, could surely go somewhere else, and still chooses to stay (despite rising hostility to rich Republican Trump apologists like himself). He dresses like a 1990s daytime talk show host: tight pants and muscle shirt slipped over a hefty gut. But he is not, he wants people to know, an ideologue. He likes Trump but his supporters include Democrats, including some fifty thousand in Alameda County. To showcase his flexibility, he explains that the US was his first choice for the World Cup, though now that we’re out, England is his second. Had it qualified, Hungary would have been his third pick. (He says his parents came from there, refugees from communism.)

The loudest applause comes when this guy, best known as a Fox News personality, offers up his agenda in the form of catchy, if utterly banal talking points. As governor, he plans on “putting California on the path to common sense,” he says. “The best way to protect workers is to have a job in the first place.” 

He gets more substantive talking about “affordability”: His plan to bring down costs involves more “common sense” changes, as he calls them, which turns out to be the same simple-minded obsession with the conversion of nature to capital and tax breaks that characterizes Republican thinking today. However, instead of cutting taxes on “job creators” or some other code for the ultra-rich, his more populist approach is to eliminate taxes on the first $150,000, along with adopting Trump’s no tax on tips rule at the state level. A few of his other ideas are fancifully connected to California’s natural resources. By opening up more land to development, we could bring down the cost of land for starter homes, he says, and by managing our forests better we could produce more timber to build them. His flier also includes a vow not to raise property taxes. “Protect Prop 13!” it says.

“You’re gonna see the water flowing to our farmers,” Hilton declares, to some verbal affirmations from the audience; “You’re gonna see the oil flowing.” With more oil, the price of gas will come down, down to $3 a gallon. And for good measure, he promises to “take a sledgehammer to that bloated nanny state bureaucracy,” he says. It’s all in keeping with the “rebel spirit of California.” 

An older fellow with a MAGA hat asks the first question. “I think it’s amazing we got a British guy coming to save California,” he says; “I’m from Oakland.” He turns to the audience. “How many people here live in Oakland?” About a third of the audience members raise their hands, surely including some Oakland Report readers. “This thing?” He tips his head and grips the brim of his hat, a little emotional now. “I have to cancel myself here…We got a communist is the largest city in America…We got a Castro admirer as mayor of Los Angeles.” His voice turns sarcastic “Oh, but she went when she was nineteen when she went to Cuba, she says.” (Bass last visited Cuba in the 1970s and called Fidel Castro “Comandante en Jefe” in a social media post when he died in 2016, before renouncing the statement four years later.)

“What’s your question, sir?” Hilton asks. 

After Hilton hears out the man’s rambling query about recalling district attorneys, he offers an equally disjoined response about crime, a subject he’s more comfortable speaking on. Hilton doesn’t have any kids, he says, but a parent knows kids have to believe the threat of enforcement. It’s the same with crime, he says, and now that the state is closing prisons, ostensibly “because prisons are racist,” the threat is diminishing. The matter of reducing crime requires some more “common sense” policy changes, he says, before summarizing his own proposal as “more prisons, less crime.” 

Old, reactionary ideas that were never good and last popular thirty years ago, spiced up with a fresh dose of resentment about how the woke people in charge have made it all impossible. This is the Steve Hilton way.

Of course, the candidate goes on, Oakland exemplifies how a once-fine city has given way to lawlessness. It’s his first acknowledgment of the place he’s speaking in. He lives “on the other side of the Bay,” without saying anything more specific. (Hilton is a resident of Atherton, it turns out, currently the second wealthiest zip code in the United States.) Yet one night, not long ago, he tells us, he chose to leave his palatial estate to meet a friend for drinks. 

The crowd leans forward in their chairs. Did he get carjacked? Robbed? Bipped, at least? He doesn’t say, but he doesn’t have to. The whole experience of being in Oakland felt like a “dystopian movie.” The whole place was gripped with a “sense of menace.” Somewhere between the freeway exit and the gathering spot that night, he wants us to know, he passed a homeless encampment. I guess he saw it from the car window. 

(Speaking of which, Hilton says he’ll instruct state law enforcement to sweep up every and all encampments by 2027 and send the homeless to either prison or rehab. How’s that for a bold idea?) 

On the other side of the room, another audience member stands and says that drugs are only part of the homelessness problem. There’s also the matter of trailer parks closing and a general lack of affordable housing to take people. The man speaks gently, as though he’s trying to help the candidate understand the layers of the matter that he’ll have to parse to bring about some material change. What will Hilton do to that end? He asks. The candidate says something again about opening up more land to development. 

I leave at that point. It’s a Saturday afternoon, the sun is out, and the edge of the lake is teeming with people. After spending an hour with my head inside a MAGA hat, I want to be among them.