John Phillips joins us on The Stone Zone to talk about the Los Angeles Riots and the role of the California Democratic Party and Governor Gavin Newsom in them. John and Roger discuss why the riots in Los Angeles are a good political opportunity for Newsom and why he should have been on TV to challenge Donald Trump.
00:01:17.460So I really want to get your take, not only on what's unfolding in Los Angeles, but also the politics of it.
00:01:27.760To me, and I said this earlier, this is a golden opportunity for Gavin Newsom, whose prospects to be president prior to this were pretty dismal, given the condition of California.
00:01:42.460And the fact that California may have another Californian ahead of him should she decide to run, Kamala Harris, who most polls show would lead as the first choice and who may be eyeing a bid to be governor of California and take his job anyway.
00:01:58.340Well, it's really hard to look at Gavin Newsom on TV right now.
00:02:05.360And not think that he's enjoying this, because he is the guy who I guess he calculated that the Democratic Party, after they lost the last election to Trump, would move to the right.
00:02:18.340And that's why he started the podcast and invited Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon and others.
00:02:26.480And that blew up in his face like a hillbillies rifle, because the Democratic Party isn't moving to the right.
00:02:33.740And Trump derangement syndrome is real.
00:02:36.360And and they're only they're only getting a stronger case of it right now.
00:02:41.320And so this situation, these riots that are playing out right now in Los Angeles, give him an opportunity to recalibrate himself and to present himself to the nation as the chief foil of Donald Trump, which is why he challenged Trump on TV to arrest him.
00:02:59.780And he's having these angry press conferences and angry interviews where he's blaming everything that's going on right now in the streets of Los Angeles on Trump, because he wants to turn this into a Gavin Newsom versus Donald Trump situation that lifts him up and puts him in a place where he thinks Democrats will rally around him.
00:03:23.980Yeah, I actually had to go and check this out.
00:03:27.020Well, Tom Homan never specifically threatened to arrest him.
00:03:31.400He said he would arrest any public official who who assisted illegals from avoiding arrest or assaulted a law enforcement officer.
00:03:42.960So this was clearly Gavin Newsom trying to bait Tom Homan and to give him the golden headline.
00:03:51.180He he nothing could be better for Gavin Newsom than to be arrested.
00:03:56.360But if he can't be arrested just for for defending a violent, quote unquote, protesters or extremists or terrorists, he could only be arrested if he acted in some way to impede an arrest or assault an officer and so on.
00:04:21.440And what's funny is Gavin Newsom is such a sociopath that getting as much publicity as possible and furthering his political career and keeping his political career alive is really the goal.
00:04:34.840And he's willing to put people's safety at risk by doing that, because the position that Gavin Newsom has been taking is there's nothing wrong here.
00:04:44.820There's nothing going on that's unsafe.
00:04:51.720The LAPD has all of this taken care of.
00:04:54.720And Donald Trump is just trying to stir the pot.
00:04:58.200And that same claim has been repeated by not just him, but other members of the political establishment, Democratic political establishment here in California over and over and over again.
00:05:11.260But then last night, the police chief, police chief McDonnell, went on TV of the LAPD and said that none of that was true, that it was violent.
00:05:35.780And right now, because the police chief destroyed Gavin Newsom's narrative, there's trouble in paradise.
00:05:44.140And the last time that this happened, it was right after the L.A. fires, when the fire chief came out and said that the budget cuts that the city imposed on the fire department prevented them from being able to fully respond to the fires.
00:05:57.720The moment she said that she was a dead man walking because she destroyed the narrative that the mayor was putting out, and then the mayor's poll number started to crater.
00:06:08.340The fact that the police chief went out there last night and destroyed Gavin Newsom's narrative, I think, makes that man a dead man walking.
00:06:17.020I think Newsom is going to target him.
00:06:19.360I think the mayor is going to target him because that man has turned their framing upside down.
00:06:25.120Well, of course, they continue to insist these are peaceful demonstrations.
00:06:29.600But the actual numbers that we see coming back, protesters hurling rocks, bottles, Molotov-style cocktails, fireworks, bags of urine and feces, chunks of concrete rocks at law enforcement and ICE officers.
00:06:49.400We're seeing this before our very eyes.
00:06:52.420These cars set on fire, both police cars and these driverless cars.
00:06:59.720I mean, it is to say that there's no violence here.
00:07:03.100Don't believe what you're seeing on video.
00:07:05.180Believe what Cory Booker and Gavin Newsom tell you.
00:07:09.740In the wake of the fires and the horrific mishandling of the fires by Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, I would have to believe that their standing in California is weakened.
00:07:22.540I think here, by going to the most radical left position, perhaps they feel they can rebuild their political strength on the left within the state.
00:07:32.440Yeah, don't forget, when Gavin Newsom was being recalled and the focus was on his performance as governor, there were a series of polls that showed him losing the recall.
00:07:43.700And that Larry Elder would be elected governor and that Larry Elder would be elected governor of California.
00:07:48.000It wasn't until he recalibrated that and nationalized that election where he was able to win.
00:07:56.380Because California is a deep blue state.
00:07:58.520If you get the Democrats to vote for the Democratic candidate, that's all she wrote.
00:08:03.440And by federalizing the recall election and making it all about Donald Trump and making it about abortion and other federal subjects that really have nothing to do with the state of California, he was able to divert attention away from his failures, whether it's with the homeless, the crime, the budget, the bullet train, the insurance crisis, you name it.
00:08:27.480So, President Trump called the rioters paid insurrectionists.
00:08:33.320I just saw that Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna got very specific in identifying those funding the riots.
00:08:40.640I mean, John, these pallets of bricks, these pallets of cement blocks, these flatbed trucks who are delivering them, they didn't just come from nowhere.
00:08:52.360Who do you think is funding this insurrection?
00:08:54.740Well, I think it's probably the usual suspects.
00:08:59.820If I had to bet money on it, I would say that you're going to find some Soros money somewhere in there, although that's just my opinion.
00:09:06.420But I spoke with someone at the FBI today who said that it's a different ballgame now.
00:09:12.660Because when you had George Gascon as the district attorney, who essentially was pro-criminal and was a Soros DA, he didn't have any interest in ever prosecuting anyone for assaulting a police officer, destroying police property, all the things that you saw happen on television.
00:09:31.020But there's a new U.S. attorney that President Trump just appointed for the Central District of California, Bill Shaley, who came from the California State Legislature and is really a shining star in the Trump administration as U.S. attorney.
00:09:46.060And he has been very aggressive at saying that he is going to go after these people, these looters, these people who have been attacking federal police officers at federal property, and he's going to hit them with everything he can.
00:09:59.880And when you start leaning on these people in a federal sort of way, you can find out just exactly who was supporting them, who was putting them up to it, and figure out who are the important players in the social network.
00:10:14.680And the fact that arrests have been made, and prosecutions will commence, and a U.S. attorney is very interested in getting to the bottom of it, leads you to believe that they'll figure this out, and we'll know exactly who was funding what you saw play out over the weekend.
00:10:32.820This shrimp and coconut sauce is divine.
00:11:02.980It seems to me the other real question is to see whether these outbreaks of violence begin to spread.
00:11:09.740Remember, in the beginning, it was Minneapolis, St. Paul, before long, Chicago was burning, and other cities.
00:11:18.240General Flynn has outlined that he thinks this is a much broader strategy to destabilize the Trump administration and the country.
00:11:26.860I will be very interested to see whether there is a further effort to create chaos, to mobilize the dissenters, disrupt law enforcement operations, and incite even more violence.
00:11:39.720One thing is clear, and that is President Trump's very quick move to send 2,000 National Guardsmen, and the statement by the Secretary of Defense that he's prepared to send in the Marines, if necessary, shows the president will not repeat the mistakes of 2020 when his advisors urged him to let the governors handle it.
00:12:01.580And governors like Tim Walsh, well, they couldn't handle it.
00:12:04.980The governor of Illinois could not handle it.
00:12:07.700There was $2 billion worth of public and private property destroyed, 54 people murdered, thousands of people injured.
00:12:16.800He's not going to make that mistake again.
00:12:21.100You're seeing that not only, as you mentioned, with the National Guard, but with the Marines as well.
00:12:27.720He wants to make an example out of Los Angeles where civil unrest, rioting, looting won't be tolerated.
00:12:34.980That Grampy Joe is no longer in the White House where he's not aware of what's going on in the world around him.
00:12:42.000Donald Trump is keeping a very close eye on what's going on here, and he's not going to let it get out of hand.
00:12:47.860And the other thing that's different this time than in civil unrest or riots in the past is that Elon owns Twitter.
00:12:57.180So you can see what's going on in Los Angeles on Twitter or X whenever you want, and it's not going to be censored, and it's not going to be shadow banned, and it's not going to be pulled down.
00:13:10.520You're going to see what's happening with your own two eyes.
00:13:13.360And before, when the other side controlled X, they were able to censor all of that content.
00:13:21.140So if Gavin Newsom and Maxine Waters and Karen Bass go on TV and say, there's no violence going on, everything is peaceful,
00:13:30.180and you just make sure that no one sees the actual evidence of what's going on on the streets,
00:13:36.300then a certain number of people will buy into it.
00:13:39.000But when you can see what's going on in real time at all points, everywhere, you know that what they're saying is not true,
00:13:48.780and they look like buffoons going out and making the claim that everything is peaceful and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.