John Phillips dissects LA’s riots as a calculated Newsom gambit—contrasting Trump’s National Guard response with Biden’s 2020 inaction—while exposing alleged Soros-backed orchestration and Asaly’s crackdown. He warns Harris’s California run risks backlash over extreme policies, ties Musk-Trump unity to anti-establishment momentum, and frames the unrest as a destabilizing play against Trump amid Congress’s rural hospital funding battles. [Automatically generated summary]
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our country has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state, every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Welcome back.
You are in the Stone Zone.
And now entering the zone is John Phillips.
John Phillips hosts the John Phillips show on 790K ABC in Los Angeles.
He is a shrewd analyst of both California and national politics.
Started radio at 20 years old, one of the youngest hosts in the country.
And he and I are the two world's two largest fans of well, anyway.
I'm not going to go out there.
John Phillips, thanks for joining us in the Stone Zone.
Well, thank you for having me, Roger.
So I really want to get your take not only on what's unfolding in Los Angeles, but also the politics of it.
To 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 and 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.
Well, it's really hard to look at Gavin Newsom on TV right now and 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.
And that's why he started the podcast and invited Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon and others.
And that blew up in his face like a hillbilly's rifle because the Democratic Party isn't moving to the right.
They're digging in their heels and Trump derangement syndrome is real and they're only getting a stronger case of it right now.
And 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.
And 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.
Yeah, I actually had to go and check this out.
Tom Holman never specifically threatened to arrest him.
He said he would arrest any public official who assisted illegals from avoiding arrest or assaulted a law enforcement officer.
So this was clearly Gavin Newsom trying to bait Tom Holman to give him the golden headline.
Nothing could be better for Gavin Newsom than to be arrested.
But he can't be arrested just for defending 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.
So he's posturing.
It's drama, a drama that I think Tom Holman is not going to take him up on.
Yeah, it's definitely posturing.
And 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.
And 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.
There's nothing going on that's unsafe.
We have this under control.
We don't need any help from the feds.
The LAPD has all of this taken care of.
And Donald Trump is just trying to stir the pot.
And 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.
But 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.
It's getting more violent.
The police are outnumbered.
They're overwhelmed.
They're being shot at with fireworks.
They're having bricks thrown at them.
They're having cinder blocks thrown at them.
And they need help.
And right now, because the police chief destroyed Gavin Newsom's narrative, there's trouble in paradise.
And the last time that this happened, it was right after the LA 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.
The 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.
The 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.
I think Newsom is going to target him.
I think the mayor is going to target him because that man has turned their framing upside down.
Well, of course, they continue to insist these are peaceful demonstrations, but the actual numbers that we see coming back of protesters hurling rocks, bottles, Malotov-style cocktails, fireworks, bags of urine and feces, chunks of concrete rocks at law enforcement and ICE officers.
We're not imagining it.
We're seeing this before our very eyes.
Cars set on fire, both police cars and these driverless cars.
I mean, it is to say that there's no violence here, don't believe what you're seeing on video.
Believe what Corey Booker and Gavin Newsom tell you.
In the wake of the fires and the horrific mishandling of the fires by Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, I have to believe that their standing in California is weakened.
I 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.
Yeah, 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 and that Larry Elder would be elected governor of California.
It wasn't until he recalibrated then and nationalized that election where he was able to win because California is a deep blue state.
If you get the Democrats to vote for the Democratic candidate, that's all she wrote.
The election's over.
And 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.
President Trump called the rioters paid insurrectionists.
I just saw that Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna got very specific in identifying those funding the riots.
I 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.
This is not an indigenous uprising.
Who do you think is funding this insurrection?
Well, I think it's probably the usual suspects.
If 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.
But I spoke with someone at the FBI today who said that it's a different ballgame now because 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.
But there's a new U.S. attorney that President Trump just appointed for the Central District of California, Bill Asaly, who came from the California state legislature and is really a shining star in the Trump administration as U.S. attorney.
And 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.
And 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 were the important players in the social network.
And 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.
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It seems to me the other real question is to see whether these outbreaks of violence begin to spread.
Remember, in the beginning, it was Minneapolis, St. Paul, before long Chicago was burning and other cities.
General Flynn has outlined that he thinks this is a much broader strategy to destabilize the Trump administration and the country.
I 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.
One 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.
And governors like Tim Waltz, well, they couldn't handle it.
The governor of Illinois could not handle it.
There was $2 billion worth of public and private property destroyed, 54 people murdered, thousands of people injured.
He's not going to make that mistake again.
Yeah, I think that's right.
You're seeing that not only, as you mentioned, with the National Guard, but with the Marines as well.
He wants to make an example out of Los Angeles, where civil unrest, rioting, looting won't be tolerated.
That Grampy Joe is no longer in the White House where he's not aware of what's going on in the world around him.
Donald 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.
And the other thing that's different this time than in civil unrest or riots of the past is that Elon owns Twitter.
So 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.
You're going to see what's happening with your own two eyes.
And before, when the other side controlled X, they were able to censor all of that content.
So if Gavin Newsom and Maxine Waters and Karen Bass go on TV and say there's no violence going on, everything is peaceful, and you just make sure that no one sees the actual evidence of what's going on on the streets, then a certain number of people will buy into it.
But 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, and they look like buffoons going out and making the claim that everything is peaceful and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
No one believes them.
Folks, if you're just tuning in, we're talking to John Phillips.
He hosts the John Phillips show at 790K ABC in Los Angeles.
He's also a columnist for the Orange County Register, a keen observer of the California and the national political scene.
Talking to John Phillips00:07:12
I was going to say earlier that you and I were the two greatest admirers of Senator Assemblyman Joe Shell, who ran for governor in 1962.
But I wanted to get to the Newsome stuff.
I also want to talk to you about this rift between Elon and the president, which seems to be beginning to be healing.
Appears to be there's a cooling at a minimum.
But what do you make of all that?
I'm not surprised.
In fact, I assume that they would probably bump head sooner.
The fact that their bromance lasted as long as it did kind of shocked me.
But I'm also not surprised that they made up as quickly as they ended up fighting because ultimately they're on the same page.
I mean, you pay attention to what Musk's beefs are with Trump, and Musk is basically attacking them from the right.
So I don't think there's any threat at all that he's going to start funding Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of them because those aren't the arguments that he's making.
I think as soon as these hotheads cool down, and Trump has already cooled way down from where he was when the fight first started, and based on what I saw today, it looks like Elon's doing the same thing.
I don't know if they'll ever be as close as they once were.
Probably not.
Certain things were said that you can't go back on.
But I think that their fighting will cool off and they will recognize that they're more powerful together than they are apart because they're essentially fighting for many of the same things.
The sad truth of it is that after he bought Twitter, changed it to acts and made it a free speech site, he found himself under nine separate federal investigations by the Biden administration.
Had Kamala Harris won, they would have taken all of his federal contracts, destroyed his companies, and probably put him in jail.
I think he figured that out.
So we are on the right side.
I think he's a free speech hero.
I told him that when I met him at Mar-a-Lago.
I told him he was the most important voice for free speech since the founding fathers themselves.
And Donald Trump was standing there and he agreed.
Folks, if you're listening to the Stone Zone, we're talking to John Phillips, the host of the John Phillips show at 790K ABC in Los Angeles, and we'll be right back.
The Stone Zone on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
And we're back in the Zoom zone.
We're talking to John Phillips of 790K ABC in Los Angeles.
John, I noticed that former Vice President Kamala Harris put out a statement attacking Donald Trump, essentially backing the left progressive line.
You had a great column recently on her future, which I think has lots to do with the country's political future choices.
In the little time we have left, tell us about that.
Yeah, well, I read the book FIDE about the 2024 presidential election, and the authors of the book essentially concluded that the main reason that she lost was she never really had a reason for running.
She was just the candidate because Biden had to drop out and she was the vice president.
But outside of that, she didn't really have a reason.
And based on everything I've seen and heard out of Kamala Harris, if she runs for governor of California, she's prepared to make all of those same mistakes a second time.
California has a million and one problems.
And when you read the articles about her as a potential candidate, it talks about what it will do for her resume.
It talks about what it'll do for her legacy.
It talks about how it would make her the chief loyal to Donald Trump, how it could position her to run for president again.
It's all about her.
It doesn't have much to do with what she would do for the state of California.
And if you're going to be a strong candidate for governor in California, you probably should have thought through some of our problems and have solutions to offer.
And she doesn't have any of that.
So in a weird sort of way, even though they just spent over a billion dollars promoting her nationally and her name ID is higher than all the other candidates, if there's a strong Republican candidate in that race, she might actually be the most beatable.
Wow.
That's extraordinary.
I just operate on the assumption between the voter fraud and the demographic changes that California cannot go red.
Am I wrong?
Well, what you just described is all true, and any Democrat would be an overwhelming favorite against any Republican, but you can push people too far.
I mean, look at the insurance crisis in California right now.
That race for insurance commissioner last time around was closer than any of the other statewide constitutional offices.
And with a strong candidate this next time around, who knows?
Maybe that's doable.
The last time a Republican won a statewide race in California was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010 for governor and Steve Poisner in 2010 for insurance commissioner.
So it is possible for California to elect a Republican.
It's unlikely, but with the way that the Democrats are running the state, treating the state like it's a spring break rental car, if there's any time that they could lose, it's now.
Afraid we have to wrap it there.
I want to thank my guest, John Phillips, who is the host of the John Phillips show at 790K ABC in Los Angeles.
Also, check out his columns at the Orange County Register.
John, thank you for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
Thanks for having me.
And for our Stone Zone regulars out there, thanks for tuning in.
Until tomorrow, God bless you and God speak to you.
Thanks for
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Never Wonder Again00:00:56
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our nation has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.