Loading...
Loading...

After all the blowback from all of the candidates of color being excluded USC has gone ahead and cancelled tonight's debate
John talks to Steve Hilton, who was supposed to be on that state tonight about whats next
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Every day, excessive delays and denials from big insurers keep patients from accessing
the care they need.
And when care is urgent, these delays can be disastrous.
These practices cost billions in wasteful spending, driving up costs for American families.
But while big insurers put up barriers, America's hospitals and health systems are in your corner,
navigating endless reviews and appeals to get you the care you need when you need it
most.
It's time to curb these harmful practices and put the focus back on patients.
Brought to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Health Care.
And a very happy Tuesday to you at 1206 in the West, eats the John of Phillips Show.
Mr. Randy Wings in Culver City.
Well John, after a lot of whining and kicking and screaming about so many candidates, not
being invited to the big debate tonight, the big debate got canceled.
No.
That's right.
The University of Southern California was supposed to host a gubernatorial debate tonight
with ABC7 and Univision.
However, they were going to leave out all the minority candidates.
Yeah, how was that going to go on Univision when none of the candidates who were on the
stage spoke Spanish?
You know what USC was trying to do?
They were trying to give the white Democrats the bush push.
Remember that?
What was the bush push?
The bush push was when Reggie Bush, who was then running back for the University of
Southern California, probably the best one they've had since O.J. Simpson.
And they were playing the Notre Dame fighting Irish and it was a year when USC was on fire.
I think Matt Liner was the quarterback.
He needed to get into the end zone for USC to win the game.
And they gave him the ball and then a bunch of them got behind him and just shoved him
as hard as they could.
And then he made his way into the end zone and you're not supposed to be able to do that.
But they counted it.
It was a touchdown, SC1.
And I think they went on to win the National Championship that year.
But they called it the bush push.
And it seems like that's what the Democratic Party and that's what the University of
Southern California and ABC7 and Udivision were trying to do.
They don't want the minority candidates on stage because they don't want to split the
vote and allow two Republicans to end up on the November ballot.
So they decided to give the white Dems the bush push.
Now what was being complained about was how it was very confusing as the eligibility rules
for this debate because you could say, well, you only want the high polling candidates
there.
And as much as he's probably the most common sense person on that side, Matt Mayhen was
not high polling.
No, no, he wasn't.
And think about this.
Think about this.
When you look at the public polling, what the public polling essentially tells you is
a couple of things.
One is the candidates, particularly the Democratic candidates, are all bunched up together.
And there's no front runner.
If you go back and you look at the latest public policy institute of California poll, they
found Steve Hilton in first place at 14%, Katie Porter in second place at 13%, Chad Bianco
in third with 12%, then Eric Swalwell at 11, Styra at 10, Virugosa, Basera and Yee
all at 5%.
Now here's what's interesting.
In that poll, the margin of error was 3.9%.
Let's call it 4%.
So that means there could be an eight point swing in any of those numbers.
And that would be within the results of the poll.
What you end up with is Yee, Virugosa and Basera polling within the margin of error of
the top performing Democrat in this poll that being Katie Porter.
How do you tell them to get out when they're statistically tied with the best performing
Democrat?
How do you say it's not your turn, get out and go endorse Katie Porter or Eric Swalwell
or Tom Steyer?
I don't see how you say that, especially when you look at all the other metrics, because
these aren't gadflies, these are professional politicians.
And they're doing all of the things that you would do if you were running for office.
They've been elected to high office before.
Many of them are statewide constitutional office holders.
Antonio Virugosa was the mayor of Los Angeles.
They've demonstrated the ability to raise large sums of money.
They have a list of endorsements that goes on longer than a receded CVS.
What more do you want?
They're doing the same things as Tom Steyer and Katie Porter and Eric Swalwell.
Why should they take the knee?
But that's what the Democratic Party wants them to do.
Because they do not want to Republicans on that November ballot.
And right now, according to internal polling from the Democratic Party, that's exactly
what would happen.
And USC goes, well, there's not enough room on stage for everyone.
How many podiums did they need?
Well, think about it.
You have the two Republicans.
You have all the white Democrats that's Porter, Swalwell, and Steyer.
And given the fact that it's USC, they probably had to make room for Lori Lachlan's kids.
Maybe Felicity Hoffman too.
Are you telling me that you can't put four more podiums on that stage?
Well I will say for a televised debate, if you have that many people on it once, you're
not going to get to many questions at all.
No, but if they're all bunched up together, what else are you supposed to do?
That's the problem.
If Kamala was in the race, she would be way ahead of everyone and this wouldn't be an
issue inexplicably, but that would be the case.
Had Alex Padia gotten in the race, he would have been way ahead of everyone else.
But the two people that everyone expected to get in the race decided to take a pass.
And now you have a bunch of people that most voters don't like, or they don't know, or
they don't know.
That's fair too.
I don't know if anyone has a negative opinion of Betty Yee, they just have never heard
of her.
No.
Because Gavin Newsom doesn't care, we have an absentee landlord governor.
He's not even here half the time.
Democratic voters have no direction in terms of which direction to go in.
Well, it's worse than that.
Gavin Newsom has been so provocative that he's actually sucking up all the oxygen where
you think a lame duck governor wouldn't be getting this much coverage because of all
the stuff he does in social media, because of the traveling around the country and the
book tour and the podcast.
He's getting all the coverage, and nobody's even aware that there is a governor's race.
No.
So what happens?
Everyone finds their tribe.
So you have all the environmentalists, they go with Tom Steyer, all the bipolar women,
they go with Katie Porter, winner, winner, chicken dinner, all the Bay Area people, they
go to Eric Swalwell, the Mexicans, they go to Vera Gosa and Basera.
The blacks, they go to Thurmond, the Asians, they go to Yee.
Well, you end up splitting up the pie then, and that's what they're left with.
And if you're the Republicans, what you want and what you need, and I know he disagrees
with us, Steve Hilton, by the way, is going to join us at 12.35.
And maybe we'll have this fight, maybe we won't, I don't know.
But what Republicans should do is they need to split their vote as close to 50-50 as
humanly possible.
If Republicans can split their vote 50-50 between Hilton and Bianco, that is the only
chance they have at getting someone in that office.
I don't think that either Republican could beat any of those Democrats in a statewide
head-to-head race.
I don't see that happening.
The one that they'd probably have the best shot against is Katie Porter, because she
sell personally offensive.
You could smell it right here.
But she still has a D next to her name, and that's probably good enough.
You don't need to win by 20 points, you need to win by one vote.
And she would start out with such an advantage, just in terms of voter registration, that
it would be a huge upset if she were to lose.
So that's not likely.
Plus any day those cooking videos are going to go viral.
Sorry for the noise I'm cutting carrots.
If she loses, she should end up on the food network.
Replace the barefoot contessa with her?
Hey, at some point you're going to have to replace her.
But it is panic mode right now at the California Democratic Party headquarters, because
they now look at this race and they see the likely scenario as two Republicans on the
November ballot.
They themselves put that out today.
Whether they believe it or not, I don't know, but they're concerned enough to put that
on social media.
I mean, it might be a tactic that, hey, we need to start putting this out there as a wake-up
call, pay attention to this race and a great opportunity for people to pay attention to
the race.
Would have been a debate, but now that debate just got canceled.
But here's the other problem.
The three white dems that they're trying to clear the way for are deeply flawed.
Deeply flawed.
What do you think the odds are that there are additional videos that exist of Katie Porter
telling an aid to F off?
Can you put odds at over 100 percent?
You're out of my f***ing shop.
You're going to have to talk to the boys in Las Vegas about that one.
But she's one bad video away from going to 2 percent.
Eric Swalwell has no judgment at all.
He slept with a spy.
What do you think the odds are?
He's jabbled with the staffers, too.
And what do you think the odds are that we're going to find out about it before the election?
Public strategists have tweeted something to that effect out before.
People in the know, not people on the fringes, people who work or working for candidates
who are currently in the race.
They fully anticipate that happening.
And depending on who it is and what the details are, it could be catastrophic for him.
And then you have Tom Steyer, who is a billionaire who is overtly trying to buy the office.
We're in a big ass crisis.
And if you're just a partisan and you don't care, I guess that's okay, but that rubs people
the wrong way.
No one wants to feel like the office is just for sale and the highest bidder gets it.
Well, and who exactly is the electorate here?
You have an election where people might be voting on taxing billionaires and then they're
going to put a billionaire in the highest office in the state?
It doesn't make sense.
So if you have those three deeply flawed candidates who are doing the best right now,
none of them are the front runner, none of them are running away with it, and the filing
deadline, by the way, has come and gone.
Which means there's going to be no white night coming to save the Democratic Party.
It's not like George Clooney or someone like that is going to announce their candidacy
at the last minute and everyone's going to go vote for him.
You're on the ballot today or you're not getting on because the filing deadline is coming
gone.
The Democratic Party convention where they do endorsements, that is coming gone.
We're not going to have another one.
So what would end up happening is the also reans, the people who aren't polling in the top
three slots, they're going to get a second look.
Because if the three people who are polling the best all implode, then Antonio is going
to get a second look, but Sarah is going to get a second look, Tony Thurman is going
to get a second look, and Betty Yee is going to get a second look.
But if you drop out before that happens, you're not going to be one of the candidates that
gets a second look.
And you could pull the pin on the grenade before you give yourself a chance to win.
And this has happened before, by the way.
If you go back to 1998, this was an election that happened after the Republicans controlled
the governor's office for 16 straight years.
I know that's hard to believe, but it actually happened.
Eight years of George Duke Magin, eight years of Pete Wilson, Pete Wilson was a popular
governor leaving office.
And the Democrats, back then, we had closed primaries.
So only Democrats could vote in the Democratic primary.
And you had three candidates who were running.
You had Al Chucky, a billionaire.
You had Jane Harmon, who was Richard Snell, for husband Sidney Harmon, did Harmon Stereos.
And she was the congresswoman from the South Bay.
And then you had Gray Davis, who was the lieutenant governor.
And in that election, you had two wealthy candidates go nuclear on one another.
Chucky and Harmon, they attacked each other viciously on the television, on the radio
in your mailbox every single day.
And Gray Davis, at that time, was given zero chance at winning the election.
But what did he do?
He just hung around.
He just stayed in the race and did his thing.
And those two disqualified one another by going to war with each other.
And Gray Davis ended up being last man standing, and he won the election.
He was one of the statewide constitutional office holders that people kind of knew but
didn't really know.
But he had run for office before, he understood politics, and he was able to win.
And a lot of these people, who they're trying to kick off the stage, have many of those
same qualities.
And they're thinking to themselves, why should I get out?
Why should I get out now in particular for these people?
And if it ends up with two Republicans on the November ballot, I'll be as happy as a
clam.
I don't have a problem with that.
And the way I see it, if you want things to get better in California as a Republican
or a Democrat, what you need is you need one of the people who seems to care about fixing
the state in that office.
And right now, there's only four of them.
It's both Republicans, Bianco and Hilton, and on the Democratic side, you have Mayhane
and Vera Gosa.
They are the only ones talking about state issues.
Everyone else is talking about Donald Trump.
Everyone else is talking about federal issues, Washington, D.C., because they don't understand
what's going on in the state.
And if you don't understand it, you shouldn't be put in charge.
So right now, if Republicans can figure out how to split their vote 50-50 for Bianco and
Hilton, you might be sitting in the cat bird seat.
That might be the play right now.
So don't trash one another, don't go nuclear on one another, understand that your only
shot is sticking together.
That's the only way it's going to work.
And if you're the Democrats, I don't know what you do right now.
I really don't.
Because your opportunity at fixing this was about six months ago.
And for whatever reason, they chose not to.
And now they're paying for it.
One of the things that happens in a one-party state is when you're working assumption is
that you're going to win everything, and it doesn't matter if you work for it or not,
every once in a while you get stung.
And this can be one of those elections where they get stung.
Every day, excessive delays and denials from big insurers keep patients from accessing
the care they need.
And when care is urgent, these delays can be disastrous.
These practices cost billions in wasteful spending, driving up costs for American families.
But while big insurers put up barriers, America's hospitals and health systems are in your
corner, navigating endless reviews and appeals to get you the care you need when you need
it most.
It's time to curb these harmful practices and put the focus back on patients, brought
to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Health Care.
This is Mike Voilo of Lexicon Valley.
And I'm Bob Garfield.
Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words?
Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language?
Hey, us too.
So join us on Lexicon Valley to true over the history, culture, and many mysteries of
English, plus some life cracks.
Find us on one of those apps where people listen to podcasts.
The NFL takes center stage.
The NFL draft starts April 23rd, register for free entry at NFL.com slash draft access
today.
800-222-5222 is telephone number 1-800-222-5222.
If you'd like to email the show, you can do so at Johnny.
Don't like show at gmail.com.
That's Johnny.
Don't like show at gmail.com.
And Randy, if you missed last week's interview with Spencer Pratt, candidate for mayor
of Los Angeles, and you would have find out what you missed out on, that's easy to
do.
All you got to do is search for the John Phillips show wherever you get your podcast.
Everybody listening right now should do that.
Search for the John Phillips show on Apple or IHeart or Spotify.
Hit subscribe.
Hit follow.
It's different on the different apps.
Download all the episodes to your phone.
Even if you have no intention of ever listening to them, you might just want them.
In case you're in a dead zone where you have nothing else to listen to and you're getting
no internet service, they're downloaded, they're ready to go and you can enjoy yourself.
800-222-5222 is telephone number 1-800-222-5222.
It is our pleasure to welcome our next guest to the program.
He is the founder of Golden Together and host of the Steve Hilton show.
He's also a candidate for governor here in the state of California.
One that's been polling in first place quite consistently in recent surveys.
You can get him online at goldentogether.com and follow him on X at Steve Hilton X.
Steve Hilton.
Welcome.
Welcome to you, John.
I'm really, really very excited to be with you because I get to talk about California
and how we solve our problems, which we were going to be doing tonight at a debate at USC
and it's been canceled.
And so what a fiasco.
This is where we've come to in California today, unbelievable.
What do you make of the decision by the University of Southern California?
Because apparently, I guess there was a disagreement between USC and their news partners, ABC7 and
Univision as to who would be invited and who would be excluded.
And then at the last minute, they decided they couldn't come to an answer that everyone
could agree on.
And so they just canceled the entire thing.
Yeah, this is actually all about the corrupt Democrat machine that's been running off
state into the ground for all these years and it's totally on display and it is not a
pretty sight.
Here's what actually happened.
You had a bunch of LPDs, as I call them, low polling Democrats who were cut off from
being included in the debate because they neither had the poll numbers nor the fundraising
numbers to make the cut.
And so led by Havier Bacerra, they started whining last week and started to try and
get themselves included, of course, because they're Democrats.
They played the race card, claiming that it was the people of color as they put it who
were excluded from the debate, nothing to do with race.
They were excluded because they're not doing well enough in the race, not because of race.
Nevertheless, they kept going with their protests.
They were joined on Monday, yesterday.
Now you had the whole Democrat machine weighing in.
You had all the usual suspects from the California state legislature, the Democrat factions and
pressure groups, the Latino caucus, the Black caucus, the LGBTQ caucus, the Native American,
the women, all of the different groups.
They wrote a letter complaining that their colleagues had been left off.
And instead of standing up to them, USC just completely caved.
And the whole thing is preposterous.
There's one thing also that I think we need to point out, which is that they were in
very weak ground because they actually rigged their own rules after the original set of
criteria were published in order to get Matt Mayhan into the debate.
That is a fair criticism, because they invented this whole new category of fundraising criteria
purely to get Matt Mayhan in there.
And I don't think that was fair at all.
I have no time for the whining from the LPDs about why they're excluded.
But I do think it's a fair criticism.
That Matt Mayhan, who's also an LPD, he's not going in a right, he's on two, three, four
percent in the polls, but he's got a ton of money from Big Tech all in a rush.
And so they tried to squeeze him and I don't think that was right.
Let me make the case for the LPDs here for a second, because you look at the top three
polling Democrats in this race, Katie Porter, Eric Swalwell and Tom Steyer.
All of those candidates are deeply flawed, deeply, deeply, deeply flawed.
We know that Katie Porter, who cannot promise that there are no more videos that exist
of her telling staffers to f off.
And she is one video of telling a staffer to f off from going from where she's at right
now to two percent in the polls.
We know that Tom Steyer is trying to buy the office and that has limited appeal.
There are certain people who are such hyper partisans, they're willing to go with them
because they think he can spend his own money and he can win the office.
But that's not a majority of the people out there.
I do not believe, I think that people fundamentally do not believe that is fair and it's not a good
look for him and it's certainly not helpful at winning support.
And then you have Eric Swalwell, who might have the worst judgment in this race, a guy
who slept with a Chinese spy and many of the tweets have been deleted.
But there are big time democratic consultants in this race who are not working for him obviously
who have tweeted that he is going to have additional sex scandals involving staffers that
are going to come out before this election is over and he is not going to be their standard
bearer.
Because you have those three candidates with all of those problems, they could all implode
before election day.
And if you're one of these low polling democrats, you're looking at these people and you
can go, okay, these are unstable lunatics.
At some point, they may take a second look at me, I'm not going to drop out of the race,
I'm going to keep going.
Yeah, it's a good argument, you always very thoughtful about this stuff.
It's a very good argument, I understand that.
I guess my point is, that's all well and good, but they set some rules and that was decided
and now they're complaining after the fact they shouldn't have caved.
I think that's the problem.
I think that the issue is for the democratic, maybe the right way through this I think is
for the democrats to have their own debate because when you've got, and the choice here
is so clear between four more years or eight more years of one party rule by the democrats
and a change.
I mean, my experience of all these democrats on the stage is they're all the same.
I've now done a bunch of debates with them, including some that were televised others
that were not.
There's no difference really between them in terms of what they say.
I mean, they're slight variations, but basically, they're all the same as each other and
all the same as what we've got now, whereas we need a real choice.
We need change in California.
I take the point.
I mean, but look, they're just not going anywhere, they're not impressive, they're not impressing
anybody.
But Sarah and Betty Yee and Tony Thurmond, they're all part of any of these people.
Vera Gosa has the best name recognition I would argue.
I guess after all those years being mayor of LA, and I like Antonio, actually, I really
do.
And actually, to be fair to him, he's on some issues, for example, on gas and oil and gas,
he's definitely the least insane of the democrats.
So I don't know, but the whole appearance of this is just a shambles, just a cancel
a debate with less than 24 hours before it's supposed to happen.
It's just ridiculous.
How much of the problem do you think a lot of these people are having?
And you said that they're anonymous and they're having a hard time breaking through and
becoming well-known?
How much of that do you think is Gavin's fault?
Because Gavin is trying to take up as much oxygen in the room as humanly possible to
sell his book to promote himself as a presidential candidate, to go on the national shows, the national
podcast, travel around other states, other countries, trying to make himself look like
the leader of the opposition.
And if you are a candidate for governor in the Democratic Party, I don't know how you
break through when you have your incumbent governor who doesn't even seem to care, by the
way, as to who replaces him.
But what he's trying to do is accumulate all the attention humanly possible at your
expense.
100%.
I think that's a great point.
And I would add another totally narcissistic self-regarding, self-promoting, Democrat
courier politician to the problem for them.
And that's Kamala Harris, who's also in the same book because she decided not to run
for governor.
If she'd have run for governor of California, she has all the polling shows.
She would have completely cleared the field.
Now, she'd have been a disaster, and actually, I think that I could have beaten her because
we want change.
And she's an absolute symbol of the Democrat corruption and misrule.
However, the fact that she chose to put her, who thinks she's going to be their presidential
candidate, let alone president?
No one except her.
No one wants her.
No one's interested in her stupid book, but she put that first and narcissism because
she wants to be president, just like Gavin does.
So I think it's the two of them together, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom.
I think that's a very, very astute observation.
They are the ones who have caused this problem for the California Democrats, and we're left
with a bunch of complete non-entities and courier politicians that nobody wants.
It's an amazing situation.
Given the fact that they've created this wake of destruction behind them as they have,
it seems like so many of these Democratic candidates for governor are unwilling to
publicly criticize Gavin.
There was just an interview with Ashley Zavala that was posted on social media, involving
Tom Steyer, where he was asked the question point blank, A through F, how would you grade
Gavin Newsom's performance?
And his answer was, I haven't paid attention, so I can't give him a grade.
It's unbelievable.
Every aspect of that is laughable.
The first is like, the fact that he has notes is so little self-awareness that he thinks
about the good answer, that that's a good dodge to a question.
And what are you talking about?
You're running for governor, and you've paid so little attention to our state that you
couldn't even make an assessment of the incumbent's record.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
The other one, of course, was Eric Swolwell, who in a different interview, was asked,
can you name a single thing that Gavin got wrong or could have done, but he couldn't
think of a single thing, not one.
These people are not serious.
And it shows you, just as with the fuss over this debate, the Democrats just put their
own interests first.
They just, this is what happens actually after 16 years of one party rule, they get very
self-absorbed.
They're not really interested in, they don't think they need to pay attention or even care
about the views of the public.
It's all about managing their internal coalition note.
They don't want to annoy Gavin Newsom because they think he might help them or endorse
them or whatever it may be.
I don't know.
And they say these ridiculous things that make them seem just so out of touch, but they're
so arrogant, they really do assume that they're going to be reelected and their power is
going to go on forever.
Assuming that they're going to continue to try to push these candidates out of the
race.
Care it hasn't worked.
How long do you think they're going to give it before the stick comes out?
And they start ruining these people's lives, trying to push them out of the race, turn
them in unemployable, unelectable pariahs.
Well, it's interesting because they've tried all that and they've really failed.
And now they're on the ballot.
So the truth is that even if these candidates drop out, they will still appear on the ballot,
even if they're not running.
So given that they're only getting to, you know, one or two, three percent anyway, maybe
they'll get that in the actual election without even being in the race.
And that causes a problem when it's a tight finish.
And so I think they're really, they really are in a mess.
I think the only thing that we need to be careful of, for those of us who are desperate
for changing California and obviously the only real change is going to be a change of
political control.
At the moment, there's a lot of speculation and excitement actually in Republicans that
I see it all the time.
Oh, it's great.
Look, you've got Steve Hilton leading and Chad is second and we're going to have two
Republicans in the top two and so on.
I just don't think that's a realistic scenario.
I mean, I agree with you about Eric's world vulnerabilities, but look at what's actually
happening.
He got the big union endorsement, the S E I U. He's getting all of the Pelosi crew
endorsing him, Adam, Schiff and so on.
I have a feeling that Eric Swalwell is going to start consolidating the Democrat machine
for all his weaknesses.
And so he might start moving up.
And then Tom Sire, I mean, he spent 80 million just as you said earlier, but it's huge
amount of money.
Well, what's another 80 or 100 million to him, nothing.
And maybe that moved him up a couple of polls.
So I think that the real risk for us is that if we continue to divide the vote, I'm ahead
and that's great, but you know, it's still pretty evenly split.
There's a real chance, I think the much more realistic chance than you get to Republicans
in the top two is actually that you get to Democrats.
And that's why I very strongly argue that it really is time for us to get behind one
Republican.
And I think that it's clear now from it's very consistent in the last couple of months
that I'm leading.
And so that would be my argument to Republicans.
Let's get behind the leading candidate.
Here's my pushback on that theory.
The one union that hasn't weighed in yet is arguably the most powerful union in the
state of California, the California Teachers Association.
And right now what you're seeing is you're seeing this coordinated effort.
They won't acknowledge it because it's illegal.
But there is a coordinated effort in big city school districts all over the state, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo, other places where the teachers are voting to
authorize a strike.
And they are trying to force these districts to give them everything they want and more,
even though if the districts do what they want, they will go insolvent.
And the teachers are going in, peddled to the metal.
They don't seem to care about bankrupting these districts.
They just want all the silver they can get.
And my theory is that they are going to extract a promise from whichever candidate they
endorse that if that person wins, all of these districts get a bail out from Sacramento.
So they get their raises and they can continue to operate.
If you look at the Democratic side of the aisle, I think that Swalwell would make that
deal with them.
I think that Porter would make that deal with them.
I think the non-Vierregosal low polling dems would make that deal with them.
And I think that Swalwell is probably the least likely to cut that deal.
Because right now, he sees himself as the most likely Democrat to advance to November.
And he wouldn't want that news hanging around his neck that promised to the teachers union
because he could see himself getting elected.
And that would destroy his public image if he went around bailing out all of these disaster
school districts as his first order of business.
I think they're more likely to endorse someone other than Eric Swalwell, which would
then split those union endorsements.
I think that's right, if that happens.
And they so far have shown absolutely no ability to coordinate or coalesce.
So that would continue the patent if the two big ones, SCIU, and then the teachers went
in different directions, then the CTA, the other teachers' unions have endorsed elsewhere.
But if those two real giant ones went separate directions, that would be the patent that
we've seen so far.
That's one of the reasons why they're in this mess.
I have to be honest, Lachon, I think you're giving Eric Swalwell far too credit for being
a serious thoughtful candidate who actually cares about anything in the real world other
than his own candidacy.
I just can't believe he thinks like that.
I truly don't.
I just think he's all about himself.
I mean, look at these, you know, he's constantly promoting himself for years.
That's what it's been all about.
And if you look at what he says, there's barely anything substantive on solving our problem.
It's all Trump, Trump, Trump, and political rhetoric and superficial slogans, rather
than any kind of thing.
And there's no sign that he's done a single thing to think about how he would solve our problems.
And I've seen him on these debates now.
And he one of the things he constantly says, he thinks it's a nice little, I don't know
why he thinks this is good, but I suppose for a Democrat audience, they lap it up.
He says that by top three priorities for governor, revenue, revenue, revenue, we need more
revenue.
Really?
They've nearly doubled the budget.
And the last five years, and they want more revenue, we've paid the highest taxes in
the country for the worst results, but they just want more money.
And so I don't know.
I think that he's just, I don't think that he's a serious person at all in the sense of
thinking about the actual issues and developing solutions to them.
Let me ask you one policy question.
We have about 60 seconds before we have to go.
We mentioned that the Democratic candidates have been hesitant to criticize Gavin Newsome.
One piece of legislation that Gavin Newsome has signed would allow elderly inmates to
be released from prison, regardless of what they were sentenced to by a judge and a jury.
We have seen any number of very dangerous sex offenders get released or the parole boards
have voted to release them from prison, one after another, after another.
It's not an anomaly.
It's what's going on right now in the state of California.
How big of a problem is that right now?
It's a huge problem.
I've discussed it with many people in law enforcement, even including yesterday.
I had a very important meeting on it.
And yes, it's the legislation.
Remember when they say elderly, they're like, what does it say 50, 55?
They're not elderly, so it's outrageous to describe people as elderly in their 50s.
And that's what we're talking about here.
And you've got people, I mean, you look at sex offenders now in California.
I'm afraid to say you've got people in their 20s and 30s committing those crimes.
So they're going to be out really early.
Now, as governor, I can't single handedly unilaterally overturn the legislation,
which is, of course, I'd like to do.
But you can do is reclassify these people and have them in a different category,
so they are not eligible for early parole.
And the decision on that is made by the parole board appointed by the governor.
And I've made it absolutely clear that I would immediately fire anyone on that parole board
who signs up to this obscenity and replace them with common sense people
who want to protect public safety and protect victims' rights
to have people put away for these absolutely disgusting crimes.
So one way or another, this whole disgusting joke of the policy is going to end when I'm governor.
Steve Hilton, candidate for governor.
You can get him online at goldentogether.com and follow him on exit, Steve Hilton next.
Steve Hilton, thanks so much for topping by.
Thank you, Joe. Great to be with you.
Every day the world gets a little weirder and a lot more awesome.
Cool stuff daily takes a look at everything from mining and space to the latest
in the fight against cancer to how AI is basically changing everything.
It's all the cool stuff you didn't know you need it to know.
Join us for cool stuff daily as we take a quick look at science, tech, and the,
wait, what stories that make you sound way smarter at dinner.
Subscribe to cool stuff daily now because the future is happening fast and it's way to fond of this.
This is Mike Fowlow of lexicon Valley.
And I'm Bob Garfield.
Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words?
Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language?
Hey, us too.
So, join us on lexicon valley to true over the history, culture, and many mysteries of English.
Plus, some ice cracks.
Find us on one of those apps where people listen to podcasts.
The John Phillips Show
