Can the City of LA be sued over the Palisades Fire?

John Phillips Show. Mr. Randy Wings in Culver City. John, the strike at SFUSD continues as parents are trying to figure out who's going to watch their kids because the teacher's got to make sure they... Get that money! Wait, I thought everyone knew what happened during a strike. Judge Judy watches their kids. Or is it the kids watching Judge Judy? I don't know. 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 ABC News legal analyst and the co-host of the Too Many Lawyers podcast, which you can download wherever you download your favorite podcasts. Royal Oaks, welcome. Hey, my pleasure, John. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for stopping by today. absolutely all right let's start out with the big news in the pacific palisades which is something that those of us who have been following this story have known quite some time and that is a lot of cya going on in the government we know that this fire was a fire that was originally started by an uber driver who went on an anti-trump tirade and then complained to one of his guests that girls wouldn't give him the time of day. So I guess he decided to start a fire because of it. Why? I don't know, but he did. That fire was never fully extinguished. The city of Los Angeles was fighting the fire. They got into a battle over jurisdiction with the state. The state pushed back on the city, said, you have no right to be here. The firefighter said, the fire isn't fully extinguished. We really need to stay on this. And after the political battle happened, someone in the city said, move on. It's good enough. That fire was then reignited when the wind started after New Year. And that became the Pacific Palisades fire that burnt down the entire Palisades or most of the Palisades. We know that the mayor was not here as the leader of the city. She was in Ghana instead to attend an inauguration. We know that there was no water in the reservoir. We know that there was no water in the fire hydrants. We know that the trucks that the fire department needed to fight this fire weren't operational because the mayor cut the budget. There are a lot of problems, a lot of things that we could have probably done differently that would have led to very different results. Well, the mayor being aware that this is not a good look, especially as she marches towards re-election, according to the Los Angeles Times then, decided to water down the after-action report. The report that was supposed to explain what went wrong so we don't do it again in the future. She wanted to water it down so that it didn't harm her re-election chances. Now, if you're a homeowner and you're trying to get a new house because your old one burned down, or you're an insurance company and you're looking at potentially going insolvent because of all the checks that you're going to have to write, this is salient information. and if the city doctored up a report and the intent was to give people the exact wrong idea as to how this happened i would imagine homeowners are going to be furious and the insurance companies are going to be furious and royal they have a right to be and you know what people do when they're furious they go to court yeah it's a that's a great overview i mean there are two sides to the coin. One side is, I mean, it's kind of a no brainer. I mean, the city owes a duty to us to keep us safe and make right decisions and not put us in danger. They clearly breached that duty. They were the cause of a lot of tragic events. People suffered a lot of damages. So, you know, the short answer is, yeah, if you're an insurance company, you had to pay out a jillion bucks and you can prove that it was because of the negligence of the city, then you may well be able to sue them. Same deal with homeowners. They may sue for damages resulting from the negligence or recklessness or intentional misconduct, whatever it turns out to be. So that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is it isn't all that easy to sue the government. We have something called sovereign immunity and immunity in general, where for hundreds of years, we've known that if anybody could just sue for anything, for any reason, and roll the dice in front of a jury and, you know, be sympathy, you're going to get gigantic awards against the governmental entities. It's not the way you're on a railroad because, you know, the government, that's all it would do if you let them be sued indefinitely. But the immunity has limitations. Generally, if you're going after somebody for sort of the big picture, 35,000 foot look, you created these policies, you passed the laws, you can't sue a governmental entity for that. But when it comes to actually implementing in specific the general regulations, then your immunity is probably not going to help. So bottom line is, although there are two sides to the coin, John, I think that the governments are going to have to lawyer up big time city, you know, whoever is responsible, fire departments, because I think lawsuits are going to be allowed to proceed through the system and take years to resolve them. But I think they're going to be a big headache. does it matter whether or not the report was bad just because the people who were writing it were dumb and they didn't know what they were doing and they missed a lot of things and wrote a bad report and if you were to read the report you're led to the wrong conclusions or in this case it looks like the report was correct or at least what we know of what was in the report was correct and then the city decided to distort the results out of malice or I guess they were trying to protect their own keisters and they were trying to make it seem like other people were to blame or at least that they weren't to blame even though the fact said we should blame them. Yeah no it's just bad in every possible way I mean it's essentially a cover-up and as we know from the Watergate experience and so many things since then, maybe it isn't technically as bad as the underlying crime, but oftentimes it seems like it is. And it's sort of an atmospheric. It convinces people in general and jurors who are going to decide the fates of the parties that, you know, these people were not good people. They're not entitled to immunity. They should be forced to pay for their negligence and recklessness. So, yeah, it's it's going to be a long playing drama in the courts. Obviously, people have all the sympathy in the world for the fire victims, people who lost everything they own down to their toothbrush. You lose your schools, you lose your churches, you lose your grocery stores. It's not just your house. You lose your entire community. Your neighbors will likely not be moving back, and it's just going to be a very different place if and when it's ever rebuilt. however people don't usually have sympathy for insurance companies they look at insurance companies as adversaries they look at insurance companies as someone who's out to to screw them over but in this particular case the insurance companies are sympathetic too because if you're insuring a homeowner in california with the assumption of hey they pay a fortune in taxes they're supposed to get first-class fire they're supposed to get first-class public safety the government is supposed to be on it the government wasn't on it and then they lied about it well the insurance companies are being wronged here too that's right and you might see one of these situations where it's kind of rare as you say that to have any kind of sympathy for folks who have have no real love for these entities i mean having represented insurance companies a lot over the years, we knew every time we'd go in front of a jury, we'd be looking at 12 people who, you know, to be honest, probably hated insurance companies at some point. You know, they killed Aunt Bertha by not paying her health claim last year. And good luck getting people to admit that during the jury selection process. The other inside baseball angle, John, is that if an insurance company is going after what they call subrogation rights, where we had to pay money to our policyholder, but the reason we had to pay it is because the city was reckless. That often is resolved by a judge, not a jury. So in those contexts, the insurance companies wouldn't have to worry about facing the 12 people looking down the barrel of a gun of folks who hate insurance companies. Presumably the judges would be a little more objective. I guess this next question is semi-rhetorical, but I would imagine that given what we've learned from these fires, how the city's response was awful, the city lied about it to try to cover their own keisters. If you're an insurance company, why in the world would you want to do business in California knowing nothing is really changing? This is just how it's going to be in the future. If you're going to stay in business in California and I was the insurance company, I'd want to jack the rates up. And if I had it my way, I'd probably just want to get out of Dodge altogether. Yeah, that's right. Well, since your question was semi rhetorical, I could get away with giving you half of an answer, but no, John, I'm going to give you a complete answer. And the answer is 30 million, 40 million people. We're so gigantic insurance companies. They can rail against the misconduct of the insurance commissioner and the legislature being mean to them and Proposition 103 type deals where it says, hey, roll your rates back 20 percent below what they were a year ago. You can't pass up this many people And you do have options You can go to court and say hey your honor the insurance commissioner I don know I guess he running for governor or something because he wouldn allow me a rational reasonable critically needed rate increase The law says rates have to be adequate and not discriminatory not excessive not too low And so you as an insurance company can go into court and prove we're really entitled to a rate increase. You're going to get it through the court system, even if a politically motivated insurance commissioner at the moment wants to bash the industry so he can do what no previous elected insurance commissioner has ever done, namely get elected to governor. We're speaking with Royal Oaks, ABC News legal analyst. Royal, the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, also announced that she will ban ICE from city properties. how in the world is that legal how can a local government tell the federal government they are not welcome in city buildings on city property in any way shape or form and i'm trying to find the reverse of this imagine if during the obama years or the biden years the state of west virginia or the state of utah said you know what the epa does nothing but cause problems here So we're going to just ban the EPA from going to coal mines because we don't want them poking around. How would that be legal? Yeah, so that's the easier case. A state cannot constitutionally prohibit a federal agency like the EPA from enforcing federal environmental laws within the borders of the state. They can try to refuse to use state resources like money and personnel and state data to assist the EPA or the IRS or ICE or whatever. The tougher call is your first example of Mayor Bass saying, well, we're just not going to allow ICE to use city property. I mean, she does have some discretion in the sense that L.A. can decide who gets permission to use city-owned facilities like a park or a garage or a lot. I mean, it owns, it controls that property. And so the federal government might have an uphill battle to try to go to court and say, hey, you know, we got this staging operation. Mayor Bass may not physically prevent federal agents from doing their thing, operating off site on federal land or private property. But she does have some ability to to not let them use city facilities. And it's a variation in the theme we've heard about on the sanctuary city or state front for years now. OK, we don't have to help you, but are we in trouble for impeding you getting in your way? And if the feds could show that that Mayor Bass crossed the line and really interfered with a legitimate federal operation just because she insisted, you know, you can't set foot on a lot. You know, she she could be in some trouble and have some splainment to do. But in general, she's got some power to keep the feds off of city properties. I would imagine if the feds want to push back, they could. Because anytime, let's say, the LAFD or the LAPD sends a helicopter up into the airspace, well, the FAA governs that. So if the federal government wants to say no city of Los Angeles aircraft can use airspace that we govern, they can do that if they wanted to, I would assume. Yeah, no, you're right. And in general, we all know that federal law is supposed to trump state law, and it doesn't completely eviscerate the local officials. But it does give you this benchmark that if the feds come in and federal law says that the federal agents are entitled to do X, then if you prevent them from doing it or impede them in some way, you are in trouble. Now, if you just say, hey, we own that warehouse, we're not going to let you use it as a staging area, then the city probably is on stronger ground. It seems like this is more performative than anything, which is what they're good at. They're good at the performance stuff. They're not good at governing. Karen Das needs a good performance. She needs a good comeback performance. I don't think she'll be getting an Oscar anytime soon. No. We're speaking with Royal Oaks, co-host of the Too Many Lawyers podcast. And Royal, Karen Bass has a new challenger. She seeks another four years as mayor of Los Angeles. Socialist city councilwoman Nithya Rahman says she wants to be the next mayor of Los Angeles. She is someone who sees herself as being the West Coast version of Zoran Mamdani, who is the socialist mayor of New York, who was just elected last year. She believes in many of the same things as him, including the government. She'd own the means of production. She wants to defund the police. She wants ice out of Los Angeles. She wants to empty all the jails right before L.A. gets the Olympics. What could go wrong? Yeah, it's tough to know what you could do, because if you've got a mayor with a compliant city council, who knows if the majority of the council is going to go along with wacky ideas like emptying the jails and defunding the police. And more likely, you're going to see some moderated, watered-down version of those things. But let's assume that she marches toward that. It's hard to know what you can do because you can't really roll into court and say, oh, your honor, nice tie. What she's done is dangerous. And here's my lawsuit saying, well, there is no such thing as, well, that was a bad idea lawsuit or it's dangerous. You have to point to a specific legal obligation by a lawmaker or a governmental entity that's being violated. You can't rely on a generic, well, government-created danger. But you do have constitutional, federal constitutional rights. And you can say that substantive due process and equal protection are violated if a state is doing something so wacky that they have actually created a danger for people. I mean, the state of California could intervene in a suit saying the state law requires cities to keep the peace. That means having a police force and a jail. Plus, the sheriff's department, of course, runs the county jail. So even if a city mayor wanted to empty the jails or dump half of the folks out, they can't do that. So, you know, it's governors can let people out. Judges, prosecutors can decline charges. You've also got John Marcy's law that protects crime victims in California. So you can intervene as an individual, maybe the California attorney general. So there are a lot of things that we can do if she goes completely off the rails. But it's not all that simple and straightforward, because as they say, you can't just go to the judge and say, you know, she's doing a bad thing, so please stop her. New York City is home to Wall Street, and in that city, none of the Wall Street people wanted Mamdani to become mayor. But the problem was they couldn't all get together on the same page. Some of them supported Mayor Eric Adams, who was the Democrat running for re-election. I guess he turned independent. Some of them supported Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor who had a million and one different problems. And then you had the Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa, as well. But everyone didn't get behind one horse to go after Mamdani. You're a longtime Angeleno. You've lived here your whole life. You know the power brokers in the city. obviously if you're in the tech industry if you're in uh you're importing things from asia at the port of los angeles you're you're in hollywood you don't want something like this to put your business in jeopardy do you see the stakeholders in los angeles getting behind the same horse or do you see the same problems that we saw in new york city repeat themselves here in la Yeah, I imagine that she's not going to take off the way Mom Donnie did. I mean, he was just such a cultural phenomenon with the beaming smile and all the promises. She's going to try to replicate his success. But I think it would be surprising if she were able to do that. But you're absolutely right. I mean, look at any example of politics. Look at Donald Trump. So many Republicans didn't like him, but everybody had their own choice. Oh, you know, we want Ted Cruz. We want Ron DeSantis or whatever. Or, well, you add up all of the opposition to Trump, and it was a big number, but it wasn't enough. I think on your point about the power brokers, I mean, I think that the – it's like the old saying, you don't want to pick a fight with somebody who buys ink by the barrel. And so it's dangerous to be getting a feud with the press. It's also dangerous to get in a feud with tech and Hollywood, the entertainment business, because they're so powerful here in Los Angeles. And I would think that representatives of those business economic communities could get the word to Nithya Raman if she does become mayor. You know, if you try to dismantle the town and turn it into some sort of a socialist oasis, you're not going to be happy. You have some extremely powerful enemies who have the interest of the general public at heart. And we know we've seen this movie before. Socialism doesn't work. promising a bunch of free stuff gets you voted, gets you in the office, but then disaster looms. I would think that'd be the message they'd deliver. Royal Oaks, ABC News legal analyst and co-host of the Too Many Lawyers podcast. You can download that wherever you download your favorite podcasts. Royal, thanks so much for stopping by. You bet. Thanks. Every week on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, we talk personal finance trends. Not paying attention to the headlines is the strategy proven to work. One headline, economists fear global recession. Literally the next headline, stocks at all-time highs, investors optimistic on the future. They're even doing it to the weather now. 28 million people in the path of this snowstorm. That means 340 million people have got good weather. It's just weather. Layers, people. Layers. Stacking Benjamins. Follow and listen on your favorite platform. 800-222-5222 is your telephone number. 1 Well we know that embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass once another four years is mayor Why I don know but for whatever reason that what she wants And incumbents don't usually lose. It doesn't matter what office you're talking about, whether it's for the city council, the Congress, the state legislature, mayor, governor, whatever. Incumbents always have huge advantages over their opponents. Also, if you come from the political power structure of the city, which she does, you have every imaginable advantage in the race. However, we know that Karen Bass has failed Los Angeles. We were reminded of this with the fires in the Pacific Palisades and now with the new report saying that Karen Bass watered down the report to cover her own ass. Well, one of the people who is furious over all of that is Spencer Pratt, who was a resident of the Palisades. His home burned down. I believe the home belonging to his parents also burned down. And now he's pissed. And he is now a declared candidate to be mayor of Los Angeles. However, he's facing an uphill battle. As I mentioned, Bass is the incumbent. She's going to have all the money. She's going to have all the endorsements. She's going to have the power structure in the city behind her. What is it that Spencer Pratt can do to try to turn this into a real race? Well, we can look to history as to when this has happened before. Back in 2009, the city of Los Angeles was facing a lot of problems. Crime, homelessness, many of these problems that persist today. And there was an attorney who had never been elected to city office before in Los Angeles who was a smart attorney and decided that he was going to throw his hat in the ring, that he felt that he had something he could contribute to try to make Los Angeles a better place. So he decided to run for mayor. And despite the fact that he faced long odds and they tried every way they could to make sure that when it became obvious that he was picking up steam, that they slowed him down. Things like not inviting him to debates, not mentioning him in the newspaper coverage, in the paper of record, those sorts of things. Nonetheless, in 2009, Walter Moore ran a very strong race for mayor, much stronger than anyone expected from him. And because of that, I think he has a lot that he can contribute this time around in terms of advice to Spencer Pratt, a guy who was given no chance, who turned that into a real race. Walter Moore is kind enough to join us this afternoon. Walter, thanks so much for stopping by. Hey, thanks so much for inviting me. It's great to talk with you again. Well, I tell you, the moment I saw that Spencer Pratt was going to run for mayor, the first thing I said to myself is this guy needs to talk to Walter Moore, because Walter Moore probably has more knowledge about what Spencer Pratt is going to go through than any other living human being on planet Earth. I think I have a PhD on how to run for mayor as an outsider now in LA. And I learned a lot of lessons. I wrote down like 20 points, and I can send them to him, but we can talk about some of them. To me, the number one on the list is talk radio is your friend, in particular KABC, because most people don't pay any attention to local politics. They don't know who their city council person is, or maybe now they know who the mayor is from national news. But the people who do pay attention listen to your show, listen to talk radio. So he needs to focus on that to reach people who are open-minded and interested in politics. That's point number one. What else is on your list that you learned from running for mayor? Well, I'll reel them off and stop me if you want at any point, but just some of these you just learn by doing it. One of them, second point is get the signatures yourself. To get on the ballot, you don't just sign a form and write a check. You have to get something like a thousand signatures from people who live in the city of L.A. And a lot of people think they live in the city of L.A., but don't. And you really need to get them yourself. You can go door to door. You can have a meeting, but you don't get those. You're not in the race. Another point that's sort of counterintuitive, but goes with the first point is that yard signs and bumper stickers are, in my opinion, critical because most people aren't paying attention. Typically, only a fraction of the registered voters even vote in these elections. It should be a little better now that they're combined with other elections. So what you're going for is name recognition. And if someone sees your name on a yard sign every time he or she leaves the house or comes back, that's the name they're going to remember when they're voting. They may not know anything about you, but they'll know, oh, I've seen that name around it. There must be something to it. It's sort of like when the rest of us vote, if we vote, in judicial elections. You don't know anything about those candidates. But if you know five people in your neighborhood had a sign up for one of them, that's a good sign, literally and figuratively. Another point that is critical that he must do or he will be shut out of any debates is get matching funds. You have to ask people for money and you have to hit that critical mass or it will be used as an excuse to exclude you from candidate forums. And in 2009, the way Villaraigosa avoided that is he just didn't participate in any forums. Right. He did not want to debate. That's the last thing he wanted to do. another thing that I think is particularly important for this candidate is you need to have qualifications and experience you need to tell people something about yourself that makes you qualified to run this city and I you know no disrespect all I know about him is reality tv personality I don't think that's going to cut it he needs to talk about what he's done in the real world that makes him qualified. And speaking of talking about what makes him qualified, he must excel at public speaking. If he doesn't know how to do it, get a coach, do it now, because that's going to be key when you're interacting with people who do vote and who do pay attention and who do come to those meetings. One other sort of odd thing you learn by doing it is to be very careful about the contribution forms. There's elaborate requirements under the city ethics rules, and they're so Byzantine that if someone's self-employed and the form asks for the name of the employer and they put self that can get rejected. So I, you know, this is kind of overly technical, but it's things he needs to know under the more interesting things, you know, you pointed out that incumbents rarely lose, but it can happen. And it happens when more career politicians come out and run against them. And I, as I understand it, one of Bass's allies just came out to run against her too. And that's good for an outsider because you get to lump those officials together and say, look, they're all in city hall, or maybe they were in the state legislature. What you see around you is what they have delivered. Have they been holding the good stuff for later? Are they really going to start doing something differently later? No, They're all the same vinegar in different bottles. And if you vote for any of them, they're all same person. I think that's very effective. And that's that helped a lot for an election in the previous election where Hertzberg and all these other people's people were coming out and running against Han. Han was an incumbent who was not reelected. And then one thing to bear in mind, both for oneself and for prospective voters that you're talking to, is a little bit of game theory, because people say, oh, you don't have a chance. You can't win a majority because, as you point out, the incumbents win. And one reason they win is all the union members and city officials will vote for them. But the way these elections work, you don't have to win a majority in the primary unless someone else does. Your mission is just to divide the career politicians' votes so they're cannibalizing each other. And what you really want is the outsider is you want all of the votes of people who are fed up with the career politicians. You want people who want truly new leadership. And another one. Stop me if I'm just filibuster. No, no, this is this is unbelievably fascinating. And we're going to definitely send this podcast to him because he needs to hear all of it. OK, good. The other thing he needs to do because most people don pay attention to local politics is identify specific failures point out exactly what government is doing that is wrong And the best source of that information I found was the city own website I went through that thing, and you can look at city contracts, and you may recall some of the things I discovered was the city was paying like a million dollars a year to rent monkeys from China, paid $200,000 to a feng shui consultant for the monkey house. There were stuff you couldn't make up. Like they had seminars for city employees on sphincter control. Remember that? Most of us mastered that by age three or four, but apparently it was a problem at City Hall. And, you know, you need to point out what they're doing wrong. And I haven't paid attention to it for years because now I live in the beautiful city of Pasadena, but I'm sure there are plenty of bad things happening. I remember one thing that struck me as odd is granting these trash monopolies. But whatever it is, he needs to identify specific problems. It's not just enough to say, boy, they did a lousy job at the fire. Okay, but what else are they doing wrong? And that brings me to the next point is, in my opinion, my experience, you need to have a specific platform. You need to tell people exactly what it is you're going to do differently at three different levels. Number one, as a mayor, executive action, exactly what are you going to do as mayor that's going to improve people's lives? And by the way, you better make sure that a mayor can actually do that, because our city government is set up in kind of a funny way. It has all these commissions and it has the city council. So don't just think you can issue an edict and it will happen. I remember in the 2005 election, all these candidates were talking about how they were going to improve the schools. And I stood up and said, excuse me, that's a completely different branch of government. You have no power over the schools at all. So why were they even talking about it? So point one of your platform is what are you going to do as mayor? Point two is what's your legislative agenda for the city? Because some of the reforms you'll want to push are things that can only be passed by the city council. And, you know, your pitch is I will use the bully pulpit to get them to enact these reforms. Well, have some in mind. And likewise, the third part of your platform is what are you going to do to change law at the state level? For example, if your issue is homelessness, will you push for reform in Sacramento to, hypothetical example, to bring back involuntary confinement of the mentally ill in institutions instead of having them live on the streets? I'm not particularly advocating on that one way or the other, but that's something that needs to be done at a state level that would have a huge impact here. Next point is, remember, you're running for mayor, not president, because a lot of people in these races, they they want to talk about foreign policy or abortion or all kinds of things over which the mayor has no influence whatsoever. and what I would point out to people and point out to a candidate is this is expressly a nonpartisan office and it really should be nonpartisan because the issues the city deals with aren't particularly ideological. We want the traffic to flow. We want to be able to ride the subway without being mugged or having to see somebody's junk. We want DWP bills that aren't insane. That's something everyone should agree on. And one thing I was proud of when I had a rally, it was also a presidential election year. There were people wearing McCain T-shirts and Obama T-shirts because the issues that divide people politically really shouldn't matter at this level of government. next point uh i kind of covered this above know what a mayor can and cannot do the city structure you really have to study it and also look at the budget because there are a lot of false claims made about what the budget is the budget is overwhelmingly massive it's multi-billion dollars and uh it can be tweaked and changed one other point let me ask you this because i think one of the fears that people have of running for office as an outsider is they fear the blowback because you are angering the system that is in their mind operating just fine without someone else standing outside pointing out the flaws and saying we can do better i would imagine that when you were running for mayor you felt some of that blowback at various times maybe you weren't invited into the opening of the restaurants. Maybe if you needed your street to be repaved, they took a long time to do that. How much blowback should he expect to get from the machine? The more successful you are, the more the blowback. There'll be smears, anything they can find that he ever said, they will try to smear him. I think in his case in particular, the attack would be, oh, a reality TV show star, he's not doing this because he's serious. He's doing it because he wants attention. But it can have blowback, and there are instances that I will spare you, some not directed at me, but the city government, they're not above retaliating against people for exercising First Amendment rights. rights. But hey, you know, you've got to stand up and fight. You've got to try to improve the city because if you succeed, great. And if you don't, you can at least say, hey, don't blame me. I tried. I did something. And, you know, you just spurred another concept that isn't on my list but should be, is you have to raise money. And at first, I felt bad asking for money because I thought, well, that's not what it should be about. But it is about that because you have to get those matching funds. You have to get the ads. And what helped me psychologically was to realize I wasn't asking for the money for me. This is an investment that the voters make. If you want a better city, and you believe, because you've lived long enough to remember how great it used to be, that it can be much better. Think of a contribution as kind of a lottery ticket with pretty good odds. It's not a million to one. But if you spend $100 on a contribution for a politician who's outside the machine, you may get a much better place to live. You may get safe streets and parks where you'd actually want to go with your kids or your dog. So there can be blowback and the press can be very biased too. Well, to that point, we have about 40 seconds left. Do you feel like you were treated fairly by the establishment press, the LA Times, public radio, those people? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. They went out of their way to ignore me. And, and, and that's, you know, that's part of the lesson I learned. And why you need talk radio, you need to reach out to neighborhood associations and civic groups, build a network of volunteers, hold your own meetings, and go around them. Like don't buy ads from TV stations, buy ads from the cable company where you can target individual neighborhoods. But do not do not think that the press works the way it does in movies. I had quotations attributed to me that I never uttered and put in quotation marks, not paraphrase. So, yeah, be prepared. You're running against the machine and part of that machine is the media. very on brand for them i i hate to say but walter thank you so much for stopping by and thank you so much for loaning your wisdom not just to spencer pratt but to everyone out there in radio land we learned so much thank you so much for stopping by my pleasure great talking with you john keep covering the city all right will do walter bohr everyone you can follow him on x at license to sue Dan Bongino returns. It's real. You better produce something fast. And he's not holding back. Dan, that's backwards. No, I'm telling you the truth. Hard truths and a bold perspective no one else can offer. You may not hear this anywhere else. I'm always under the assumption that you're being played, we're being played. Man, this show continues to expand its footprint. I love you guys for it. It's the comeback everyone's been waiting for. If there was ever a time, it is this one. The Dan Bongino Show. Follow and listen on your favorite platform. It's the John Phillips Show. Dan Bongino returns. It's real. You better produce something fast. And he's not holding back. Dan, that's backwards. No, I'm telling you the truth. Hard truths and a bold perspective no one else can offer. You may not hear this anywhere else. I'm always under the assumption that you're being played, we're being played. Man, this show continues to expand its footprint. I love you guys for it. It's the comeback everyone's been waiting for. If there was ever a time, it is this one. The Dan Bongino Show. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.