And we continue at 205 in the afternoon on the John Phillips show. Mr. Randy Wings in Culver City. John reason number 978 to not get your kids an e-bike. A pack of e-bike and teens took over a Walmart in Orange County. Oh, well, more on that later on in the hour. 802 222 5222 is telephone number 1 800 222 it is our pleasure to welcome our next guest to the program. He is a syndicated columnist and the author of a Watchman in the Night. What I've seen over 50 years reporting on America available online at Amazon.com. You can get him online at CalThomas.com and follow him on X at CalThomas CalThomas. Welcome. Hey, John, nice to be with you again. How are things in wonderful California? Well, the weather is good, but that's about all I can say. Well, the big news of the day is that Hunter Biden has announced that he would like to be Gavin Newsom's vice president on a Newsom Biden ticket. That's even better than anything Kamala Harris could come up with. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that because Randy and I were just talking between the election for governor here in California, between the LA mayoral race and that weirdo in Maine that's running for Senate, Gavin Newsom has just been left in the dust. No one's talking about him. He's not particularly relevant right now. So we knew that he was going to have to pull a stunt to get his name back in the papers. And what does he do? He puts Hunter Biden on his podcast as if that's going to help him out. Yeah, I think that's that's a stroke of desperation. And I think it's going to be, well, back when the late night comedians actually did comedy instead of all of this left wing politics. I think it would have been a major thing for Jay Leto, among others. Well, let's talk about some of these races here in California, including the LA mayoral race, where Spencer Pratt, who generated a lot of interest, at least on this show and around town, and put up viral videos that expose the despair that's going on right now in Los Angeles that were shared on social media and across different platforms all over the globe. He will not be on the November ballot. It'll be the socialist councilwoman, Nithya Raman, and the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, who cut her teeth in politics studying at the knee of Fidel Castro. And she's supposed to be the moderate in the race. He put out a video today saying he would not be endorsing either candidate. He regards both of them as communists, and he is going to continue to put videos on social media between now and the election, exposing the corruption of both of them. What do you make all of that? Well, John, this is the definition of insanity. I mean, the polls have shown in Los Angeles that people regard the city as going in the wrong direction. And so what happens? A majority of them vote for people who are the problem. It makes no sense at all. I would like to see a lot of the people who voted for Karen Bass and the socialist, what's her name, interviewed and asked them, do you really want to continue things the way they are in Los Angeles with the taxes, with the homeless, or as Karen Bass calls them, the unhoused? I just love that wokeism term. I mean, why would you do this? Because so much of it is knee jerk. I've always said that if Satan were running for office as a Democrat, he'd probably win because there are people who just would vote for anybody who claims to be a Democrat. And it's the same in Maine. This guy, a Platner, is a whack job. 20 years ago, he wouldn't have gotten any attention, much less any votes. I mean, the Nazi tattoo, Medicare for all, taxing billionaires out of existence, all these things are just crazy. I don't think he's going to win, but I do think Susan Collins has got a real problem on her hands because he's going to get the most coverage. Well, you kind of have similar elements going on in that race as you do in the LA mayors race. And I say that because in Spencer Pratt's video, he says that he has information on one of the two candidates. He won't reveal which one that is career ending, but he's not going to release it until after the election, presumably if the person gets elected, to expose them to voters and expose them to the world. We know that there's additional information on the candidate that you just referenced in the state of Maine, Graham Platner. I don't know what that information is or what those stories are. I can tell you this, when he was first exposed as to being on that website kick, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a deputy district attorney out here in California. And she told me that that is the website where they catch the people who are trying to have sexual relationships with children on, that when you have like the to catch a predator where they go undercover, the cops go undercover and they start chatting with people and posing as underage girls, that's the forum. That's the website that they do it on. And she said, if he's on that website, that's bad news. And there's only one reason to be there. And this guy's going to have some problems. Yeah, I don't think it matters to a lot of voters anymore, John. I just think the whole issue of character, and this includes Republicans too. I wrote a piece the other day, going back to the early 20th century, late 19th century that included Republicans and Democrats engaged in all kinds of activities that got them thrown in jail or thrown out of office. And now, as you say, you can be on this kick website, you can have sex with people, not your wife. Look at this guy, Platner, his wife turned him into the state Democrat party or told them that he was on these websites and sexting with women. We don't know how old they are or were because they haven't been told yet. And the Democrat voters in Maine say, you know, what else is new? Or as James Carville said about Bill Clinton and all of his sexual proclivities. It's just sex. It's between he and his wife. So nothing really matters when it comes to character anymore. It's only power and it's money. And as the old song says, you know, let the devil take tomorrow, help me make it through the night. Or in this case, keep my check coming in. I looked up the age of consent in the state of Maine. And the age of consent is 16. What do you think they do if he ends up, if he gets caught having inappropriate comments, conversations, sending inappropriate pictures to a girl who was 16 years old while legal in the state of Maine, I think a lot of people would have a problem with a grown man and a 16 year old. Well, apparently not Democrats because all of a lot of this stuff was known before the primaries. And he was really the only Democrat running. And so Democrat, what are Democrats going to do? They're going to cross over and vote for Susan Collins. I mean, this gets to my point about character. I mean, if you, here's, here's something you remember when Gary Hart was cheating on his wife with, with what's her name? You don't even remember her name now. I want, I was doing CNN at the time and substituting for Pat Buchanan on Crossfire. And I wanted to have him on, but I couldn't get him on. And the question I wanted to ask him was Senator, if we can't believe your pledge to your wife to forsake all others until death do you part on what basis should we believe your political promises? I think character and your political stance and your public life go together. I just don't see how you can separate the two, but maybe I'm too old and part of another generation. Apparently younger people don't care anymore. I don't know if it's only me, but we're on the air right now, not just in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco. And in San Francisco, there was a political assassination that rocked the world when Mayor Moscone was gunned down at City Hall, as was Harvey Milk. And they were both killed by a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dan White, who was a little off kilter to say the least. I kind of get those, those Dan White vibes from Grant Platner every time I see that guy on TV. If I were serving in the United States Congress, I would not want to be in a room with that guy. He's awful. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, I was just watching a video of him about an hour ago, and he's talking about not just fighting, but taking over. He and Bernie Sanders and the crazy socialist left, Zohan Mondami of New York, they really do want to take over the country. They want to impose their socialist communist values on everybody. And it remains to be seen whether they get there first or those who want to impose Sharia law on all of us get there first. But this is dangerous stuff. And I think, you know, for too long, too many people have looked to government as a first resource instead of a last resort. And as we approach the 250th anniversary of our country, the founders must be spinning in their graves because they were all about individual responsibility, personal character, and all of these other things. You read the founding documents, refer to God, refer to endowed inalienable rights, and all of these other things. We've forgotten all of that. You know, you look at some of these interviews, Jesse Waters guy goes out to the beach and talks to some of these kids and ask them basic, simple questions that they can't answer. And this is the product of our government education system. It's very, very sad to see this. They don't know anything except what they read on social media. Yeah. When I went to political science school, and we were learning about socialism, it was taught to us that socialism means the government owns the means of production. The government owns the factories, the government owns the farms, the government owns all of those things. Well, now in modern society in 2026, China owns the means of production. Many of those things are not even happening in the United States. They're certainly not happening in big cities like Los Angeles. Yet you have a candidate who could be, according to the polls, is likely to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, who is a self-described socialist. We have a socialist candidate in Seattle who won that election and is now mayor. There's a socialist in the mayor's seat in Chicago and in New York City, who you just referenced not long ago. We have members of the DSA in the United States Congress as well. What do you think the term socialist means today, assuming that the means of production is kind of an outdated term that doesn't apply to a service-based economy, which is what most big cities have? What do you think that word means to them? Well, I think you probably referenced that many times on your show. It's one of the most famous quotes about this when Margaret Thatcher says, the problem with socialism is you soon run out of other people's money. It's equally shared poverty. When I was growing up, I was taught that working hard, being responsible, living within your means, don't envy others. So all of these things were inculcated in me by my parents and grandparents, who my grandparents lived through the Great Depression and World War II. This is why we call the World War II generation the greatest generation. Why were they great? Because of their character, because of their commitment, because of their patriotism and dedication to the country and opposition to evil and knowing right from wrong. All of these things now have been obliterated from our education system in favor of this envy, greed and entitlement, the unholy trinity of the secular left. I don't envy anybody making more than me. God bless them. Let them go ahead and do it. There's not a fixed amount of money so that if you take more than I do, it's somehow unfair. There's an unending supply of money. If you work hard, don't have kids at 14 years old, stay off drugs and get a decent education. You can be part of the American dream, but we don't teach that anymore. Look at this case in Texas, where these liberal blacks turned out and claim that the verdict, this murder verdict that came out was somehow racist because there were no blacks on the jury, although there were Hispanics and Orientals. We are fighting each other now and this is great news to our enemies. They would rather have us fight each other and destroy each other so they don't have to do the job. Let's go back to the socialists in the mayor's seats in big cities all over the country. Do you think that is something that is just going on in big cities or do you think that that could be something that foreshadows what's going to happen in the Democratic primary for president in 2028? Well, as you well know and your listeners know, when you look at the map, for example, California, you know, the whole western part of the state, virtually all of it is blue and all of the rest of California, the rural parts are red, but the blue parts have the most population. And that's true in these big cities. You look at the national map, most of America is red, but these tiny little blue dots, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, increasingly Houston, look at that crazy Jasmine Crockett, who is a congresswoman from there. She is a real nut job. These have the major population centers. And if you train enough of these people in their schools, in their universities, to believe against the evidence, by the way, that socialism is fair somehow, because as Obama said, we want to spread the wealth around, then you're going to get a lot of people believing this. And of course, the peer pressure and the desire to go along and to be liked by your friends means you have to buy into this, be anti-Israel, be anti-Semitic, and the whole list of the secular progressive agenda. And I think we're seeing more and more of it, and that's why I'm such a fan of school choice and seeing how it's spreading now across the country. I think that's our only hope if we're going to be around for another 50 years. You used to be a regular on the McLaughlin group. You knew John McLaughlin. He unfortunately is no longer with us. If he were to come back and take a peek at the newspapers and figure out what's going on in the United States right now politically speaking, you were to explain it to him over a couple of cocktails. What do you think his take would be? Well, it was never on the McLaughlin report, but I was on Crossfire quite a bit sitting in for Buchanan. But I think John or Buchanan, who's still around, but not writing his column anymore, when people of a certain age have a perspective, when they, and my wife and I talk about this all the time, we went to the same high school, and some of the things that are being taught today would have not been taught when we were in high school and elementary school. As I said earlier, we pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. We proudly stood and sang the national anthem. We flew the flag in front of our house. All of these things now are supposed to be, you know, super nationalistic and racist and superior to other nations and all this stuff, and that's what's being taught. So I would say to listeners of, you know, if you've got a child or grandchild in the public schools or one of these universities that teach this stuff, get them out, put them in a private school, home school them, send them to a university where, like Hillsdale College or maybe Pepperdine there, if they're still teaching these kinds of values, where they will come out with what they went in with. And I think that's the only hope for the future, frankly. Cal Thomas, syndicated columnist, author of A Watchman in the Night, what I've seen over 50 years reporting on America available online at amazon.com. You can find Cal online at caltomas.com and follow him on X at Cal Thomas. Cal Thomas, thanks so much for stopping by. Always a pleasure, John. Thank you. Thank you. And if you'd like to email the show, you can do so at johnnydon'tlikeshow at gmail.com. That's johnnydon'tlikeshow at gmail.com. And if you'd like to follow both of us on social media, because you might have some valuable information there and a not too distant date, you can do so easily by following me at johnnydon'tlike and by following Randy at Randy Wing radio. And Randy, we're about a half hour away from being done with the show. But if you want to continue listening to us all weekend long, that's easy to do. All you got to do is search for the John Phillips show wherever you get your podcast. That could be the Apple podcast app. Like 30% of our listeners use that one. I heart people use that one spotify not as many people use that one. Search for the John Phillips show. Hit subscribe. You can download all the episodes. You could do a Google on the YouTube. Subscribe to the channel. Cumulus news talk at youtube.com slash at cumulus news talk. Our shows get automatically posted there. So you can check us out that way. You can get the K ABC app, the K S F O app, get the K M J now app. We're on the big K M J Saturdays and noon. In fact, I get a couple seconds here. Why don't we see what episode we have ready to go for the big K M J audience? It's going to be June 13th and we've got, oh, Julie Watts gas story and a tree trimming story. That's some good podcasting right there. Check it out. All right. Coming up and right now it's time to open up the California crime blotter. And this one takes us to the Walmart. I cannot reiterate this enough. Do not buy your kid an e bike. It will turn them into a no good criminal. Yeah. I don't know why it is that anyone would want to turn their kid into some kind of suburban Hell's Angel. A bunch of e biking jackass teens decided it would be really fun to take over a Walmart in Orange County and start e biking through the aisles. Uh oh. I wonder if anything happened to the rotisserie chickens. We Walmart has rotisserie chickens. They do it mine. Okay. I might sound a little classic there, but don't buy your food at Walmart. Well, the only reason I know is because it's on the way to the little Debbie's. There you go. For more, here is K T L A a trip to Walmart turned into chaos when teens on e bikes and mini motorcycles took over the store. Now this latest incident sparking fresh debate over e bike safety and whether enough is being done to stop reckless riders. K T L A Sandra Mitchell joins us live in Hollywood with more sandy share. Micah, we have all seen these dangerous riders on the streets and now some of them are getting even bolder going right into stores because nothing's going to happen to them. Nope. Not a thing. They're teenagers. They're untouchable. The parents should be held financially liable for the actions of their little bastards. And yes, I'm assuming that they're all boys because they are. You do not hear of little girls doing this. You really don't. Nope. Tonight, I talked with the man who says his family was really stunned and frankly scared when they started revving right through a Walmart. You punk. Punks get the out of here before you hurt someone. That guy was at his wit's end chaos in an Orange County Walmart kids on e bikes and emotos terrorizing shoppers. I was yelling at them to get out and none of the store employees were doing anything. Well, they're Walmart employees. What do you expect them to do? They're making sub minimum wage. Well, and if you get involved and someone gets hurt, you know the company's going to blame you again. I may be sounding elitist here, but the average Walmart greeter has just enough IQ points to say welcome to Walmart and that's it. That's 61 year old Vince Vasquez on his mobility scooter. He says the teens almost crashed into his wife and daughter who has autism and it really startled my daughter. I typically when you're going shopping at the store, you don't expect to get run down by a mob of teens. No, but it sounds like these three being in the middle of the, I don't know, soda aisle was like being in the middle of the 405 freeway. I yelled at them to stop. It happens Sunday afternoon. You use some bad words too, but that's okay. It's understandable. If you were getting chased down by a mob of e bike and teens, you'd be using every word you had at your disposal. Oh, if I burn my toast, I use those words. In fact, you use those words somehow every second of the day except for when we're on the air. I'm trying to get better. It happens Sunday afternoon inside the Walmart in Foothill Ranch. No one was heard, but the riders got away and Orange County Sheriff's Department spokesperson telling KTLA the incident did not result in criminal charges, but the potential for someone to be, it's not illegal to drive your e bike through a Walmart terrorizing people. Those go pretty fast, but the potential for someone to be harmed, damaged. It's not a crime till you actually run somebody over. And then it's, Oh, he was a teenager. He didn't know it went that fast. He didn't know what he was doing. California gets accused rightly all the time of being an overregulated state when it comes to emerging technologies like e bikes. Maybe we should lean into the regulating part a little. It's so wild to me that for a body like the California legislature that exists to regulate everything out of existence that they've just taken a pass on this one damages to the store or trespassing charges are very real. It is the latest incident involving riders on e bikes and e motorcycles causing dangerous, sometimes deathly situations in April, a 14 year old allegedly struck and killed an 81 year old also in Lake Forest. And they're charging that kid with the charging that kids mom with manslaughter. Good, but the problem is there's going to be tears and waterworks and he's just a boy. That's why you go after the parents because these kids cannot buy these things on their own. They cost hundreds to thousands of dollars in May. If you buy your kid an e bike, you're a bad parent. I said it. In May, a Huntington Beach man seriously injured after he was attacked by a large group of e bike riders. Well, clearly there are no boundaries for these kids. Beth Black is the author of the Caring Parents e bike survival guide. She says it is vital that parents are more aware of the dangers. This was not a harmless prank. What's wrong with getting them a bike with pedals? Yeah, don't we have a problem with childhood obesity too? If they're going to be outside on a bike, at least let them get some exercise. It's a direct result of zero consumer awareness and a lack of compliance. Vasquez, who is also an avid e bike rider, says he blames parents and police. More people don't have to get hurt. More people don't have to get killed for this to stop. I think the police need to do a better job patrolling and just immediately impounding these these motorcycles. Well, then we need to make that the law. The law enforcement can only enforce what current law is. And right now it is the wild, wild West when it comes to e bikes. It's so wild to me that they have chosen to just allow these to go unregulated because if you regulate them, you also get to tax them. And maybe you get to force them to take tests or I don't know, pay fees. It's a money making opportunity for the state. Oh, we did the exact opposite. We used cap and trade money, money raised from the gas taxes and why you spend so much when you're filling up your car to give out vouchers for discounts and $2,000 off of these e bikes. The state is encouraging people to use these because it'll get cars off the road. The Orange County Sheriff's department says it's still trying to track down those teenagers in the Walmart incident, but it is unlikely they will face any charges. We're live tonight in Hollywood. I'm Sandra Mitchell, KTLA 5 News, Sharon Micah back to you. By the way, we just got an email and this is brilliant. Brad writes in at Johnny. Don't like show at gmail.com. Here's a Walmart shopping strategy. Always a good idea to head to the sporting goods section first and pick up an aluminum bat for e bike protection while shopping. Well, I'll tell you this, I know that Walmart has a certain reputation of a certain clientele and certain activities like this that goes on, which is why people like you don't shop there. However, they have a wide variety of items, particularly items that I happen to like. So I go to Walmart, but what I do is I just go very early in the morning. They open at like six o'clock and if you go early, that's going to be before the people on welfare wake up. And usually you can avoid all of those problems. So if you want to go to Walmart, go in the 70 year olds go. I go at six or seven in the morning. I'm not going to go at high noon. Oh, here's a funny email. Jason writes in at Johnny. Don't like show at gmail.com subject line, Pearl clutches. You too need to stop with the e bike persecution on Halloween night of 1977. I was knocked down and assaulted and had my candy stolen by a gang of hoodlum kids on BMX bites. It's not about the vehicle. It's the behavior. The fork didn't make you fat either, Randy. Hey, Hey. And then he finishes it with go Titans. Hey, I like that part. He finished strong. Let's go. 80s broke. Yeah, even those for reds. Just like a boy's scrap. Full set golf. Follow and listen on your favorite platform. 800 222 5222 is a telephone number 1-800-222-5222. And right now it's time to reopen the California crime blotter. It's happened yet again. I see time for the California crime blotter. And this is a peculiar one because typically real estate stories don't make the blotter, but this one did. That's because a couple is pleading guilty to selling properties that they didn't own. That's no good. For more here is CBS eight in San Diego. New tonight using the American dream to steal nearly a million dollars through fraudulent property sales tonight. A married couple is behind bars after admitting to an elaborate scheme of selling real would it be any better if they were living in sin? Hey, if they both go to prison, do they get to conjugal visit each other? No, you can't get released to go other to some other prison to have a role in the hay. So they don't have some program where like you transfer them for one night to the other prison in a special trailer. No. So they both be someone's bitch by day one. Probably of selling real estate. They did not own and then laundering the proceeds. News eight searcher, Dallin is here with more on how the scam worked and how people can avoid becoming a victim. Well, that's right. It's hard to believe this could even happen. Now, Victor Amazon and his wife, Nayeli Rodriguez, both Mexican nationals who were here in the U. S. on tourist visas were arrested last November in Houston while boarding an international flight and taken into custody. Now today, that's a lot of details. People in this country on a tourist visa were about to flee the country after they sold a bunch of property they didn't own. Who does that? Let's go to some other country and sell stuff we don't own. Well, they almost got away with it. Now today in federal court in downtown San Diego, both of them pleaded guilty to bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy in carrying out this property theft crime and now face the possibility of decades in prison. When you think of American dream, part of that is to buy real estate. But what these defendants did was not with 6% interested as in cause a nightmare. A nightmare that assistant U. S. Attorney Christopher Bealer calls one of the wilder cases that he's prosecuted. What we unearthed was a criminal organization that would pretend to be the homeowner of a piece of land and create an email address that looked like the name of who owned the land and then offered it for sale to these unsuspecting third party buyers. So if this property is owned by James, they have an email that says Jim, I know someone that this has happened to before. Oh, really? A long time ago, a long time ago. And they ended up having to live in a motel for months and months and months and months and months and months. Oh my. In this case, it was these pieces of land and empty lot along 36th street in city heights that the couple ended up selling for more than $400,000. And this dirt that takes one hell of a level of salesmanship to sell property that you don't even have. And this dirt lot on Hollister street in the Palm city neighborhood of San Diego, which sold for over $560,000. They would identify. Okay, there's no way anyone's ever affording a home. If dirt lots are going for 500 grand and not even to a legitimate owner to con artists, they would identify pieces of property that were just vacant lots. So there was no homeowner there. There was no one to say, Hey, get out of my house. This house is not for sale. As for who purchased these fraudulent properties, anyone from property development, development companies, flip companies. And, and well, I guess you can take some solace knowing that it was the flippers that got defrauded. Oh, but the flippers, they do this professionally. So my guess is they know real estate attorneys and they're just not going to let this go. And, and those were who they targeted to buy these pieces of real estate. Almost everything was done virtually using email with no face to face contact and no closing ceremony at the end. They got away with just shot just under a million dollars and transferred it off shore and the rest was withdrawn in cash. But now wait a minute. And I don't work in that industry, but I have bought and sold homes over the course of several years. Don't you have to go through an escrow where they confirm that you are in fact the owner? Maybe it was a short sale. Because every time I sell a property or buy a property, you have to go to an escrow office and sign about nine million documents. And transferred it off shore and the rest was withdrawn in cash. The defendants created bank accounts with names similar to the true property owners, according to Bealer. They used those phony accounts to receive the stolen funds, which were then laundered off shore to Mexico and Jordan. One lesson learned is that here's that's quite a combo. Yeah, no kidding. One lesson learned is that here's a don't buy a home without meeting the person who you're buying it from. I think that's okay. That's also not great advice because I have sold properties to people I never met. In fact, I think I've only actually met one person. One person I've conducted a real estate transaction with the first house I ever bought. And it was only because that individual was also a realtor and was selling the house. I think that that stop gap could stop a lot of these scams. Some good advice there. Now, Amazon and Rodriguez each face up to 30 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each charge. They are scheduled to be formally sentenced on September 4th. Crazy to think they almost got away with it. Yes. So what about the buyers who paid, what did you say, collectively about a million dollars? That's right. Yeah. Now, so it's actually the title insurance companies who were left holding the bag in this case. And like you said. Oh, there you go. The title transfer, the money never actually, wow, that's interesting. See, that's what I thought because that's the reason you bring in an escrow company to make sure everything's kosher and all the paperwork is done correctly. Because you have to file the paperwork with the county. Title insurance companies who were left holding the bag in this case. And like you said, collectively it was about $960,000, almost a million dollars. Now, in their guilty plea today, they agreed to make restitution, meaning they're going to have to pay back that money. It's hard to believe this kind of scam and even work. Absolutely. Crazy. Wild as they said. Keep your eyes out. Thanks, Richard. Thank you. So there you go. The couple of Mexican nationals who are trying to sell vacant lots that they didn't own in San Diego and somehow were able to walk away almost with a nearly a million dollars. But instead they're going to get a different kind of real estate, a jail cell. 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