And very happy Thursday to you at twelve oh six in the West, It's the Phillip Show, mister Randy Weggs in Culver City. John, we all get tongue tied from time to time, but when you are a public servant and a public speaker on live television, you really want to make sure you don't confuse your tea's for your f's.
So, yes, there were fire trucks that were broken, but there were also fire trucks that were out of use.
WHOA. Obviously it was a misspeak, but it happened on live television and she said fire. You know what, She dropped the F bomb during the debate accidentally. But yes, so yes, there.
Were fire trucks that were broken, but there were also.
Fire Oh my, well, Katie Porter's working blue too? Why not?
Karen Bass eight hundred two two two five two two two is jellphone number one? Eight hundred two two two five two two two. Well, last night was the first la mayoral debate where you had Nitthiya Raman, the socialist candidate for mayor, the incumbent, Karen Bass, and Spencer Pratt of reality TV fame all on the same stage together at the same time. And I've got to say, Randy, it was cathartic to watch that debate because he mopped the floor with those two.
I don't know what the expectations were for Spencer Pratt going into this debate. I'm sure a lot of people who don't pay a lot of attention to what's going on just assumed that, you know, he's not really up to date on the issues outside of the fire. But he knew his stuff and he had a good answer for pretty much every single question. And not only that,
but he handled himself really well. And neither Nythia nor Karen Bass even thought to try to go after him because they were so busy going after each other that at one point Spencer Pratt, who is a classy guy, goes to the moderators is like, you know what, she just attacked Karen Bass. Karen Bas should respond, I'll tell you.
When I watched that debate last night, the first thing that jumped out of me is that those two, the two standard politicians, Karen Bass and Nitthia Rahman, walked into
that debate assuming that he was stupid. They thought that they didn't have to do any homework and that he would fall on his face because he came from reality TV, so clearly the guy has to be dumb, which is crazy, because he's been out doing interviews everywhere, including here when he came in studio and I peppered him with questions for an hour, and the guy was well read.
The guy had clearly.
Been spending a lot of time thinking about solutions for the problems that face the city. I know there's an assumption that he's a one note Johnny and all he cares about is the fires because his home burned down in the Pacific Palisates fire. But you talk to him about homelessness, you talk to him about crime, you talk to him about the Olympics, you talk to him about any of those subjects, and he was up to date
and well versed on all of it. And those two are so arrogant, and those two are so snobbish that they just looked down their nose at someone who appeared on reality TV in a past life.
And assumed that he couldn't put two words.
Together to save his life, and he showed up and made them both look like phones.
The debate was of every debate I've had to deal with, and we've watched a lot of governor's debate. This was the most entertaining debate of the entire political season. I don't know if there's going to be another one before June second, but it was a thing of beauty.
And you know, it's so funny to me because I mentioned before that they thought he was stupid, and I went to graduate school, and let me tell you, some of the dumbest people I've ever met have advanced degrees. Just because you are educated doesn't mean that you have wisdom.
And speaking of which, and Nathia.
Rahman came off looking like she has zero common sense at all. She is totally unaware of the world around her.
She came off as completely not ready for prime time. I don't think she's ever had to do a televised debate. She's done some small all debates that are inside homeowners associations. But she looked like a deer in the headlights, and at one point got so rattled that she claimed that Spencer Pratt and Karen Bass were colluding against her. Idiot. So, Johnny, we got a lot of topics to cover. We're going to try to get to as much of this debate
as we can before three o'clock. You want to talk fires, crime, homelessness, the budget, housing, reviving downtown Hollywood or other.
Let's start with reviving downtown because that exchange was a humdinger.
All righty take it away. Here is the NBC mayoral debate and Conan Nolan did a fantastic job, as he always does, and Colleen was also there.
Downtown Los Angeles seems to be in a state of crisis. The high rises there, the office buildings are worked a fraction of what they used to be. That will impact the budget. By the way, you have a graffiti tower. You have a half a billion dollar bridge at six Street Bridge where somebody ripped out thirty eight thousand feet of copper, so it's in the dark.
Yes, By the way, should just be the campaign at right here? Yeah?
How could you be the mayor of all of this chaos and even expect four more years.
You have restaurants Cole's at sixth and Maine, Clifton's at Broadway in eighth that survived the Depression, Prohibition and World War Two, but they can't survive the human thess outside the front door.
They're closed. I have said it many times. Conan Nolan has zero bleeps to give and he is fantastic for it.
Did I tell you I was on a flight with him one time and he wore an Indiana Jones at that's great.
What is your plan for downtown? Can we afford to let it die? And israma will start with you? Oh you don't want to do that, all right? Let's see drunk man drive down an icy road. Would you agree to bring city workers back full time to the office in order to help sell the businesses?
I think we do definitely need to bring city and county workers back. We bring in our office. We have people in the office three days a week in order to be able to address issues. There are some workers that should be in the office much more, and there's others that can be there three days.
We think we're running out the clock here, Nathea.
I love the fact that she has nothing to say about shutting down all the chaos. It's just making sure that the city employees still get to work from home two days.
In the week that can be there three days a week. But absolutely that is not the only intervention that downtown needs. And right now, the lack of care that's being demonstrated in downtown La is part of our broken status quo. Downtown LA needs attention and it.
Needs Boy, we're just talking in the most generalities possible.
She's talking about downtown as if it's a child of divorce. They don't need more TLC. They don't need more attention. They need someone to go in there and clean it out. Downtown LA needs an enema.
Real care.
It needs more public safety officials on the streets. It needs work with businesses to ensure that businesses aren't just fleeing Downtown LA, that they're actually staying there. It needs regular cleanups, It needs real maintenance.
It needs a strategy.
Instead, what Mayor Bass has done is to dismantle our economic development department.
We don't have a strategy to keep.
Businesses here in Los Angeles, and we're watching as they walk away from this city instead of investing in it. That's the kind of investment that I want to encourage people to make by actually investing in a real economic development strategy for LA.
Mister Brett, how do wrong wrong? Let's see if Spencer has a different answer. Mister Prett, how do we solve this?
You want to bring workers back into the city full on?
I mean, what's the solution for this problem, and he mentioned a lot of problems.
What's your plan, Thank you sir. Well.
First off, I was just talking to my friend Rachel, who works in downtown LA. Downtown is so unsafe now that they have to serve the food. All the employees have to eat inside.
They can't risk going like the Kaiser in Oakland. Yes, exactly, like the kais are in Oakland.
They can't risk going out. That's why all these beautiful restaurants are closing because it's so unsafe.
So before we.
Require city workers to go back into Eddie Billies, we need to enforce the laws on the street. Council one Ramen is talking about safety. Yet when animal rescue activists Rebecca Corey came in and said the dogs are being torturing abuse on the streets of Done and she walked out of the hearing.
She doesn't care.
That is true. And by the way, I've been doing a lot of talking with the animal activists that are talking about what's going on in skid Row and it's horrifying. Nithia Rahman at the debate the night before for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, she was confronted by Joey Tuccio, who's the guy shooting all those videos in skid row? And she said, and she said this honestly, the first time I ever went to an La animal shelter was five days ago. Oh my, she don't care about nothing.
She doesn't care about safety, she doesn't care about anything she's talking about. At least Mayor Bass pretends.
To care everything I ever wanted in a mayor ol debate.
Oh my god, if I could just inject this into my veins, I would, Ma Bas, can we.
Afford And you've got a minute to answer this question? Can we afford to let downtown La die?
Though? Absolutely cannot?
Here comes mother Goose cannot.
But is it a crisis situation at this point?
Even Colleen's done? By the way, Karen Bass, I know that you're a mayor of a big city, but don't outdo my girl. Absolutely, absolutely, there's only one die.
We absolutely cannot situation.
It's absolutely it seems to be going the wrong way.
So let me just tell you that we absolutely cannot.
That's three times whoa. It's like machine gun fire.
Downtown is the center of our city.
Look, this is a very different situation than that debate. Between her and Crusoe four years ago. Because she is now a known entity. All of this happened on her watch.
Downtown is the center of our city and it isn't.
It really shouldn't be. It's a dump. Yeah.
Whenever tourists come to La and stay with me, not one has ever said, take me to downtown LA.
And it is an economic engine that absolutely needs.
Again, you know what, she's flustered. She's flustered, and that's a crutch.
You know absolutely that it absolutely needs to be attended to.
We have a strategy that is working.
We are working. No, it's not.
On what planet is your strategy working? They're bums everywhere. It's like they're falling out of the sky.
That is working.
We are working with the downtown business associations. We are increasing public safety there.
No, you're not another lie.
That's why I did the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which allows for the office buildings that are vacant to be converted into housing.
She did that last week, and she did it because she's running for mayor and she wanted to say she's doing something about the empty office spaces.
And those conversions are taking place right now. That is why we have to deal with the street homelessness that is there.
Skid Row's worse than it was three years ago. What planet is this dizzy broad living on the planet de Lulu?
There needs to be massive intervention there. And then, of course there is the convention center and the convention center.
Is nobody's going down to the convention center that's parked on Figaroa.
And the convention center is a long term investment.
Imagine you're a business, and are you're an organization, a trade organization, like let's say that you represent all the dentists, and you have to decide where are you gonna have your California convention? Are you gonna have it in Anaheim next to Disneyland or are you gonna have it in downtown LA next to murder in skid Row? Yeah?
How long do you think it would take before all of the laughing gas was stolen out of the trunk?
This is a true fact. Fresno does more convention business than the city of LA and making the building look prettier isn't going to solve that.
And the convention center is a long term investment that we have to make in our city because the more people you have downtown, whether it's a convention, Are people coming downtown for concerts?
Is they're all going to Englewood.
Have you noticed that she has the algore affliction here where she talks to adults as if the assumption is that we all have brain damage. Well, she really talks down to us, doesn't she.
She understandably does, because in order for her to be elected as mayor, a good portion of the electorate in La had to have had brain damage.
If you're feeling down, if you're feeling blue, let's get help for you.
That is quite something the way, and that would explain how she got elected in the first place. If every voter in the city of La was carried to term by Courtney Love, then the voting patterns would make sense.
Is the way to make the city more safe and downtown more safe, and my number one obligation is to keep our city safe.
Downtown is absolutely critical. Thank you all right?
Moving toward I don't remember Ramen, would you like to respond to that?
So Colleen had a brain fart there, and she's so used to just asking Ramen to respond because Ramen gets attacked by both of them every single time, and she has no good answers.
To the mayor and what she's talking about that.
I mean, look, I feel like we're having a theoretical conversation here about the direction of our city, which is being led.
Currently by our mayor. Our mayor is.
The CEO of the city. She sets the direction of this city. And if you are satisfied with the status quo, then I've got great news for you. The incumbent is on.
The ballot, and so is one of the top members of the city council. Yeah, what do you do is your day job? Lady?
What I'm here to say is that we need more urgency to respond to the issues right now. We need real plans, we need real efforts to make sure that we're keeping businesses here, that we're keeping workers here, that we're keeping residents in downtown LA. That is the strategy and effort that I want to bring to this role.
Two weeks before she ran fact check true.
YEP for election, two hours before the candidacy closed, she adorsed mayor of Bath. So, all of a sudden, now she's has all these problems with mayorbaths.
They do photos together.
We have so many more topics, and you know what, I know we're passionate. You're passionate about what we're talking about, but voters really want some concrete evidence here and they want people.
To direct So she references me, I need to that that's supposed to be part of the rules.
Debates are getting ugly this season. Oh I love it. Go ahead.
I haven't been offered that that in a lot of this Nithia.
You've got a chance respond to every single question debate.
Well, I'm joining you there. Absolutely the.
Absolutely the status quo and breaking up the status quo and dealing with the bureaucracy is exactly why I ran.
And why she sounds exactly like Shang. Now the bureaucracy is real. She's checking all the boxes.
And I started doing that by addressing homelessness, but also by bringing coalitions together to make sure that we can deal with downtown. Did you know that we are the only major city that does not have a comprehensive infrastructure plan.
You're in charge.
She's acting as if that's some sort of profound point.
So it's been charge here.
So it's been haphazard up until now. Left to the wishes of every single council member. I have instituted and started a comprehensive infrastructure plan and moving right away into replacing sixty thousand solar life.
Thank you yeah and sending me a bill for them. Good job, Karen, eight hundred two two two five two two two. Easy telephone number one eight hundred two two two five two two two. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so at Johnny don't Like show at gmail dot com. That's Johnny don't Like show at gmail dot com.
And Randy.
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Why do you have to watch porn in the living room?
Eight hundred two two two five two two two is telephone number one. Eight hundred two two two five two two two. It is our pleasure to welcome our next guest to the program. He is the opinion page editor for the California Post. You can follow him on x at Joel Pollock. Joel Pollock, Welcome.
Thanks for having me on. Good to be here.
Well, I've got to say, after watching last night's mayoral debate and the performance of Spencer Pratt compared to the incumbent mayor Karen Bass and the Socialist councilwoman Nitia Rahman, Spencer Pratt cleaned their clocks and it occurred to me as I was watching it unfold that the two standard politicians walked into that room with two beliefs that led them down the wrong road. One was that he was stupid, which he clearly is not. He's done more reading on
the subject matter than they have. He's clearly thought about solutions more than they have, and he certainly was perfectly fine on his feet defending his positions on that debate stage. I also was of the belief that they walked into that room with the assumption that he was a one note Johnny who could only talk about the fires and had no knowledge about any other subject, which was clearly
not true. The two things, the two assumptions that they bought into last night, I think caused them to get waxed.
Your thoughts, well, I think the three Cannis did very you know, you could say they turned in very different performances. As you mentioned, Spencer was outstanding and for a number of the reasons you've suggested. One is that he showed knowledge of a variety of subjects in addition to the fire which you mentioned as well, very very impressive. He talked about policing, he talked about homelessess, and he had some very common sense solutions, which is that you simply
enforced the law. You do not allow homeless people to camp out on the street, and you do not allow non citizens to vote. Very, very straightforward and comprehensive. He looked like he could be the mayor. That was the big hurdle he had to overcome because people had seen him as this scruffy social media guy, podcaster trying to sell a book, reality TV star, wears a T shirt and funny shorts, hanging out with his wife all the time.
And here he puts on a suit, gets a shaven a haircut, stands behind a podium and he looks like a big city mayor. And it's not just looking the part. It's talking about a wide range of policies. The other thing he did, which was really important. I think this is sort of implied, and some of what said, he came at it with an intensity that made it absolutely clear if you were watching that debate, that he is
the candidate for change. And it's interesting because Nitchia Rahman on the left, we'll get to her in a minute, but she is claiming she's the candidate for change. She's the socialist. She wants to move LA further in the direction of, as she would put it, social justice, not socialism, but maybe socialist in private moments, I don't know. Maybe she admits that she was once quite socialist in her political leanings, but she's not really projecting that intensity. Where's
the energy, Where's the outrage, Where's the passion? And Spencer Pratt came across like someone who really wants to change things, and you can tell why immediately because he has suffered personally and that's motivating him. And look, it motivates a lot of us from Pacific Palaces. I mean, why did I join the California Post. It's for the same reason. I am passionate about rebuilding and also passionate about holding people accountable, and this is his way of doing it.
I found it very competitive, so he did very well. Let's go to n Initia Ramen. She is trying to be the progressive alternative to Karen Bass. Although Karen Bass, who is basically a Cuban communist, it's hard to get much to the left her. But Robin just did not pull it off, and for a variety of reasons, but she just lacked the stage presence she needed. She lacked the passion. She has zor on Mamdannie's politics and policies, but lacks his charisma and his sense of outrage wherever
he draws that from. I think he draws it from his hatred of Israel, which is sort of central to his personality and his politics. But Nitchie Ramen, I mean what motivates her. We didn't really get infensive why she's running, and she had to be on the defensive for various city council votes. Now, normally people just pivot from those attacks and they talk about what they want to talk about. She didn't really even do that. She was just on the back foot entire evening and as Trump might say,
kind of low energy. So she didn't really convince anyone. She was passionate about the changes she's seeking. Karen Bass. And I'm going to say something that might disappoint you, but Karen Bass did not do well, but might have done well enough because she was the incumbent, and she admitted she had made some mistakes in the fires, and she took ining shots all night from both sides, but especially from Spencer Pratt. And yet she still looked like she was a mayor. She did not look like she
was falling apart. She clearly understands, at least telling about how the city works or it doesn't work. She didn't have any new ideas, but she did at least sound like she knows who to call if she needs to get something done, and again, not someone who's achieved much. And Spencer really hit her over the issue of Hollywood, and you know, the mayor said, well, I've made it easier to get permits, and Spencer's like, everybody's leaving. What do you mean you made it easier to get permits.
I mean you're sitting there. You've been in power for how long you haven't done anything to stop this problem of jobs leaving the city. So, you know, she couldn't make the case that she'd done a really good job, but she did make the case that she more or less knows how things are done. And I think that is going to be good enough for her political allies to stay with her. The big city unions and some of the standard Democrats, they're not going to jump ship.
They didn't see her fold or collapse. It wasn't like that first debate of twenty twenty four when Biden looked like a deer in the headlights against Trump and suddenly all of his allies said, oh my god, we've made a terrible mistake. So I think Spencer is going to have to win by drawing new voters to the polls, people who don't normally vote in city elections, because if it's just a traditional electorate which is largely controlled by
the unions. I do think that Karen Bass is going to cruise back into office.
Rightly or wrongly, it seems like the playbook right now for California Democrats, whether it is Karen Bass running for reelection as mayor of Los Angeles or Javier Bsara is now trying to do this at the state level, is not to run on your record. It's not to run on I have improved your life. You're better off now than you were four years ago, or in the case of Besera, after eight years of Gavin Newsom and eight
years of Jerry Brown, you're better off today. What they see aim to be doing is relying on that old Tom Bradley coalition. I guess in recent years you'd call it the Obama coalition, a multi ethnic coalition Liberals, blacks, latinos, Asians, gays and lesbians, and they just take the figurehead, whoever that may be at any given moment in time, and they run there. It's the figurehead of the coalition, but it's not the individual that's in charge. It's the coalition that's in charge.
And if you just.
Elect the figurehead of the coalition, then the coalition will be in charge of the city government or the state government. And that's a good enough argument for partisan voters, and that seems to be what they're both doing right now.
Well, it's a little bit different. So Ken Bath, yes, she is a coalition leader, and you could even argue in twenty twenty two when she first ran for mayor that that was a strength because the problems she was elected to address, like homelessness, we require buy in from all different stakeholders in the city. So even though Rick Caruso had more passion and energy about it, and he's really the one who put that issue on the map, I mean, Karen Bass was not talking about homelessness until
she had challenged from Rick Caruso. She had a skill set which was to be able to bring people together who might not normally do anything.
About that issue.
And look, she has wasted billions of dollars to help relatively few people, but at least she can say homelessness has started to decline over the last year or two, and that's what her campaign is really hanging their hopes on that they can at least say, well, it did get better. Now, is it better than it was when she took off his No? Is it better than it was two years ago? Yes, So you know she's able to say, let's keep the band together. You're right, Spencer's
not really talking about coalition. He's doing more kind of management consultant team descends in the city and throws out all the rot I mean he wants to bring a team in. That means he's saying, look, I'm not an expert in all the stuff I need to know, but I'm going to bring in people, almost like a Doge operation, you know, come in and cut the fat and restore value to taxpayers, make sure that the people are working and the city services are there, and that kind of thing.
You know, she's she's a very strong candidate only because she has the support of the public sector unions. Again, that is just the key. Now, what you're seeing at the state level is a little different because Democrats are so split at the state level that the unions are a little confused. You've got one in endorsing one one and using endorsing another. Sometimes unions are endorsing more than one candidate because there are so many Democrats that don't know what to do. So there may be some kind
of surprise to think at at the governor's level. But look, Spencer's going to have to go outside of normal politics in LA. He's going to have to go to the valley and he's going to have to say, look, I know nobody votes from Ayra up here. You guys got to turn out. Here's the key when you have a disaster like the Palisades fire. You know, for most people in LA it was a sad moment, but not something
that they felt particularly bad about. It was something that happened. Yeah, I probably had a cost for people in Brentwood and Santa Monica businesses losing local customers as Palisades residents scattered around the state in the country for a while. And yeah, I mean, you know, they blamed the mayor. People understood the mayor wasn't in town and so that was bad.
But they don't really feel like it's happening to them. Yeah, we have bad roads, bad schools, and we don't have as many police, you know, but it doesn't really feel like it touches them yet. If you want to make the Palisades fire into an election issue that is effective. Then you have to explain to angeliaus why this could happen to them next. And I don't think he's done that yet. It doesn't mean he can't. He's still got
time to make that case. And I do think that he's got a stronger chance of qualifying for the general election. So even if he doesn't win outright in this primary, you haven't seen the last Dispenser Pratt. He comes back to the general election. He's got to make the case that, look, what happened to me, what happened to my community could happen to any community in LA because of the disastrous
way our city is run. And unfortunately sometimes it does take another disaster or two for people to figure that out. You don't want to wait for something like that to happen. You certainly don't want to hope for something like that to happen. So you've got to find another way to get the message out, and I think he can do it very creative with messaging. But that's the case. You have to make what happened to me should never happen
to anyone else. Again, it could happen because none of the problems that led to it happening to me have been addressed.
In politics, I always tell people to worry about the law of unintended consequences. We certainly saw that in twenty sixteen when Hillary Clinton decided that she rather run against Donald Trump than Jeb Bush or one of the other Republicans who was running that cycle more traditional Republicans. Last night, Nathia Rahman, I think correctly alleged that Mayor Bass and her team want to run in the general election against
Spencer Pratt and not NiTi I Raman. Do you think that's true and do you think that's risky?
I think it's true only because he's a Republican, you know, and the pattern in California is generally that the worst Democrat will beat the best Republican ninety nine times out of one hundred. But Spencer Pratt is different because although he's a Republican, what you know about Spencer Pratt is that he lost his house in the Pali States fire. Spencer Pratt was not running for office before he lost his house, and so this could be a little different. Again,
he's got to generalize it. He's got to let people know this is about the other things that are failing. The police that aren't getting hired, the school's terrible, the World Cup which is a disaster, the Olympics that isn't getting planned, the delayed people mover at the airport, and the high speed rail that we're wasting money on, the home you know whatever. But he's got to just say, look, this is a general you're not safe anymore in this city with these people running it because they run it
for themselves, they don't run it for you. And he's got to make that convincing. So I think, yes, there could be some unintended consequences. They think they won't face him, and then you know, CNN did this. I mean CN was accused at least of doing this. They were accused of boosting Donald Trump because they thought Trump would be easier for Hillary to be and then of course he wasn't. In fact, I thought of the time, he's the only one could be Hillary Clinton. And yeah, he tried to
get too cute and too clever. In politics, sometimes it comes back to about you.
In the old days in California, if someone was really screwing something up, the railroads, the oil companies, the Chandler family that owned the La Times would pull the plug on that person and they'd replace them with someone else.
They really were a cabal that ran the state.
Despite the fact that LA is a shell of itself and how it used to be, how powerful, how many industries were headquartered here, we still have a lot of money here. We still have a lot of industries here, We still have a lot of influential players here. You correctly mentioned that the World Cup's going to be a disaster. The Olympics are going to be a disaster. We're going
to be humiliated on the global stage. Why do you think the stakeholders haven't pulled the plug on Karen Bash yet the way they would have in the old days, Well.
Partly because they see the alternative as nithirana. I mean, what is happening in cities across America is that face with the failure of left wing policies, they're further left and they're not moving to the right. You know, thirty years ago, New York City chose Rudy Giuliani, and it saved itself because after Giuliani became Michael Bloomberg, and Bloomberg
eventually became a Democrat. But you had responsible management, conservative management of these cities, and the cities improved, and the investors came back and even had a Republican running Sandie. I mean, there was a movement, but now in the opposite direction. And the left has convinced itself that the problem with left wing policies is that there weren't enough of them, kind of like the problem with communism is that we never practiced true communism, so we got to
try it again. Right, So they're all looking at the possibility of a Zorn Mamdani and they're desperate to avoid that, and they feel that Republicans are discredited for whatever reason.
And it's hard really to put your finger on what that is, either because cities have become so socially liberal that they'll never accept a Republican even if the Republican says they're pro choice or whatever, or because of Donald Trump, and he's just polarized the electorate to the point where Democrats and the sea voters just decide that he's the reason that they're in trouble until they don't want to
have anything to do with anyone who supported him. And there is some of that, I mean, Trump arrangement syndrome is a real thing. But I also just think it's a generational thing in a way. Leanni, in that generation of more conservative mayors, they did too good a job because I think that the Mamdanni generation grew up with all these wonderful city services. They have no memory of
when cities were really bad. They don't remember the lais, they don't remember crime on the subways in New York City, the Bernie Getz shooting people. They don't remember how bad things got under the Great Society of the LBJA years and the cities and all the decades of mismanagement that followed. And so they think that they have the wealth and the resources to withstand whatever sacrifices the Great New Age
is going to demand of them. When they have to give up little pieces of their quality of living to get to their socialist utopia, they think they can afford it, and largely because it's been paid for by other people. A lot of these kids running for mayor running for office, they're private school kids. They're not from the places they are running to represent. You know, they just don't know anything.
I mean, Mamdanni became a citizen in like twenty eight team I mean he's not like, Yes, he grew up in New York, but he went to private schools and he didn't live like other New Yorkers.
I mean.
Romen moved to LA when I did. Basically, I'm not a native Angelina. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. I love Los Angeles, have adopted it as my home. But you know, I picked a lot of my LA history from friends who would reminisce about things that happened, both good and bad. And it doesn't mean you can't run for office and can't do a good job, but it does mean that if you're going to make radical changes, people are I think entitled to ask where'd you get
this idea? I mean, do you have any reasons? Do you have any reasonable.
We're out of time, Joel, thank you so much for stopping by. Joel Pollack, opinion page editor at The California Post. You can get him online at Joel Pollock, The Fixed Califori Gowers. Next, don't you go anywhere