Sheriff Chad Bianco on Oathkeepers, BLM Smear & California Gun Laws

Opening: Why the Music Got Cut and the Stream Stays Up

The show kicks off mid-song before the hosts pull the plug on the music. Jeff explains it straight: playing music past a tight window has gotten the show suspended from streaming platforms before, and they are not going back down that road. Kevin is managing the stream in real time, keeping things close to the edge. The crew makes the call to go without the intro music and keep the broadcast alive. Small sacrifice, smart trade.

Sheriff Chad Bianco Joins the Show After a Whirlwind Campaign Stretch

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco dials in fresh off a bruising run of campaign events and public appearances. Jeff notes running into him at the IE Conservative Convention and catching a glimpse of him at a fundraiser, where Bianco good-naturedly jokes about wearing a coat that dates back to a heavier chapter of his life. The tone is easy and familiar. These are men who have shared rooms enough times that the small talk is already spent.

The Boarded-Up In-N-Out: Downtown Los Angeles Through a Sheriff's Eyes

Bianco describes driving through the area near the old downtown Los Angeles stadium district and what he found there. Graffiti coating buildings and K-rails, trash piled against fences, homeless camps filling the gaps, sports franchises long gone from a city that could not hold them. And sitting in the middle of it, a shuttered In-N-Out Burger stripped of everything except its shape and the ghost of its red signage, fenced off and dark. He calls it surreal, and the word fits. An iconic California institution, closed down in a neighborhood so “criminally enabled” that staying open was no longer worth the risk. Jeff points listeners toward Bianco’s social media video of the moment, where the sheriff stands in front of that fence and lets the picture speak for itself.

Oathkeepers: Setting the Record Straight on a Manufactured Controversy

Jeff opens the substantive portion of the interview by noting that listener emails lit up after Bianco was announced as a guest, all asking the same question about his connection to the Oathkeepers. Bianco answers it directly and without apology.

He traces the Oathkeepers back to roughly 2014, when there was a broad push nationwide for constitutional sheriffs and peace officers. The organization, he says, was built around law enforcement and military personnel who swore their oath to the Constitution itself, not to politicians or government agencies. Their stated mission, if you actually look it up, reads close to what the ACLU claims to stand for: defending constitutional rights against all enemies, foreign and domestic. What they are, at their core, is a group of patriotic Americans who take that oath seriously.

What poisoned the well, Bianco explains, was a handful of people who claimed Oathkeeper affiliation and ended up arrested in Washington D.C. on January 6th. He reaches for an analogy that cuts right to the bone: one of his investigators recently arrested a schoolteacher for child molestation. That does not make all schoolteachers child molesters. The logic is the same, and the fact that it even needs to be said tells you something about how far common sense has drifted. He is blunt about who is pushing this narrative against him: both Democrats and Republicans, writing checks to spread bad information because they know they cannot beat him on the merits.

The BLM Kneeling Smear: 900 Deputies Know What Actually Happened

The second manufactured attack Bianco addresses is the claim that he knelt for Black Lives Matter. He calls it flatly untrue and explains the actual sequence of events in downtown Riverside in 2020.

His department had 900 deputies on scene that day, with 250 more from other agencies. They had already issued the order of dispersal. The crowd was going to be moved out, one way or another. Before that happened, the event organizers came to Bianco and told his team where the Antifa members were positioned, where weapons were hidden in bushes and behind buildings, and what was planned to be used against the deputies. Then those same organizers asked if everyone could pause and pray that no one would get hurt. The deputies prayed. A news camera was rolling, and the story that got written was that Bianco knelt for BLM.

He points to the outcome as the real answer. His department cleared between 5,000 and 10,000 people out of downtown Riverside in under an hour. No deputies injured. No buildings looted or destroyed. One cracked window that may or may not have had anything to do with the protest. The crowd left and has never come back. The LA Sheriff’s Department, which had let its situation go longer, watched what Riverside did and started doing the same thing the following day. It took them about three days to get control. Riverside had it in less than one. A man who knelt for a domestic terrorist organization does not come away with that record, and his deputies know it.

Riverside County While Los Angeles Burns: Why Rioters Are Avoiding the County

With protests and riots flaring across Southern California, Bianco makes a point that does not require much argument to land: nothing is happening in Riverside County. Protesters are circulating word among themselves that if deputies are nearby, you stay in line, you stay off county property, and you keep it peaceful, or you go to jail. That is not a threat. That is a track record.

Bianco draws a clear line between protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, which he says his department respects, and people who show up to break things. The latter are avoiding Riverside. One person over the recent weekend pushed a deputy and was immediately taken to the ground, booked, and jailed. The people standing around him reportedly said they warned him. That is the environment Bianco has built, and he argues it is exactly what California as a whole needs from a governor.

If Elected Governor: How Bianco Would Handle Riots Statewide

Jeff asks the natural question: if Bianco is governor, how does he handle what is currently playing out in Los Angeles? Bianco’s answer is to point backward rather than forward. He did not need a playbook in 2020 because he had a standard. He says a governor with real relationships in law enforcement would have been on the phone with the chief of police and the county sheriff before anything escalated, not after, offering state resources, personnel, and a clear message: protest all you want, but anyone there to violate the law gets arrested and prosecuted, full stop. Instead, what California got in Los Angeles for the first four or five days was a governor picking fights with the federal government while the city absorbed the damage.

California Gun Laws: The Veto Strategy and Repealing Two Decades of Bad Policy

Jeff pivots to firearms, which is the business of the show, and asks what a Governor Bianco actually does about California’s gun laws. Bianco lays out the mechanics honestly. Regulations can go with an executive order. Laws are harder, because they require the legislature. But the governor holds one powerful tool: the veto pen.

The California legislature pushes somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 new laws every year. Bianco says his strategy going in is simple. He will compile a list of public safety laws that need to be repealed, altered, or replaced. Until that list is addressed, he will not sign another bill into law. If the legislature wants anything passed, they bring him a bill that undoes one of the bad ones from the last twenty years. He acknowledges it will not happen overnight, but he projects that within the first year, the bulk of the laws that turn law-abiding gun owners into criminals will be gone. His framing is direct: guns do not commit crimes, criminals do, and California’s gun laws have been designed not for safety but to make the process so burdensome and expensive that dealers and owners eventually give up.

DOJ Reform and the Regulatory Burden on California Gun Dealers

Jeff speaks from experience here. Gunslinger Auctions just ran a two-day auction and moved 1,200 firearms. The paperwork that goes with that volume is staggering, and a recent DOJ audit dinged the operation for requirements that border on absurd, including thumbprint rules that allow the thumbprint itself to be destroyed after three years. He makes the point plainly: none of this is about safety. It is about making compliance so difficult that dealers stop trying.

Bianco agrees completely and turns his attention to the California Attorney General’s office. He says it needs new leadership, someone who understands what the DOJ is actually supposed to do and who it is supposed to serve. He mentions there may be a sitting sheriff with a law degree who is considering the race for AG. Get the right person in that office, he says, and a lot of what DOJ does to the firearms industry gets corrected in short order.

Campaign Talk: Fundraising, Volunteers, and Getting to 10 Million Votes

Bianco lays out his math. California has 40 million residents. Gavin Newsom pulled about 7 million votes in his last election. Bianco wants 10 million. If every one of those supporters donates five dollars, that is $50 million for the campaign, and he says flatly there is no losing with that kind of ground. His volunteer count is already at roughly 10,000 people signed up through the website. Jeff’s wife donated $100 on the spot while the interview was running, and Bianco thanks her on air. The website for donations and volunteer sign-up is biancaforgovernor.com. Merchandise sales, he notes, flow 100 percent back into the campaign.

Wrapping Up: Happy Father's Day and Back to the Second Hour

Jeff thanks KRLA for holding the full half hour without a break, Bianco signs off with a Father’s Day wish, and the show rolls into its second hour. It was a straight half hour of unfiltered conversation from a man running on a record instead of a resume, and the audience on the other end of the radio heard every word of it.