Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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Speaker 2: Last night I.
Speaker 1: Started seeing a lot of the stories coming out of California,
Southern California and the wildfires that are just devastating the
areas out there. And as I look, I am not
an expert unlike you know, deep water submersibles and Ukrainian
Russian history.
Speaker 2: I'm not an expert on.
Speaker 1: Southern California geography and environmental policy and and all of
the laws at the state and national and federal levels.
But I have been reading people who do know what's
going on now, but also what has kind of led
up to this. So I put these into buckets of
bad policy, bad politics, and bad priorities, and they're not
if I were to do sort of Kamala Harris approved
Ven diagram, there would be overlapping portions of these circles. Right,
politics will often you know, influence not often, it always
influences the policy.
Speaker 2: What can you get done? What can't you get done?
Speaker 1: The priorities is informed by and informs the politics and
the policy. So there's a lot of overlap sort of
in the center of the ven diagram there but bad policy,
bad politics, and bad priorities. So you got to a
lot of different angles on this story. First off, let's
start with sort of an overview as to what's happening
now is best I can surmise, and following the media reporting,
one of the co owners of Trending Politics, a guy
by the name of Colin Rugg r Ugg shared a
video from Liz Kreutz from Malibu where the beachfront homes
in Malibu have been completely destroyed all along the coast.
The city of Malibu is urging all residents, even if
they're not under mandatory evacuation orders. Malibu is urging everybody
to get ready to leave if they haven't already. They're
dealing with wind gusts up to one hundred miles per
hour in the overnight hours. According to the Los Angeles
Fire Department spokesperson Eric Scott. If you've ever been there,
there was apparently a popular seafood restaurant called the Real
Inn r ee l.
Speaker 2: The Real In It is gone.
Speaker 1: It's been completely raised to the ground. At least thirty
thousand residents in southern California were forced to evacuate due
to multiple wildfires that have destroyed thousands of acres in
the area. The latest numbers that I saw was approaching
three thousand acres, which is about four and a half
to five square miles. That's in the Palisades fire. Then
there are two other fires. There are a total of three.
I'm not sure everybody is aware of that. There are
actually three wildfires. We don't know what caused any of
these at this time. But you've got the Palisades which
was the biggest. There's also one called the eat In
Fire E A t O N. The Eating Fire and
the Hearst Fire h u rst. So the Eating Fire
and the Hearst fire they broke out. So the Eating
Fire was first reported in the early evening, like around
six six thirty near Pasadena, California. The Hearst Fire broke
out about four hours later. Near Silmar, California, and combined
those two have more than eleven hundred acres destroyed between
the two of them. I think the Hurst Fire is
actually bigger than the Eating Fire, but they're zero containment
on these things at this point, and you're dealing with
these super strong winds.
Speaker 2: As I mentioned, one hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1: They called them the Santa Anna winds, and I was
not aware of this, but apparently the Santa Anna wins
come from east to west, where like the normal the
prevailing westerlies, that's you know, the wind comes from the
west and goes across the entire country, moving to the
east coast where we are, and so apparently the Santa
Ana wins are going the opposite direction and creates all
of this turbulence, the strong winds. They've got low humidity
in the areas that has contributed to the rapid spread
of these fires, and the conditions are expected to get
worse as we move into tomorrow. So they're not even
they're not even at the worst part of this yet
as they expect.
Speaker 2: According to cal Fire, a state.
Speaker 1: Of emergency has been declared by the Governor Gavin Newsom
posted on Twitter California has applied deployed fourteen hundred firefighting
personnel and hundreds of prepositioned assets to combat these unprecedented
fires in Los Angeles. The first fire was the Pacific
Palisades Fire. The Palisades Fire, the Pacific Palisades is apparently
a neighborhood and it's got a lot of houses packed
in pretty tight around these curvy mountainous roads. And that
one started yesterday morning at about ten thirty am. The
winds and the unfavorable conditions caused that fire to spread
very quickly and that's where it ravaged over like twenty
nine hundred acres, still burning, still zero containment as of
this morning. There are reports out of the area that
firefighters have been giving up on some areas that cannot
be saved and so and I understand, like you're in
a triage mode, right, so you can't you can't get
to certain areas or most disturbingly, there's no water in
the fire hydrants. They've run through all the water, so
they cannot put them out. Even if they can get
to the area, they can't put them out. So they're
relying on some of the aerial you know, fire suppression
dumps that occur with the planes and the helicopters and stuff.
But on the ground, if they're trying to get to
an area, to a neighborhood or street and they want
to plug into the hookup into the fire hydrant, they're
finding that there's not water coming out of the hydrants.
Speaker 2: They are also dealing with power outages.
Speaker 1: I was not aware, but apparently they shut down, they
turn off people's power in these types of fire events,
they turn them off, They turn the power off, and
I'll get to that. The AP reported on that as well,
and because there's a fire hazard associated with that, so
people are on a able to make contact with loved ones,
much like we saw in western North Carolina where due
to the Hurricane Helene aftermath and the mud slides, rock slides,
flooding and all that power was taken out. Cell phone
communications were all taken out and that made it very
difficult not just to get in contact with people, but
also to get emergency response to the areas where people
needed help.
Speaker 2: This is from to Do.
Speaker 1: This is from k t l A, which, by the way,
if you are looking for news sources to see what's
going on, go to the local news organizations. I'm not
saying you should only go there. I always say get
your news from multiple sources. But a lot of the
local outlets are doing a lot of great work because
they know the area, right, They know the people, they
know the streets, they know who to talk to, and
they and they have experience with this kind of you know,
these kinds of wildfires, because this happens, right, This happens
in California for a number of reasons. Some of it
is environmental, yes, but a lot of it is bad policy,
bad policy. And I don't know how many more of
these types of catastrophes we have to see before people
start waking up to the fact that what they have
been doing and what they have been advocating for is
actually detrimental, is actually causing more loss of life, more
loss of structures, more environmental damage. Right, because burning four
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of Los Angeles. Her name is Karen.
Speaker 2: Bass or Bass but Bass.
Speaker 1: She I believe was a congresswoman from California, and she's
now the mayor of Los Angeles. And Jim Garretty, writing
at National Review, posted up onto Twitter. Actually, he says,
in what must be the most unfortunately timed trip since
Texas Senator Ted Cruz took his family on vacation in Aruba,
Karen Bass was roughly seventy four hundred miles away from
her city as the fires engulf did. She was honoring
the inauguration of a man most Angelinos have never heard of,
in a place most of them could not find on
a map. Mayor Bass is in Ghana for an inauguration
of the president there. She is there as part of
a presidential delegation of some kind. Very politically unfortunate. As
Will Collier points out, she's probably gana regret that trip.
Speaker 2: That's probably well.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, obviously she could not have known right
that this was going to happen when she agreed to
and then took the trip. But she I'm not sure
she better be on a plane heading back, because she's
the mayor of Los Angeles and that's where this is occurring.
Speaker 2: This is La County.
Speaker 1: Evacuations were ordered for the entire Palisades community down to
the Pacific Ocean, according to cal Fire. During a Tuesday
afternoon press conference, officials said more than ten thousand homes
in Pacific Palisade and Malibu were affected by the evacuation order,
and warnings also extended into areas of Santa Monica and Calabasas.
If you have seen any of the you know, I
don't know, the ten thousand foot elevation views, like the
whole picture, if you will in your mind a you know,
you got the Pacific Ocean on the left side there,
and then you've got the city, you know, Pacific Palisades, Malibu.
Speaker 2: You got all of that up against the water.
Speaker 1: And then you've got this sort of crescent that runs
from the top the northern part around the city, and
it runs sort of in this crescent shape from the
top left all the way around to like the midway
through the right side, the eastern side, and that's a
mountain chain that's right there. There's a bunch of mountains there,
and so this area is in a bit of a valley,
and then on the other side of the mountain there's
more housing and that sort of stuff. And so the
big fear now is that this fire is going to
get across that mountain chain, across those mountains, and once
that happens, it's going to spread through that whole area
on the northern side as well. Pacific Palisades is about
ten miles from Malibu, and both areas have been affected.
Malibu is where the Franklin Fire burned more than four
thousand acres and several homes when it erupted with windy
conditions back in December. Okay, so again, this is not
a new thing for California. However, because it is not new,
and because these conditions are persistent, they've existed before humans
ever got there, there are things that humans can do
to mitigate the devastation when these conditions kind of converge
into a wild fire. And however it was sparked, we
don't know yet. It could have been like I saw
one video a woman caught another woman lighting fires along
just in like some desert scrubland area. She had just
the woman I think is obviously mentally deranged in some manner,
and she was just piling up a bunch of stuff
and setting it on fire, saying that this was a
good thing to do. Yeah, there are a lot of
crazy people out there that do crazy things, and so
that may be how this started. Could have been you know, arson,
it could have been accidental. There's also a problem with
homeless encampments where people gather around, they're in RVs, or
they're intense, and they set fires to you know, keep
themselves warm at night, or to cook over, and then
those fires get out of control. That's another part of
this story. That's another angle. All right, I hope you
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are gathered around, maybe y'all are in the living room,
you're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and then somebody says, hey, Dad,
remember those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred?
And then the room gets all quiet. All eyes are
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create a Video dot com. So, about fifteen thousand utility
customers in southern California had their power shut off to
reduce the risk of equipment sparking another fire. Half a
million customers total are at risk of losing power preemptively. Okay,
so they're going to shut people's power off even though
they're not you know, they're not being affected directly yet
by the wobfires there.
Speaker 2: Now I mentioned.
Speaker 1: You've got the politics, you've got the policy, and you've
got priorities. And again they all sort of intersect in
certain parts. So for example, there's a writer at RedState
dot com named Banchi and has he's posted a bunch
of stuff regarding some of the policy that are informed
by the politics and priorities California. He says, has been
throttling or shutting off water to southern California for decades
in a vain attempt to save a three inch long
minnow like fish. This is tiny little minnow that they're
trying to save, which is which makes sense because like,
but I thought the minnow was only gone a three
hour tour. But it doesn't matter anyway. Trump tried to
change that, and he was opposed, and he's got a
series of headlines here. I'll just read them real quick.
At San Francisco, Delta smelt that's the name of the
It's a smelt fish. It's not like you know, Delta
smelt it anyway, the tiny fish caught in California's war
with Trump, harbingers of a diminishing ecosystem. The smelt are
almost extinct now, forces then the Trump administration could usher
them into oblivion. Or this one Delta pumps throttled back
despite rains, cutting California water deliveries in order to protect
fish Delta smelt shuts down major water supply. That's the
fish is shutting down the water supply, and the report
is all it took was a sparse population of minnow
like smelt and two days for state and federal water
contractors to turn off the drinking and irrigation water spigots
for twenty five million Californians and almost a million acres
of farmland. The Department of Water Resources stopped pumping at
state water project facilities in the Delta in late May
to protect the Delta smelt. A day later, federal officials
dramatically cut back the amount of water being pumped to
farmers in southern California cities to the lowest level ever
in an attempt to save the endane Delta smelt. That
was a story from two thousand and seven. Two thousand
and seven. Why California has not built desalinization plants all
over its coastline at this point is beyond me. I
do not understand. Once again, bad priorities, bad politics. While
California's water management is a big issue, Bonchi says, it
is also true that these fires typically start on federal
lands guests whose administration canceled controlled burns crucial controlled burns
this past fall. Why Bonchi says, so they wouldn't look
bad if something went wrong, Well, that would be Joseph
Robinette Biden KQED reported Forest Service Holtz prescribed burns in California.
Speaker 2: Is it worth the risk? And there's a quoted in.
Speaker 1: There from an official who says, I think the Forest
Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening
with a prescribed burn, and they're willing to trade that risk,
which they will be blamed for for increased.
Speaker 2: Risks on wildfires.
Speaker 1: In the event of a wildfire, if something bad happens,
they're much less likely to be blamed because they can
point the finger at Mother Nature.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Always try to look for the incentives that people are
responding to, and this would have been in October October
twenty twenty four. The federal government not wanting to risk
things getting out of control with a prescribed burn and
negatively impacting Kamala Harris's chances of winning re election, they
didn't want that on them, and so they just didn't
do the burn. They delayed the burn, and then if
something bad happens, if a burn does erupt, a wildfire
does erupt, well, then they could just blame Gaya Earth.
Speaker 2: And that's right.
Speaker 1: Climate change. Climate change is the reason why. Supposedly, this
is Bernie Sanders on Twitter. He says, eight months since
the area has seen rain, the scale of damage and
loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not a hoax.
Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis. It
is right, it's not my best Bernie impression, that is true.
But this is not climate change. Okay, this is not
climate change. This is a failure of man. This is
human failure. Bad priorities. Did you know that Los Angeles
County cut funding to the fire department last in this
year's budget, Like I think it was like almost twenty
million dollars they cut out of their budget. Right, these
are priorities, These are policy decisions. Not building desalinization plants,
not doing prescribed burns, the controlled burns when you should
be doing them. And why do you do that? Why
do you do the prescribed burns, these controlled burns?
Speaker 2: Why do you do them?
Speaker 1: It's to clear out the underbrush in a small contained area,
So this way you don't have fuel for these wildfires. Right,
it's harder for a wildfire to spread if you don't
have all of this underbrush. And you remember, Donald Trump
made a comment about this, talking about raking leaves. Remember,
and oh, it was so hilarious. He's so stupid. What
is he talking about? And raking the leaves and all
of this, this is what he's talking about. Maybe if
people were to instead of automatically mocking and rejecting what
Trump is saying, maybe if people were to listen a
little bit to what it is that he's may I
even say the term in artfully describing, right, because he
was correct. There are leaves that need to be burned
out of there, not raked up. You're not going to
rake a forest, but that underbrush, that scrub that needs
to be controlled. And that's why you do the controlled burns.
Speaker 2: But you don't.
Speaker 1: These governments don't do it because the environmentalist wackos refuse
to allow them to do it. And so now this
has become an embedded article of faith inside the left
and the Democrat Party that they can't do them. And
this is what you see, This is what we get,
all right, if you're listening to this show, you know,
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do too, and you've probably heard
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I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
and it's a website and it combines news from around
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then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports
ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Banchie,
a writer at RedState dot com, going over some of
the recent history of California's complete garbage management of fire
and forest land. During Donald Trump's first term, he tried
to increase water diversions on federal land to help calif
Fifornia's water supply. The state of California and various environmental
groups sued him and won. Once again, owning the Orange
Man took priority over protecting people. Joe Biden, he says,
canceled planned controlled burns in October because he didn't want
his administration to be blamed if a fire got out
of hand. California has not built a new reservoir since
nineteen seventy nine. Well it's a good thing. I mean
they're not growing or anything. Well they're actually not anymore.
But this is part of the problem that they didn't
fill the reservoirs. And the reason they didn't fill the
reservoirs was related to these policies and politics that say
you've got to protect.
Speaker 2: This smelt minnow fish. Right.
Speaker 1: This is why so many like the environmentalist movement, like
I call them watermelons, because they are, you know, green
on the outside, red on the inside.
Speaker 2: They're commis. They're not actually for progress.
Speaker 1: Despite the fact that they like to call themselves progressives,
they're actually not progressive. They don't want to progress. They
want to actually regress, they want to go backwards.
Speaker 2: They don't want people on this land.
Speaker 1: I'm sure some of them are going to be perfectly fine, like, well,
I guess we shouldn't build there anymore. Let's just leave
it all up to let nature take it take it over.
Speaker 2: You know. There is also a guy named Sam Stein.
He is an MSNBC guy.
Speaker 1: He also writes at the Bulwark and he says the
swift devastation of the Palisades fire is horrible. And then
it dawns on you that Trump, set to take office
in thirteen days, has threatened publicly to cut wildfire aid
to the state, and this prompted a response from a
fellow on Twitter named Jarvis, who is well worth the
follow Jarvis underscore best Jarvis best. He says, a lot
of people are you know, dunking on Sam Stein for
this post that he made. He said, but let me explain. See,
one of the rules of journalisming is that whenever something
bad happens, you have to blame the bad thing on
what's called the RICP, the RIICP, which stands for Republican
in Closest Proximity the RIICP. So you find So if
it happens in like a Democrat controlled city, then you
got to go to, say, the republican governor. Oh no,
in California, they got a Democrat governor. Okay, so now
we got to go to the president. Oh no, we
have a Democrat president. So now like, if you are
stuck with this Democrat mayor, Democrat governor Democrat president, then
there's nobody to blame. There's no Republican in proximity for
the bad thing, because there's there's no RIIC in those cases.
Then you have to pivot to what's called the h RIICP,
which is the hypothetical Republican in closest proximity, right, And
that's when you imagine how bad this would be if
there was a Republican around, right, Because you can't blame
a Democrat mayor for the decisions about filling the reservoirs.
You can't or cutting the funding for the firefighters and such,
you can't blame them. You can't blame the governor for
diverting all of the snowfall that came in the mountains
and sending it to the Pacific Ocean. You can't blame them.
So you got to then go to the president, but
you can't blame him for not doing the controlled burns
because he's a Democrat. So then you got to go
to what would have been like had there been a
Republican doing something, and that would have been way worse.
Can you imagine how much worse the hellscape would be
if a Republican had any kind of proximity to the
levers of power. Luckily we have the babylon Bee with
this headline that Governor Newsom has ordered all trees to
wear masks to prevent the spread of the wildfires.
Speaker 2: That's it's a national treasure, the Babylon Bee.
Speaker 1: California has a huge population, not just because it's huge geographically,
but because for decades, according to Fisher King, it had
a reputation for being a clean, fun and well governed state.
It was actually a reliably GOP state in presidential elections
all the way through nineteen ninety two. People wanted to
live there. You got the sun, you got the beaches,
you got the mountains. Right, it was a Tier one
first World country. But you get the politics wrong, and
you can do a real number on a place. And
that's what California is reckoning. With Dave Rubin, host of
The Ruben Report. Former liberal from California, now more of
a libertarian conservatorian type of guy, does a podcast show.
He said, a few weeks ago, he appeared on Piers
Morgan's show, and he got into this fight with Chank Uger,
one of the founders of the Young Turks Right, and
they were arguing over diversity, equity and inclusion, which, by
the way, good news. The chief of the fire department
in Los Angeles is LGBTQ and has a focus on
diversity and inclusion, so thank god, that's going to help
us fight the fires there. He points out that DEI
isn't just wrong because it's repackaged racism. He says it's
also wrong because once it enters a system, it takes
attention and resources away from the actual mandate of the institution.
There is finite time and manpower and funding, and if
you choose to waste your time and your man power
and your funding on DEI, your core competency will diminish.
Speaker 2: It is as simple as that.
Speaker 1: All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
without your support and the support of the businesses. That
advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support
them too and tell them you heard it here. You
can also become a patron at my Patreon page or
go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much
for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.