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Jan. 9, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:13
Why Is California ON FIRE?!
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Well, folks, wildfires are breaking out all around the Los Angeles area.
It's all horrifying.
We're bringing you all the news updates and a breakdown of exactly what happened in California that led to the magnitude of this particular wildfire, why this is a lot of mismanagement in California.
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All righty, so according to the Wall Street Journal, portions of the heavily populated Hollywood neighborhood in Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate Wednesday evening as a new fire broke out in the hills above the center of the city, which is currently battling numerous deadly blazes.
If you look at a map of the LA area, effectively, these wildfires now surround nearly the entirety of Metro Los Angeles.
They range from the Pacific Palisades, which is on the coast in California, all the way inland.
At least five people have died.
Tens of thousands were forced to evacuate as six wildfires simultaneously hit the most populated county in America.
At least 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed.
125,000 people have lost power.
The region's firefighting resources have been stretched to their limits.
And the authorities appear to have no containment in hand.
At this point, the winds are simply too high.
According to the Wall Street Journal, those devastating fires have been driven.
By high-intensity winds, the Santa Ana winds, that blow from the deserts of interior California and Nevada out to the Pacific.
Those Santa Ana winds are feared by Californians because they are fast-moving, dry, and extremely warm, which means they can push embers from one fire into an entirely different area.
They can also blow for days.
The gusts were reaching 100 miles an hour in the San Gabriel Mountains at 8 a.m.
as of Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service.
And the fallout is absolutely horrifying.
The video...
is tremendously shocking.
Here are some of the footage of burning in Pacific Palisades.
Again, Pacific Palisades is a really, really upscale area in California.
The homes that are being burned are some of the nicest homes in the entire state, which means in the entire country.
Here are some of the footage.
This is from NBC News Channel 4. Where we're looking here directly to the south, right next to the Aldi, is Elliott Arts Magnet Middle School, which also caught fire earlier this morning.
And now we're seeing it across the street at the grocery store.
We're seeing some folks here that are making their way up on Lake Avenue right here.
here but this is a busy thoroughfare as you can see people are sort of walking around and filming this is because there are not the resources available to actually put out these fires even in heavily populated areas there's footage that came out a little bit earlier this morning aerial footage of pacific palisades and the entire place looks to have basically been burned to the ground over on msnbc reporter steve gutenberg's camera feed cut in the middle of his coverage of what was going on in pacific palisades that's how bad the situation was
we should use this current and his compassion We've totally lost it.
It's the actor Steve Guttenberg who is calling into MSNBC. James Woods has lost his home in the area.
Again, this is a very wealthy enclave of California.
It's not just hitting that very wealthy enclave.
It's also hitting places in Pasadena.
It's moving all the way on up to Calabasas.
And the entire area is basically on fire.
Here is some footage that Elon Musk put up on X. Sent to him by a friend driving through Pacific Palisades.
And as you can see, entire areas burned.
Houses burned to the ground.
Nothing left.
Chimneys standing.
Dramatic fallout in these areas.
And the wildfire map is dramatic this morning.
Let me take a look at the wildfire map.
It is just unbelievable how much area has been burned.
An area stretching all the way from Glendale in the west.
All the way out toward Covina in the east.
Large swaths of Santa Clarita.
The area that stretches all the way near Agora Hills, all the way down to Santa Monica.
And a sunset fire has broken out as well that is now threatening.
There's an evacuation warning in parts of West Hollywood.
I mean, these are heavily populated areas.
Truly, largely populated areas.
Incredibly dangerous fires.
And all of this, of course, raises the question as to...
How did any of this happen?
According to the L.A. County Fire Chief, they have no idea how all this happened.
It's possible it's the wind.
It's also possible that it's copycats.
It's possible that this happened a bunch of times in California recently.
You have homeless people who are living in these areas and they are using open flame.
It's possible that somebody threw a cigarette out of the window.
We really have no idea at this point.
Here's the L.A. County Fire Chief, Anthony Marone, saying the cause of the wildfires at this point is unknown.
We have over 500 personnel assigned.
And unfortunately, we have two reported fatalities to civilians.
Unknown cause at this time, and we do have a number of significant injuries.
We have over 100 structures destroyed, and the cause of the fire is unknown and under investigation.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors member, Catherine Barger.
Says, don't worry about it.
The L.A. mayor, Karen Bass, is engaged.
She's on top of this.
Now, there was only one problem.
Karen Bass was, until last night, in Ghana.
What the hell she was doing in Ghana, nobody knows.
Remember, Karen Bass was actively considered as a vice presidential candidate for Joe Biden in 2020. And this is how thin the Democratic bench is.
Here is an L.A. County Board of Superpowers member defending Karen Bass's performance.
Remember, Ted Cruz was really bad because even though he had actually zero authority, Do you know if Karen Bass is on her way back to Los Angeles?
She is, and I've been in contact with her.
She is...
She's very, very, very engaged in this and is going to be here today.
And so I, you know, she is, with technology the way it is, she has been in contact up in the air and is going to be landing this morning and is going to hit the ground running.
So the fact that the mayor is not in town doesn't mean that we're not getting the resources we need.
And the president of the city council, who's going to be here at the press briefing, Marquis, is fully engaged as well.
Well, not so much, Ken.
Karen Bass was getting on a plane from London back to Los Angeles because, of course, she was in Ghana.
And a reporter caught up with her right before she boarded the plane and asked her some very basic questions.
She had zero responses.
Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?
Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor?
Have you nothing to say today?
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?
Elon Musk says that you're utterly incompetent.
Are you considering your position?
Madam Mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today who are dealing with this disaster?
Do you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this was unfolding back home?
Madam Mayor, let me ask you just again.
Have you anything to say to the citizens today as you return?
Madam Mayor, just a few words for the citizens today as you return to deal with the catastrophe.
Man, deer in the headlights.
Deer in the headlights, Cameron.
I mean, the real question is why it is that all these local officials always feel the necessity.
To jet set off to distant parts of the globe as part of their mayoral job.
It's very confusing to me what exactly the LA mayor has to do with Ghana, per se.
It's a very weird move in general.
But it's not just being absent.
It's that she's done a horrible job leading the city while she's been the mayor of the city.
I mean, here she was.
She's back as of Thursday morning.
And here she was trying to tell people where to go to receive new information, and she can't even read a website name.
That's how incompetent these folks are.
Right now, if you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available.
All of this can be found at URL. At URL, guys.
At URL. Yeah, for those of you who are computer literate at all.
A URL is actually just the web destination, like the generic web destination for any web destination.
That's like saying, for more information, head to internet.
Head to www.
My goodness.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong, who's the billionaire owner of the LA Times, slammed Bass in an ex-post, claiming the mayor slashed the LA Fire Department budget.
Quote, fires in LA are sadly no surprise.
Yet the mayor cut LA Fire Department's budget by $23 million, he wrote in a tweet.
Reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions.
Competence matters.
She was also taken on by Rick Caruso.
Rick Caruso, of course, was basically a Republican running as a Democrat in the last LA mayoral race.
And it was the endorsement of a bunch of Hollywood celebrities that put Karen Bass over the top against Rick Caruso commented on Karen Bass's poor leadership.
We've got a mayor that's out of the country.
And we've got a city that's burning.
And there's no resources to put out fires.
So if you look at your pictures, you don't see the firefighters there because there's nothing they can do.
And it looks like we're in a third world country here.
And we've got a lot of tough questions that we need to ask the mayor.
And the city council and our representatives and the county representatives, why didn't you work to mitigate this?
And that is the big question.
See, when it comes to natural disasters, natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time.
There are earthquakes and wildfires and hurricanes.
But the thing about wildfires in particular is that public policy matters an awful lot.
See, with every natural disaster situation, public policy can mitigate the effects of the natural disaster.
This is why if you have an earthquake in a first world country like the United States, not a lot of buildings are going to fall down.
But if you have an earthquake in a third world country, tens of thousands of people might die.
Same magnitude, it's just the buildings are built to code in places like the United States.
When it comes to hurricane response, how you respond matters.
This is why Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, handled disasters really, really well.
When it comes to mitigation and response, when it comes to preparedness, California has been an absolute disaster area that is true for years.
They've not done anything that they could have done to mitigate the effects of seasons like this.
Gavin Newsom, the absolutely execrable governor of California who has spent more money than any governor in the history of the state of California by a long shot who spends billions of dollars on useless rail.
By the way, I used to be a host in Los Angeles and I actually had the opportunity to interview Gavin Newsom and I asked him about his dumb high-speed rail.
At the time, he was running for governor and he said it's a dumb idea.
Then, of course, he immediately reversed himself to spend billions of dollars on a rail that goes nowhere and has never been built.
But Gavin Newsom was out there trying to pretend that he was handling the situation even as half the state is apparently on fire.
Here at the Palisades Fire, you can see behind me how quickly this is growing.
Hundreds and hundreds of personnel all throughout the state of California are here.
Coming from Northern California, we pre-positioned 110 engines.
We've got fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, dozers, water tenders, specialty personnel, putting everything we can to not only suppress this fire, but to prevent additional fires over the course of the next few days.
Unprecedented winds for this time of year, and of course, this time of year, traditionally, Now, again, one of the beautiful things about being a Democrat is you blame everybody but yourself, even though you're the person with authority.
So Gavin Newsom was, in fact, talking yesterday about...
Whether he had any responsibility for anything that's going on, and it turns out everyone else who's not Gavin Newsom is to blame.
What a shock.
What is the situation with the water?
Obviously, in the Palisades, it ran out last night in the hydrants.
I was trying to fire fire on this block.
They left because there was no water in the hydrant here.
The local folks are trying to figure that out.
I mean, just when you have a system that's not dissimilar to what we've seen in other extraordinarily large-scale fires, whether it be pipe, electricity, or whether it just be the complete overwhelm of the system.
I mean, those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire.
You have something at this scale.
But again, that's going to be determined by the local.
Ah, the local authorities.
The local authorities.
See, here's the thing.
Statewide policy actually matters a good deal.
And you know who's been talking about this pretty openly and repeatedly for years and years at this point would be one Donald J. Trump, the president-elect of the United States.
In fact, it was just last year on Joe Rogan.
That he was talking about how California was not doing enough to stop wildfires.
They said, we have no water.
I said, do you have a drought?
No, we don't have a drought.
I said, why do you have no water?
Because the water isn't allowed to flow down.
It's got a natural flow from Canada all the way up north.
More water than they could ever use.
And in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean.
Millions and millions of gallons of water gets poured.
I could have water for all of that land, water for your forests.
You know, your forests are dry as a bone.
Yeah.
Okay?
Dangerous.
That water could be routed.
You know, you could have everything.
Not only dangerous, billions of dollars a year they spend on forest fires.
And, you know, there's a case with the environment.
They're not allowed to rake their forests because you're not allowed to touch it.
And all they have to do is clean their forest, meaning rake it up, get rid of the leaves, get rid of, you know, leaves that are sitting there for five years.
Well, certainly get rid of the dead fall.
And get rid of the trees that have fallen.
Yes!
Perfectly obvious.
By the way, he's right about all of this.
California's had a significant water shortage for years because they refused to build the infrastructure necessary, the reservoirs and the dams necessary to actually, you know, hold the water from the seasons where it is raining in California.
Or to bring water from up north.
They've been flushing fresh water out to the ocean for years to save something called the Delta smelt because of environmentalists.
Here was Trump back in 2019 talking about Newsom when it comes to natural disasters.
He said, quote, The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has done a terrible job of forest management.
I told him from the first day we met, he must clean his forest floors regardless of what his bosses the environmentalists demand of him.
He must also do burns and cut fire stoppers.
Every year, as the fires rage in California burns, it's the same thing.
And then he comes to the federal government for money help.
No more.
Get your act together, Governor.
You don't see close to the level of burn in other states, but our teams are working well together in putting these massive and many fires out.
Great firefighters also open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the north.
Don't pour it out into the Pacific Ocean.
Should be done immediately.
California desperately needs water, and you can have it now.
That was Trump writing on Twitter back in 2019. He was right about all of this.
So let's go through all of this mismanagement because there's a ton of mismanagement ranging.
It is a perfect storm, not just in terms of the fire conditions, but in terms of the political conditions for fires to rage out of control.
From DEI to budgeting, from environmentalism to blaming climate change, Democrats have done a horrifying job on all of this.
Again, you can't blame Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass for the fires.
You can blame them for not doing the preparation necessary to deal with some of the most perfectly predictable weather that California has.
You see wildfires pretty much every year in California.
I mean, last year we were there in 2020, there was a very large wildfire in many of these same areas.
So let's begin with DEI and firefighting.
So California, LA in particular, has spent an awful lot of time attempting to do its firefighting staffing with intersectional characteristics in mind.
Now, this is not a rip on the current firefighters in Los Angeles.
It is a suggestion that the misprioritization Of effective firefighting below the race and sexual identity of the people who are doing the firefighting is stupid and wrong and backwards.
And that if I were to Google LA Fire Department, what I should have seen over the course of the last several years is LA Fire Department staffing up with best possible not, not enough lesbian black women in LA Fire Department.
Unfortunately, it's the latter that you see.
So all the way back in 2017, I actually testified in front of Congress.
About DEI, intersectionality, and all this sort of stuff with Adam Carolla.
Adam Carolla, of course, is a very prominent host, podcast host, radio host in Los Angeles.
He lives in one of these areas.
And Adam, in 2017, talked about how he had attempted at one point to join the LA Fire Department and was told he couldn't because he was, you know, just a big white guy.
I want to talk about my white privilege so badly.
I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA. I could not find a job.
I walked to a fire station in North Hollywood.
I was 19. I was living in the garage of my family home.
My mom was on welfare and food stamps.
And I said, can I get a job as a fireman?
And they said, no, because you're not black, Hispanic, or a woman.
We'll see you in about seven years.
And I went to a construction site and dug ditches and picked up garbage for the next seven years.
years, I got a letter in the mail sent to my father's house saying, your time has come to do the written exam for the LA Fire Department.
I took it and I was standing in line and I had a young woman of color standing behind me in line.
And I said, just out of curiosity, when did you sign up to become a fireman?
Because I did it or a person seven years ago.
And she said, Wednesday.
That is an example of my white privilege.
Okay.
And again.
This has been a long-standing policy of the LA Fire Department going back for decades.
Well, some things never change.
Obviously, DEI has been a problem going all the way back to 2017 when Adam was testifying.
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In 2021, Robin Abkarian, one of the worst columnists in America, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Had a piece titled, quote, the LA Fire Department's sexism problem.
Yeah, that was the main problem there.
That was clearly the main problem.
When I reached Chris Larson on Thursday's shoes in Spokane, Washington, attending an international conference for female firefighters, Larson, 55, is president of LA Women in the Fire Service and has worked as an LA firefighter for 31 years.
Over time, she's risen to the rank of battalion chief and is currently the only black female officer in the department.
She is, as are many of her firefighter sisters, deeply unhappy about the dearth of women on the force and about the fact that women are hazed, harassed, or disrespected by some of their male colleagues.
This is an especially fraught moment for the LA Fire Department.
This is in 2021. Talking about how terrible it was that there weren't enough LGBTQ people in the LA Fire Department.
There weren't enough women.
That was really the big issue.
In 2022, at the behest of the left, then Mayor Eric Garcetti stood alongside current Fire Chief Kristen Crowley and launched the L.A. Fire Department's first ever Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau, focused on ensuring a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace for all.
Garcetti said, we believe in and are committed to justice in Los Angeles and we focus an equity lens on every aspect of our work.
Of course, Kristen Crowley is herself a lesbian, which means that she is highly qualified to be L.A. Fire Department Chief.
And that's obviously the main qualification they were looking for.
Here she was defending.
The DEI initiative at the time.
I am super inspired.
She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future, one that includes a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity.
People ask me, well, what number are you looking for?
I'm not looking for a number.
It's never enough.
Out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 are women right now.
She's already looking at ways to change that.
She's quick to point out that doing so has a greater purpose, attracting the best and brightest for the job.
They feel included, they feel valued, and they feel part of a cohesive team.
Really slow clap for the geniuses who decided that we needed racial diversity and sexual diversity in firefighting as the top priority over at the LA Fire Department.
NPR in 2023 covered this diversity initiative.
The byline over there suggests, quote, firefighting is mostly white and male.
A California program aims to change that.
Well, man, oh man, have you guys succeeded.
You guys are amazing.
Now, again, it's not the racial constituency of the fire department that is responsible for the failures of the fire department.
However, where you put your focus as a government says something about your priorities.
And your priority obviously wasn't just staffing up with the best.
Here's NPR reporting on this in 2023. Firefighting departments nationwide have tried to diversify their ranks for years.
They have made only modest progress.
Today, the profession remains overwhelmingly white and male.
Oh, no.
Oh, absolutely.
Wow.
That's so terrible.
Well, the good news is that at least Kristen Crowley was honored at the local pride parade.
That's the really important thing.
thing.
This is just from last year.
Now, Half West Hollywood may be on fire by This evening.
But the important thing is that the fire department chief is herself not straight.
That is the thing that matters most of all.
But again, when it comes to the DEI and the fire department, that is a problem.
It is also a tertiary or quaternary problem when it comes to the list of problems here.
Top of the list would be things like lying about your wildfire prevention efforts, which is what Gavin Newsom did back in 2021. According to CAP Radio, quote, on Gavin Newsom's first full day in office, January 8th, 2019, the newly elected governor stood before the cameras clad in jeans and sneakers and surrounded by emergency responders and declared war on wildfires.
Everybody has had enough, the governor said.
He said climate change was sparking more fires more frequently.
And he said that the state's response had to fundamentally change.
But two and a half years later, as California approaches what could be the worst wildfire season on record, it does so with little evidence of the year-round attention Newsom promised.
An investigation from Cap Radio and NPR's California newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention.
This is 2021. The investigation found Newsom overstated by an astounding 690 percent the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state's most vulnerable communities.
Newsom has claimed that 35 priority projects carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres, but the state's own data show the actual number is 11,399 acres.
Overall, California's response, this is NPR reporting, has faltered under Newsom.
After an initial jump during his first year in office, data obtained by Cap Radio and NPR's California newsroom show Cal Fire's fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020 to levels below Governor Jerry Brown's final year.
At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire's wildfire prevention budget.
It's circa 2021. Gavin Newsom, the most amazing governor who wanted to run for president.
Unbelievable.
And it's not just on the statewide level.
Just weeks ago, LA Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department budget by nearly $20 million.
According to the New York Post, LA Mayor Karen Bass faced scorching criticism Wednesday.
As it was revealed, she cut the city's fire department budget by $17.6 million ahead of this week's devastating fires, as she prioritized funds for its massive homeless population that largely went unspent, according to a report.
The cut was the second largest in Bass's 2024-25 fiscal budget city figure show, and it wasn't even the gunning she wanted.
She actually wanted to cut $23 million from the fire department budget.
In fact, the cuts were so bad that even Crowley...
Was warning how bad they would be.
She actually wrote a letter to the Board of Fire Commissioners saying, quote, Wildfires.
That was according to, again, LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley to Mayor Karen Bass last month.
Last month.
And here's the thing.
Preparation for this stuff requires years in advance.
Years in advance.
Chad Pergram, Senior Congressional Correspondent for Fox News, interviewed Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, who made his career, made his business career, with a company that fought wildfires.
And what Sheehy said is, quote, those of us in the wildfire community have been shouting from the rooftops for years this was going to happen.
We're going to have the big one in a wildland-urban interface environment, which is what this is.
It was going to be catastrophic.
This is the big one.
As a federal apparatus, we are not prepared to fight fire year-round.
It's January.
Most of the air tankers, helicopters, and firefighters are off contract.
They are not prepared to launch out.
This is like one of the few things the government should actually be good at, and they have sucked at it.
They've been awful at it.
They haven't also done the things they need to do on an environmental level.
So they did not clear the brush.
They did not create the fuel breaks.
They did not do backfires in order to burn and clear burn some of the areas that were most likely to become tinder for a giant wildfire like this.
In fact, the firefighters were running out of hydrant water in the middle of this.
They were running out.
That's insane.
They literally had no water.
According to the LA Times, the hydrants are down, one firefighter said over the radio.
Water supply just dropped, another added.
The Department of Water and Power confirmed reports of hydrants being empty without giving numbers.
According to Rick Caruso, the problem stems from reservoirs that feed the neighborhood's hydrants.
He said this is a window into a systemic problem of the city, not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old.
By the way, the infrastructure in LA is super old.
We used to live in Los Angeles, as you all know.
When we were living in Los Angeles, the transformers that provided power to everybody's houses.
Those things hadn't been updated since the 1920s.
L.A., California are wildly mismanaged.
They've built no new reservoirs.
They've built no new dams.
The Sites Reservoir, which was a very important reservoir for holding water for situations like this, which was planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years, still has not been built.
It still has not been built.
They spent billions of dollars building nothing.
That is how California works.
Also, worth noting, California did in fact release reservoir water not all that long ago.
According to Newsweek, in February 2024, CBS 8 reported that billions of gallons of water had been released from local reservoirs over the prior year out of an effort to keep water levels low should dams fail and inundate surrounding areas.
You know, it would have helped that if you had built more dams and more reservoirs, but you didn't have it.
So, in short, They release water because they didn't do the infrastructure work.
And then the water is not there when you need it.
Again, slow clap for the geniuses in California.
And of course, so much of this is also tied to the insane environmental policies.
You can't build anything in California from houses to reservoirs without going through years of legal wrangling.
You can't do controlled burns because you're afraid you'll be sued.
As Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valatomics, makes clear, he says, In 2007, the Sierra Club successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a categorical exclusion to NEPA for controlled burns.
The CE would have allowed the Forest Service to conduct burns without having to perform a full environmental impact survey.
The median time for that is three and a half years.
The John Muir Project helped claw back the full scope of the categorical exclusions from the 2018 omnibus bill as well.
In 2021, the outgoing Trump...
Bureau of Land Management was served with a notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity for their fuel reduction plan in the Great Basin.
The Bureau of Land Management then backed off because they were afraid of the legal consequences.
The environmentalist groups have sued everybody into the ground to stop them from doing precisely the things they need to do in order to prevent wildfires like this.
Again, here's the point.
Disaster can strike anywhere.
The preparation here?
Non-existent.
In fact, worse than non-existent.
Damaging.
Actively damaging.
And yet, Democrats keep being elected.
Folks, public policy has a lot to do with this.
And when you hear Democrats shout from the rooftops that it's climate change, understand that it is a misdirect.
It is a misdirect.
Even were that true, it would not alleviate their responsibility to mitigate the effects.
That is literally what they are elected to do.
When you have David Jolly reporting over at MSNBC, and when he says, we didn't do enough to address climate change.
Nothing would have addressed climate change in time to stop these wildfires.
When you say climate change, what you really mean is don't blame the politicians who are really to blame.
We don't do enough to prevent the change of climate science or change of climate or address climate science.
But we also are ignoring the fact that we have this this significant risk peril in communities across the country.
And the government either is going to help subsidize paying for that risk on the front end or is going to have to bail it out on the back end.
Bailing it out is always more expensive and less responsible.
Just amazing.
Just amazing.
It must be.
It must be that what we have to do is stop driving carbon-powered cars.
That would have stopped all of this.
Or maybe, again.
That is just a workaround to the fact that Democrats have done a horrifying job of handling their bleep when it comes to actual governance.
All right, coming up, we'll get to Joe Biden's inane response to all of this.
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Again, the mismanagement here is off the charts.
Joe Biden, of course, is still titularly president of the United States.
He did a press conference with Gavin Newsom and it didn't go well.
It didn't go well, mainly because the president is clearly senile at this point.
So he lamented the fact that Hunter Biden And his new wife may have lost their home.
It's astounding what's happening.
There's only one piece of good news.
My son lives out here and his wife.
They got a notification yesterday.
Their home was probably burning ground.
Today, it appears that it may be still standing.
They're not sure.
Okay, so then he followed that one up.
He followed that one up by saying that there is good news.
He's a great-grandfather today.
What the hell is wrong with him?
Seriously, the most egoistic, self-centered human being alive, Joe Biden.
2,000 people have lost their homes.
And Joe Biden is talking about how he's a great grandfather. - But the good news is, I'm a great grandfather, as of today.
I'm a granddaughter.
10-pound, four-ounce baby girl, a baby boy.
So I remember this tape for a lot of wrong reasons. - Well, I mean, clearly our country's in the best of hands Can't imagine why he would have lost re-election to Donald Trump and why his vice president did lose her election to Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, President Trump correctly surmised that Gavin Newsom is to blame.
President Trump spoke about this yesterday.
He put out a statement, quote, Governor Gavin Newsom refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him.
It would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.
He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called the Smelt by giving it less water.
It didn't work, but didn't care about the people of California.
Now the ultimate price is being paid.
I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California.
He is to blame for this.
On top of all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes, a true disaster.
This, of course, led the media to suggest that the real problem here is, wait for it, Donald Trump.
There was one MSNBC commentator, Mike Murphy, suggesting it's imperative that Donald Trump find the right tone.
The right tone.
Well, here's the thing.
He's been telling Newsom what to do on this thing for the better part of a decade.
And Newsom did none of those things.
So if you're not going to cudgel him at some point into doing the things, then what exactly are you supposed to do?
I hope the president-elect in his new job will find the grace to know what the tone ought to be, which would be a change for him.
But I will hope for the best here because we could use it.
Yeah, that's clearly the issue.
That's clearly the issue.
Well, I have to say, big L for media coverage goes to David Muir.
Who humiliated himself in the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, made a fool of himself, but he wasn't done making a fool of himself.
Muir, who of course works for ABC News, he was reporting the wildfire and he had to make sure, he was wearing some sort of firefighting outfit, which I don't understand, he's not a firefighter, that's weird.
But in any case, he wanted to dress up as a firefighter, he was cosplaying as a firefighter, but he needed to make sure that it was form-fitting enough, his firefighting outfit.
He didn't want to look like he was swimming in his fake firefighter outfit.
So he used clothespins in the back.
And when he turns, you can clearly see the clothespins holding his firefighter uniform closer to his body.
He needed the fitted look.
And there we go.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
He is our media.
Only the best.
Only the best.
Well, speaking of Joe Biden, there is more bad news for Joe Biden.
A new poll finds that Americans think that Joe Biden is the worst president since Richard Nixon, which, by the way, is selling Richard Nixon kind of short because Richard Nixon did do some good things as opposed to Joe Biden, who has done only bad things.
The survey was conducted between December 2nd and 18th of last year and found that only 6% of respondents believe Joe Biden's presidency was outstanding.
Those are all the members of Joe Biden's immediate family.
13% said it was above average.
26% said it was average.
17% said below average.
37% believe it was poor.
That last total is the highest for any president included in the poll.
His net positive of minus 35 is better only than Nixon's minus 42. That is not good at all, but it is accurate because he has been, indeed, an absolutely horrifying president.
He's also still delusional.
Hilariously, Joe Biden.
Sat with USA Today's Susan Page for a lengthy interview, and he says he thinks he would have beaten Donald Trump.
Uh, no.
You certainly would not have.
I mean, Kamala Harris didn't, obviously, but Joe Biden definitely would not have won.
And then he was asked, would you have had the vigor to serve for another four years?
He said, quote, I don't know.
That's why I thought when I first announced talking to Barack about it, I said I thought I was the person.
I had no intention of running after Bo died.
For real, not a joke.
And then when Trump was running again for re-election, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him.
But I also wasn't looking to be president when I was 85, 86 years old.
So I did talk about passing the baton.
Who the hell knows?
So far, so good.
Well, no, actually not so far, so good, since he's obviously no longer with us.
This did force Hakeem Jeffries to make one of the funniest statements of the day.
He was asked, does he think that Joe Biden would have beaten Donald Trump?
And he's like, well, we're not going to talk about that.
I know over the summer you met and had a private conversation with President Biden in the run-up to his decision to exit the 2024 race.
In a new interview in USA Today, he says that he believes that he could have beaten President Trump based on the polling.
You saw the polling as well.
Is the president right?
We're looking forward, not backward.
But was he right?
Could he have beat the former president?
Same answer.
President-elect.
Same answer.
Looking forward.
The answer, of course, is no.
Meanwhile, speaking of President Trump, we are now just 11 days from his inauguration, from him officially taking office again.
Thank God.
Thank God.
And the fights over his nominees are breaking out.
The question of whether there will be a quick confirmation or not, I think that his nominees will be confirmed pretty quickly.
There will be FBI background checks.
I think that the Senate is going to insist.
And frankly, I think they should.
I'm going through all of the information.
That is literally their job.
The advice and consent process is part of the constitutional process, but they're going to move fast.
Democrats, however, are going to do their best to hold up the works.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is not, in fact, a Native American, she was out there ripping Donald Trump's nominees, suggesting the reason that Donald Trump is talking about Greenland and the Panama Canal is because he's trying to misdirect away from talk about his nominees.
Well, no, that's actually, no.
No, Senator.
I want to make a second point, and that is, why is Donald Trump doing this?
And I think the answer is, let's have a big distraction and several more questions so we don't spend more time on Pete Hegseth, the nominee to be the head of the Department of Defense.
So we don't spend more time on Tulsi Gabbard, who has been in the pocket of Putin and is not someone who should be trusted with our secrets.
So that we don't spend more time.
On Robert Kennedy's views on vaccines.
In other words, we have a job in front of us right now.
And that is advise and consent on the nominees who are there to run our government.
Donald Trump would love it if we spend no time talking about them and all of our time talking about this idea and that idea and something else.
Well, the plan for Democrats is to create as much chaos as possible.
Chuck Schumer is saying as much.
According to Axios, he's privately pressing his senators to create fireworks when they question President-elect Trump's nominees in coming weeks.
Schumer told his top committee Democrats in a closed meeting, quote, Republicans have spent four years attacking the Democratic brand.
We need to use the hearings to begin returning the favor.
So he wants them to ask questions of RFK about vaccines.
He wants them to ask Pete Hegseth about what the MAGA agenda looks like and all the rest.
Good luck.
Good luck.
I don't think that's going to have any impact.
Meanwhile.
Around the world, many world leaders are upset with President Trump for saying obvious things like perhaps the Panama Canal should not, in fact, be under the sway of the Chinese government.
The leader of the Panama Canal Authority undenied President Trump's claim that China is controlling the vital trade route on Wednesday.
He said Trump's suggestion the U.S. ships get preferential rates will, quote, lead to chaos.
Ricoarte Vasquez Morales said, quote, the accusations that China is running the canal are unfounded.
China has no involvement whatsoever in our operations.
I don't think that's true at all.
A Chinese company operates the ports on either end of the canal.
The canal itself is run by the Panama Canal Authority.
The state entity is selected by the Panamanian government.
The foreign minister of Panama said the sovereignty of our canal is not negotiable.
It's part of our struggle, our history of struggle.
It's an irreversible conquest.
I mean, it wasn't really a conquest.
We sort of handed it to them under Jimmy Carter, another one of Jimmy Carter's brilliant decisions.
You know, Donald Trump certainly has leverage to apply if he wishes to apply it.
Applying it not on behalf of seizing sovereignty over the Panama Canal, but on behalf of cutting ties with Chinese companies would be, I think, one very positive impact of the new Trump administration.
Meanwhile, other players overseas are very, very upset because, of course, Donald Trump and his allies have been getting involved in foreign policy.
The Mexican president has responded to Trump's plan to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
By suggesting that they would rename the United States.
Well, yeah, good luck with that.
Claudia Scheinbaum clapped back at Trump, saying that parts of the United States should be called America Mexicana.
Her playful reaction came as Mexico sent serious messages that will defend the human rights of Mexicans in the U.S. who may be abused during Trump's planned mass deportations.
So apparently she stood in front of a 1607 map showing the territory of northern Mexico and part of the present-day United States mixed together.
Scheinbaum said, without prompting from reporters, the joint region that used to belong to Mexico should be called America Mexicana or Mexican American.
Well, I mean, sorry that your country lost.
I'm sorry that happened to you.
I'm not sorry at all.
Honestly.
Maybe we should just take Baja in response.
As long as we're doing this thing.
Meanwhile, on the economic front, the Fed is now suggesting that they're going to hold rates steady for now.
It's hilarious.
They're willing to ramp up the cuts was running toward re-election or as Kamala Harris was running toward election.
And then the minute Trump was elected, they're like, ah, we're going to slow down on these cuts.
So, by the way, it would be a good thing to slow down on the cuts.
I think it is good.
I do not think that we should be injecting more loose money into the system.
The interest rates have been artificially low for decades.
And the economy, I think, will do better if we have a predictable regime of interest rates.
The Federal Reserve, however, is blaming their lack of cuts on President Trump.
The Federal Reserve officials saw risks of higher than expected inflation due in part to potential tariffs by President-elect Trump when they made a finely balanced decision last month to lower the interest rates.
But apparently, they say they're not going to cut any further.
Again, is that political?
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get into the latest from the UK where the Labour government has now denied a petition to investigate the grooming gang scandal that has plagued the country.
For the last couple of decades.
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