Will MAGA Movement Confront Israel & AIPAC?! – w/ Greg Foreman
One area of contention within the MAGA movement is over the question of Israel. Many Trump supporters are adamantly anti-Israel and wish to sever the close ties between the US and the Jewish state. Within the Trump camp, however, there is near unanimity in offering unconditional support for Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza and aspirations for expansion into what’s termed “Greater Israel.” Guest hosts Russell Dobular and Keaton Weiss of the Due Dissidence podcast talk with Black Conservative Perspective host Greg Foreman about why MAGA will never do anything to change the Trump administration’s policy on Israel. Plus segments on the LA fire chief’s foreknowledge of empty reservoirs and broken hydrants and the prison laborers being used as virtual slaves to fight the LA fires. Also featuring Mike MacRae! And a phone call from David Axelrod!
Come see us on tour in Dallas, Texas, Baltimore, Atlantic City, co-host New York, and Providence, Rhode Island.
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Hi, this is the Jimmy Door show, Russell and Keaton speaking.
Who's this?
Gentlemen, greetings from the CNN podcast studio, home of the Axe Files, hosted by none other than yours, truly, David Axelrod.
I say, gentlemen, that it is a true pleasure to be talking with some fellow political prognosticators, particularly of the due dissonance variety.
Well, pleasure to make your acquaintance to you, David.
Thanks for calling into the show.
Well, the honor is all mine for sure, especially to talk directly to the one and only Russell Dabular.
Jimmy, I know you're out there listening somewhere.
And Jimmy, you know better than anyone that David Axelod is calling in today exactly because of how he would pronounce Dobular.
And that's no disrespect to you, Russell, or your name.
It just so happens that Dabular really brings out the idiosyncrasies in my idiot, as one would say.
Yes, I have that effect on people.
I see.
I see.
Yeah, you know.
Hey, I wanted to rap with you, too, about the future of the Democratic Party, because I am a Democratic strategist or am employed thusly from time to time.
Well, I would imagine right now would be a difficult time to be a Democratic strategist.
Well, yes and no, Keaton.
Yes, in one sense, being a Democratic strategist right now is similar to being the head waiter on the Titanic who rides the boat all the way to the bottom of the ocean and gurgles out, can I get you anything, sir, to a bunch of dead bodies?
Yikes.
Wow.
Well, yeah, Russell, but at the same time, there is no bigger opportunity for growth and change than at a low point.
I'm sure you'll agree.
And let's be honest, the Democratic Party is definitely at a low point right now.
Oh, you could say that again.
Yeah, definitely the lowest point in my lifetime, perhaps even in its entire history.
So low, in fact, one wonders if the Democratic Party could ever possibly recover.
Oh, okay.
Okay, fellas.
We don't want to overstate the case here, but suffice it to say we have our work cut out for us.
No doubt about it.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
We are in a real pickle looking forward.
So what is your strategy then?
To put it in a nutshell, think big, way big, outside the box, because where we are at now tells us one thing.
Every political instinct the Democratic Party has collectively had was wrong.
The things we thought would work got us where we are now.
So literally, there is no change that could be too big.
And I say, go crazy.
Crazy?
Absolutely bananas, Russell Dabular.
And if past is prologue, I think it is, the Democratic Party can go absolutely bananas with policy shifts.
For example, remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party and the Republicans were the hawks?
Vaguely, yes.
Yeah, it's a distant memory at this point.
And the shift happened so slowly that it was imperceptible.
And now the Democrats are the forever war party position, which remains unpopular with American voters.
If that's not fucking crazy, I don't know what is.
Hard agree.
Yes.
But here's the thing.
That change happened accidentally without any foresight.
Just a completely unthought out moral shift in response to GIP isolationism.
Now, just imagine if we actually think things through when we change our positions, actually get a sense of what does or does not resonate with the American voter.
What a concept.
Wow.
Yeah.
For example, us Democratic muggety mucks are finally getting up to the fact that the incessant highlighting of cultural issues did us no favors with the public in this last election.
That was an unforeseeable political event, in my personal opinion, because it's the last issue that we are truly left on.
So we figured we'd highlight the fuck out of it.
Sure, why not?
Yeah.
Yeah, but it didn't work.
So maybe, just maybe we can reinforce our commitment to equal rights for all people, but not have topless trans women on the White House lawn during public events.
Maybe just dial down the cultural messaging a little bit.
I don't know.
Sounds pretty radical to me.
Or much as we took the pro-war stance from the GOP, we also steal the pro-gun stance, force the Republicans to favor gun control like they used to decades ago.
And also now we, the Democrats, get all that sweet NRA cash.
But how would that connect to any kind of liberal ideological stance whatsoever?
Russell Dabular, give me a break.
We gave up on that shit long ago.
This is about playing the long game, whatever it takes to win.
You really are just out of ideas, aren't you?
Absolutely bereft, Keaton.
Rudderless.
That's exactly why I'm calling, as a matter of fact.
What do you guys suggest?
We are not in the business of trying to write the chorus of the Democratic Party.
We gave up on that a long time ago.
Well, okay, neither am I. I'm a political consultant for crying out loud.
I just like talking about this stuff.
It's fun and interesting.
You guys should come on my podcast sometime and rap about this some more.
At the end of the day, we can not fix anything.
Well, I'm sorry, Axe, but we have our own show, Dew Dissidence, to work on.
So we will talk to you later, David Axelrod.
Okay, bye.
Bye.
Thanks for calling.
All right.
Another big rift in MAGA is Israel.
All right.
So here's Thomas Massey.
You've probably seen this clip talking about AIPAC handlers.
Honey, but me has an APAC person.
What does that mean?
An APAC person.
It's like your babysitter, your AIPAC babysitter, who is always talking to you for APAC.
They're probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in AIPAC.
Every member has someone like this.
That's how it works on the Republican side.
And when they come to DC, you go have lunch with them and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them.
That's absolutely crazy.
I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my APAC person.
And it's literally what we call them, my APAC guy.
I'll talk to my AIPAC guy and see if I can get him to dial those ads back.
Why have I never heard this before?
Why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country?
It doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that.
So they're not going to tell you that.
All right.
And here's Donald Trump talking about what he did for the Adelsons.
Hang on.
He had to sometimes tell him, calm down.
You just had a big victory.
Let's celebrate.
No, no, we have to immediately start.
Let's see if we can do Golan Heights.
How about Golan Heights?
They've been trying to get it for 72 years.
I got it done in about 15 minutes.
guys Even Sheldon couldn't believe that one.
I tell you, even Sheldon couldn't believe that.
All right.
How does that make America great?
Doesn't that make Israel great?
You know, I'll never forget that clip of Nixon talking about the APAC lobby.
And Israel, I mean, at this point, man, like it's inevitable, man.
I mean, here's the thing.
It doesn't matter who you vote for.
You're going to get the same result when it comes to Israel.
And I don't really understand people who are so caught up on the Israel thing when you know that no matter what, Democrat or Republican, you're going to get the same result.
So, you know, in my opinion, they have a powerful lobby.
And I think that ultimately, unless, you know, as a group, both sides come together and decide that, hey, we want to somehow get, you know, not lessen the impact of APAC in politics, then there ain't really that much we can do about it.
But I don't know if there's a consensus, enough of a consensus to actually get it done.
I think everybody knows it, but I think there's just, I don't think enough people really agree to come together to do something about the influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby in politics.
But I think regardless, you're going to get the same result.
So do you wish we could get a different one?
I mean, what are your views on it?
My views on Israel.
I'm a realist when it comes to kind of foreign policy and stuff like that.
So I personally think that no matter what happens, eventually Israel is just going to take all the land.
And it's not about if, it's about when and how.
You know, are the Palestinians going to leave or is Israel going to take out enough of them to eventually take the whole Gaza Strip?
That's what the question is about.
It's not about if, it's about when.
And I just don't think that they can live together peacefully.
So at this point, it's really about do we want to co-sign that happening?
And for me personally, I don't think it's worth risking a war with Iran in order to support it.
But at the same time, I'm not convinced that Iran actually is going to go out of their way to stop that from happening.
But who knows?
Today, there was just announcement that Hamas was willing to hand over the hostages after Trump basically was threatening to essentially blow the whole place up if they don't do it.
So who knows?
Maybe there will be some type of ceasefire, something like that when Trump comes into office.
I don't know.
But I just think that ultimately, like, no matter what, like somebody's like, Israel's going to take the land.
I think people just got to accept it.
Well, this seems like an area where a lot of the MAGA base, you know, I was at Rescue the Republic this year.
I was speaking at Rage Against the War Machine the day before.
There were a lot of MAGA people there.
It was basically a MAGA event.
Most of them do not support Israel.
This is something that you see in the leadership that you see in certain elements of the podcaster class, not even all of them.
You saw Candace Owens had that big falling out with the Daily Wire over that.
It's something where the left and the MAGA base should be coming together to try to put a stop to it.
You were saying before, you know, MAGA will have these debates, right?
And I agree with you.
I agree with you.
When you're talking about the libs, not the left.
When you're talking about the MSNBC people, man, you could show them pictures of Hillary Clinton with a baby on a pizza box.
They would say it's a daycare center.
It would not matter what you showed them, but that's not the actual left.
And MAGA will actually fight with their leadership.
So why don't they fight with their leadership about this?
Because from what I can see, most of the MAGA base hates it.
They tolerate it like what you're describing, but they don't like it.
Yeah, I think, I think you could throw me in that camp of I tolerate it because I just think, I just think that this, I mean, they're a more powerful country, more powerful group of people, and they got the back end of the United States and they're going to do what they want to do anyway.
So, I mean, it is what it is.
But the evangelical base, that's the issue on the right when it comes to the Israel stuff because they really do believe that that land is entitled to them and they can do whatever they want to do.
And they really care less about the Palestinians, especially being a largely Muslim population.
I'm not saying that that's a form of hate and bigotry.
I'm just saying that as in, like, from a religious biblical perspective, they really do believe they are the original Jews and that that is their homeland and that they're entitled to it.
So, um, I wouldn't say that the MAGA base per se is you know, largely against Israel.
I would say that there are factions on the right that are against Israel.
Uh, and then there are some that, again, more evangelical leaning that are very, very, very pro-Israel, staunchly pro-Israel.
And that ain't really changing because essentially 70s and 80s, there was a lot of education about Israel and how much, you know, they're important to us and connecting Judeo-Christian values to the founding of the country.
I mean, there's a whole, I almost call it a mythology that's connected back to the founding of the country and connecting Judaism and Christianity as if we're the same when we're really not.
But this is this is what they've done.
Like this is the whole conservative thing.
So it's a hard thing to push back against because I think so many people are just kind of setting their ways when it comes to this issue.
And I really don't even like talking about it because I just, I just don't think it's, I just don't think it's worth us being so upset about something that's, I think, just inevitable, to be honest with you.
Well, when you talk about the expansion of Greater Israel, you're not even just talking about Gaza.
You're talking about now, I mean, Syria, obviously, Lebanon, and then Gaza is its own horror.
You know, that is certainly part of that.
I mean, they are certainly going to take land in the Gaza Strip.
I think that that's a certainty.
They're already talking about people in the North not being able to return to their homes like they promised them they'd be able to just a few months back.
They've already gone back on that.
But and obviously, I mean, we agree that no matter who you vote for, the policy is going to be the same.
We did not support Joe Biden when it was Biden.
We didn't support Kamala when she became the nominee for exactly that reason.
I would probably disagree that that's a reason to throw your hands up and just say, well, let's not think about it.
I think we should try and figure out a way to influence it.
So what would you say to Thomas Massey?
Like, what, like, this does it not fall to the conservative base if there is a strain of the conservative base that feels like we do have to do something about this?
Well, it's not enough.
But what I'm saying is, does it fall to the conservative base to empower more people like Thomas Massey?
Like, you guys don't just vote for president.
You, you can primary sitting congresspeople.
Like, why not put more Thomas Masseys in office and get the Lindsey Grahams out if you feel strongly about it?
Now, if you don't feel strongly about it, then that's another thing.
I would strongly disagree with you on that.
I think it's a hugely important and consequential issue.
But I'm just saying, even if we don't prioritize it the same way, what do you say about the project of getting rid of these old guard neocon Israel hawks and replacing them with the crop of Thomas Massey's?
MAGA can certainly do that if they wanted to.
They have the numbers.
Yeah, absolutely.
I hear you on that.
But I think that on that rallying around that issue specifically isn't really going to work because I don't think they care enough.
I think the people that are actually super passionate about the Israel issue on the right, they kind of also like also seem to be kind of obsessed with like Jews in general, right?
And just pushing back against the Jew lobby.
So like when you get into that, I think that makes people uncomfortable.
And I think that's part of the reason why it's more of a niche, in my opinion, I think it's more of a niche faction of MAGA that is like very like anti-Israel.
And I'm not saying it's not large.
I'm not saying it's not, it's not somewhat impactful.
I just don't think it's enough to be a single issue in which you're like, all right, we're primaring out anybody who's not on board with trying to push back against Israel and to stop the genocide.
I just don't think they care that much.
And I think that's the issue.
Well, I agree.
I mean, look, that's just a fact.
I mean, it's just a fact that, you know, if you look at the exit polls this election, only 4% of people prioritize foreign policy in general as a top issue.
So it's a fact that right now you don't have the numbers.
But on the left, look, a sizable faction of the left made it a point to prioritize this issue going into 2024.
Now, Kamala got her ass beat in all the swing states by a decent enough margin where that wasn't the difference maker.
But in a state like Michigan, it could have very well been the difference maker.
There was the abandoned Harris movement, which were Detroit and Dearborn-based Muslims and Arabs.
Many of them had family members murdered in Gaza who said we are going to boycott the Democratic ticket, whoever it is, with the express intention of costing Kamala Harris the state of Michigan and costing her the race.
Like there was a, there was a faction of the left that organized around that.
Now, I'm not delusional, and I'm not going to tell you that made the difference, and that's why Kamala lost, but they made they made it a point to take on that endeavor.
And I hope that there could be some organizing in some right of center circles to do the same thing.
I hope that can happen.
Yeah, I think that that's, I think it's possible.
I just think that in order to make that argument, you know, I think some of it is going to, you have to pull back on it on the on the Jew hating, right?
And I hate calling it that because I'm not one of these people that like to, we, we've run into it.
We know.
Yeah, we've run into it.
We're talking about, are you guys familiar with John Milshire?
Sure.
You're talking about Michelle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So I kind of take his approach when it comes to Israel.
I don't think from a, like, from a, from a geopolitical strategic standpoint, like it don't really make sense that we bend over backwards for Israel because they don't really offer us anything.
They claim that, oh, they offer us intelligence and, you know, a presence in the Middle East, but they're more of a pain in the ass to deal with.
And we have other people as well, too, in the Middle East that, you know, we can partner with.
So I'm not one of these people that buy into this idea that we must support Israel due to, you know, a geopolitical benefits, strategic alliance, anything like that.
I just think that a lot of it is just grounded in culture and just this idea that America and Israel are representation of the West in the Middle East.
And regardless of whether or not it actually benefits us, people are just tied to that.
And it's just, it is what it is.
So, you know, I think it can happen.
I just think that it has to be a different argument.
It has to be an argument about, okay, does it benefit America to potentially get in a war with Iran or to destabilize the Middle East for Israel?
That has to be the argument.
Do you want to go and fight and die on behalf of Israel?
That has to be the argument, not that Jews run the world and that they're controlling everything in the media.
That can't be the argument.
The argument has to be more about: is this best for America to continue to fight on behalf of Israel or to provoke on behalf of Israel?
And that's just, I mean, that's just what it is.
I mean, look at what's happening in Syria, man, with Bashir al-Assad leaving.
That's a vacuum.
I mean, that's a disaster waiting right.
That's another Afghanistan.
That's another Iraq waiting to happen.
And, you know, a lot of that has to do with us, you know, being on board with, you know, trying to destabilize other countries to benefit Israel.
And ultimately, like you said, they're trying to, you know, take more to land and have more control and stuff like that.
So, you know, again, you have to make real solid geopolitical arguments for why is it that it's not in America's best interest to support everything they do rather than grounding the arguments based off of the identity of, oh, oh, this like this, this cabal of Jews that are controlling the world because you're just never going to get people at a mass scale on board with that.
That's what I'm saying.
Well, look, we're two Jews who are very critical of Israel, and we've certainly run into what you're talking about.
I'm not going to deny that it's there.
But what I would also just ask you, and I mean this very, very seriously, because you started this interview off talking about how your sort of social conservatism and family values-oriented, you know, cultural views led you into conservative politics.
Candace Owens has spoken about this very, very well.
I think, you know, she's a Christian, conservative, family-oriented person.
I'm a husband and a dad.
And it is on that level that this Gaza genocide is really just devastating to me.
It really offends my sense of family values.
I mean, the number one cohort of deaths in Gaza is five to nine.
And by far, the largest cohort of deaths in Gaza is 14 and under.
It is a genocide of the family.
It's a crime against the family.
It's a crime against mothers and children and babies.
And so is there not a conservative family values-oriented argument to make in that respect.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I used to date a Palestinian woman.
So trust me, like I've heard my fair share of, you know, the arguments and I understand like it's a very emotional thing.
People are losing their families and people are dying.
And there is, you know, a lot of Christians that are concerned about the Christians that are dying.
There were reports about a lot of Christians that were getting caught up in the strikes from Israel, especially initially, right?
And that's why a lot of people were, you know, backlashing towards Israel.
It's like, yo, you guys are killing people indiscriminately, right?
You have Christians dying.
It's not just Muslims dying and stuff like that.
So that is an argument to be made.
And I think that that argument is probably more effective than I think some of the arguments that are more commonly made on the right that, again, are not grounded in that.
They're grounded in other disagreements with just, you know, the Jewish identity.
Yeah.
As we said, we've run into it.
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Welcome to the Jimmy Door show, everybody.
Keaton Weiss here with Russell Dabuler in for Jimmy through today.
He'll be back on Wednesday.
So this is our swan song for the time being.
LA Water Chief knew about empty reservoir broken hydrants months before fires report.
This is local ABC news in LA.
Los Angeles' water chief reportedly knew about an empty reservoir and broken fire hydrants months before the deadly wildfires now spreading across the city that have left some communities in ashes.
The Daily Mail reports the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janice Quinones was hired by Mayor Karen Bass on a $750,000 salary in May.
Now LA Fire Department insiders are blaming Quinones for a nearby reservoir disconnection and broken fire hydrants, the outlet reports, claiming this has led to firefighters running out of water.
The mail reports that Quinones' past employer was linked to fire scandals.
Quinones previously held a top executive role at electric company PGE.
The company previously went bankrupt over liability for several California wildfires, the outlet reports.
Quinones reportedly oversaw the emptying of the Santa Inez Reservoir in the Pacific Palisades area during brushfire season, sources told the outlet.
That's the 117 million gallon reservoir that was empty when they needed it.
The reservoir was designed to hold 117 million gallons of water, but was taken offline recently to fix a tear in the cover, the LA Times reported Friday.
Former DWP general manager Martin Adams told the Times that having the reservoir would have helped fight the Palisades fire.
An LAFD source told the Daily Mail that DWP officials said had it not been closed, they probably would have been okay and had enough water for the fire.
So that's a pretty damning quote right there.
During a press conference amid the fires this week, Quinone said fire crews ran out of water Due to, quote, low pressure in the system because they were using water faster than it was being replenished.
The source, a former LAFD senior official, told the mail lack of water was a common problem with a failure by DWP to fix fire hydrants.
A current LAFD member told the outlet some fire hydrants were not working in the Palisades area during the fires this week.
California governor Gavin Newsom is demanding an independent investigation into Los Angeles's power and water departments after firefighters say many hydrants ran out of water.
He is also looking into the reported reservoir closure.
Newsome shared a letter addressed to Quinones on his ex-account.
So here we go.
All right.
Here comes the damage control from Newsom.
New, I'm calling for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Inez Reservoir.
We need answers to ensure this does not happen again.
And we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires.
Every time I hear the word again makes me want to punch a wall because there's not going to be an again.
I don't see you building this city back to what it was.
There was another interview.
It's not related to this segment where he's talking about we're going to build LA 2.0.
I saw that.
I saw that.
Try LA 0.5.
Like you're not going to be able to build it back to what it was.
I don't think.
I don't think you're going to have, I don't think you're going to have the resources available.
I think a lot of people are going to leave after this.
And unfortunately, tragically, there's just not, there's just nothing there is there's just no way of envisioning how on a scale like Los Angeles, you're able to build back to what it is.
Even if you have the will to do it, the amount of time that's going to take, it's never going to be the same.
It's never going to be the same.
New Orleans was never the same after that hurricane.
It was never the same.
They never had the, I shouldn't say it's just a matter of capital, but you had an exodus of people.
You know, it was just, it never really grew up.
The people who made New Orleans, New Orleans last.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
You know, you could see it even as an outsider.
When I went back, it wasn't the same.
Like that, that, that New Orleans, if anyone, a great show about post-Katrina New Orleans is Tremay, same guy who did The Wire.
And very much similar style, very, very journalistic kind of a way of approaching the question from every angle, from every social class.
And it really captured how for people who loved what it had been, they were just in mourning because this very odd, unique, eccentric, one-of-a-kind place was gone.
And you almost didn't realize how fragile it was until it was gone forever.
Right.
Now, L.A., yeah, it's, it's what is a city if not its people, right?
When you get a lot of the people are just not going to come back.
Why would they?
You start rebuilding.
What happens when the next fire comes?
Because this is not just because they didn't rake enough leaves.
It is partly the nature of the region.
Yeah.
And this was it.
This was the chance.
This was your chance.
You know, for the governor to say, well, we can't let this happen again.
I mean, that's like saying we can't let 9-11 happen again.
I mean, you know, I mean, this was the big one.
This was the big one.
Gavin Newsom also went on Pod Save America, thought it was a good idea to take time out of the schedule, even though the fires are still raging, barely contained.
They're a little above 0% containment now, thankfully, but still well under 50%.
He thought it was a good idea to go and save face on a Democrat-friendly show here, Pod Save America.
You'll see the same thing here.
I demand answers.
I wanted to get to the bottom of what happened.
The answers.
So I'm the governor of California.
I want to know the answer.
I've got that question.
I can't tell you about how many people, what happened, my own team saying what happened.
And I want to get the answers.
And when I was getting happy cannot, they weren't getting straight answers.
I watched the press conference.
I met with some of those leaders.
We had my team start talking to local leaders saying what's going on.
Our state weren't getting straight answers from.
I was getting different answers.
When you start getting different answers, then I'm not getting the actual story.
And they're assessing it.
And I get that as well.
You have to have a little bit of grace back to the point.
We're in this emergency environment and everything else.
I just want to determine the facts, but no one has any patience anymore.
In this weaponized, back to the grievance of Trump, everyone else, there's immediacy.
And lies travel the proverbial world.
And it's hard to get the facts out there unless you have backing of those facts and you can communicate them soberly.
And so that's what we're trying to achieve as it relates to this.
But I have 10 other things we're doing concurrently as well.
I mean, across the board on recovery, disaster assistance, getting the major disaster declaration.
It may be the first one in U.S. history over a text with the White House within literally 36 hours to get 100% reimbursement for folks out here.
We've been working concurrently in all of these areas.
We're doing executive orders as I speak as it relates to recovery and land use, dealing with speculation and fraud and trying to address issues of the Coastal Commission here and address the issue of planning permits and how we address all of the myriad of needs for small businesses.
All of this in real time, again, as the state, even though this is not a state responsibility or to support the city and the county that are overwhelmed at this moment.
So you'll see there was a bullshit sandwich there where at the beginning, he says, you know, I'm not getting straight answers from those underneath.
You don't want to punch down the chain of command as the governor.
You also don't want to say, as he says there at the end, this is not a state responsibility.
It's a local responsibility.
What are you kidding?
I mean, what are you nuts?
If New York City were wiped out in a tornado, would Kathy Hochle be able to say, well, I mean, this is really the mayor's problem.
It's a local issue.
you could argue it's a national issue.
You could argue the National Guard should be there now, right?
You could argue it's too big for even the governor.
It's certainly not a smaller responsibility than his.
If anything, it's an even larger one, which would, of course, encompass him as well.
So there you have it.
More of that.
The Babylon B notice the irony.
Get Newsome demands answers from whoever's in charge of California.
Yes, good headline there.
The mail reports that Quinonis' past employer was linked to fire scandals.
PGE went bankrupt over liability for several California wildfires.
The outlet reports the fires have burned more than 12,000 homes and other structures when they first began popping up around a densely populated 25-mile expanse north of downtown LA.
At least 11 people have been killed, as I understand.
That is now over 20 as of this recording.
So, you know, this was published over the weekend.
With five from the Palisades fire and six from the Eaton fire, according to the LA County Medical Examiner's Office, no cause has been identified yet for the largest fires.
So you could see, obviously, you know, Newsome trying to make this someone else's fault.
See, I think politically, they realize just how catastrophic this is for them.
And I think that the argument that this was inevitable isn't quite sellable because of the fact that while, yes, obviously, hurricane force wins plus an eight-month-long drought means there's going to be fires.
That's part of the problem.
That's part of the problem: the mayor knew of these circumstances at the beginning of the year.
There were reports that from the 7th through the 9th was going to be extremely risky for fires.
She leaves the country.
And where is the preparation at the state level?
Where is the coordination of local municipalities?
You know, it's a common thing among like small towns.
Like if a fire breaks out in a really small town in Pennsylvania, they won't just have the town fire department come and put out the fire.
They'll pull in fire departments from surrounding towns.
Given the scale of Los Angeles and given the recent history of catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, I think you need similar coordination between the LA Fire Department and surrounding municipal fire departments.
You just have to have all hands on deck, not because you can eliminate damage, but 12,000 structures burned.
If you save 500 of them, that's 500 homes or 500 storefronts, right?
Or 500 office buildings.
Like you do have a responsibility to do what you can.
I don't think anybody is saying that this all could have been avoided, but some of it could have been avoided.
And you have a responsibility to do that.
And if you actually take the problem of climate change, seriously, this is the irony.
People who want to blame this on climate change do so in the same sort of nihilistic spirit that liberals often virtue signal about problems that they have no intention of actually solving.
There was a CNN segment.
We're going to cover it on our show, I think, this week sometime, where the anchors are talking about how people take climate change just about as seriously now as they did 30 years ago.
There's really been no progress on that issue.
And I think the reason there's been no progress on that issue is because the same people who want to alarm you about climate change prove themselves so unserious when it comes to solving every other problem that they claim they want to solve, right?
A party that claims it wants to empower working people and even the playing field, but allows a Senate parliamentarian to block a minimum wage.
Well, how are you going to sell someone on climate change, which is a much more abstract issue than a wage, right?
So if you prove yourself totally unserious and only about a certain virtue signal that scores political points, then yeah, don't be surprised when people don't buy it.
And materially, which is the more important part of this, if you think that your city is at increased risk because of climate change, then don't you owe it to your city to prepare even more?
Like that is what you are empowered to do as a municipal authority.
You're not empowered to dictate to China what they put in the air.
If you think that's a problem, well, your jurisdiction as mayor of Los Angeles is your city and your people.
And the same goes for Newsom and the state of California.
You have to adjust.
If you take the problem seriously, you have to demonstrate that.
They did not.
They seem to just be hoping for the best.
That Rogan clip that we showed, where he said, I was talking to a firefighter and a firefighter told me it's just a matter of time before the winds blow in just the right direction at just the right speed.
And when that happens, we're fucked.
There's not a thing we can do.
It seems like Newsom and Bass's plan for that was just to cross their fingers and hope that day never came on their watch, but it did.
Yes.
There was an interesting article.
I shared it with you and Jimmy where a couple of firefighters/slash fire experts say, hey, it's not even just a wildfire issue.
You have to harden all the architecture against fire.
You have to take measures, special paints, special reinforcements, fireproof materials.
That essentially you have to do what cities did after all of these major fires burned down.
Chicago, New York burned down a couple times.
It's not as famous because it happened earlier on.
I think the second time was in 1835.
But not since.
It said, you know, they completely reconceived how they built cities.
That's why you don't see like wood tenements.
You see brick tenements.
So they were saying you have to think that way.
Like if you want to continue to habitate this region, you're going to have to harden all of the architecture against these kinds of fires, trying to deal with forestry management.
It's not enough because when you do get these fires breaking out, what really causes this are the sparks landing on the houses.
Oh, sure.
And then once though, so you're not going to solve it just by dealing with that.
You're going to have to increase your fireproofing materials.
And okay, but God, to do that to all of LA, what are you talking about?
Trillions?
You're talking about a major reorganization and reprioritization of society as a whole.
You're also talking about, quite frankly, you're talking about having to empower the state in ways that a lot of people who flee California to Texas are not comfortable with.
You know, in New York, we have burn bans when the conditions are dry, you know, when there's been a drought and there's going to be winds.
There are bans on outdoor burns.
And there are bans on outdoor burns in Southern California as well.
I don't know to what extent that gets communicated to people, how strictly those are enforced.
But yeah, man, like if you're having 14-year high winds and you have a metro area built on arid grassland, you know, that hosts 14 million people and you haven't had rain in a year.
Yeah, there's got to be very strict enforcement.
You can't be lighting fires outside.
You can't be flicking cigarette butts in your backyard.
Now, if you tell people you're going to get a ticket for smoking a cigarette outside and no fire happens, guess what?
Guess what?
All of the Chud accounts who are raging at Newsom for being woefully unprepared for this now, they're all going to say, this is why you need to move to Texas because the commies in California won't let you smoke a cigarette.
Well, look, at a certain point, you can't have everything.
I mean, what do you want?
What do you want?
There are trade-offs and you have to negotiate that.
And that's what politics is.
But so this is what I mean.
Like to prevent this entirely, you're talking about really, really big picture changes that have to happen.
And, you know, people are either going to be down for those or not.
That's an open, open question because if you exert the kind of control over the over the society that you would really need to to really minimize the chances of these fires, a lot of people aren't going to go for that.
And I'm not saying they're wrong not to go for that, right?
Like people don't want to have the government's boot on their neck in that way.
The reality is that makes these fires more likely.
I mean, that's just like, like, what do you want?
Like, there's no such thing as a utopia.
Right.
You would need collective action of a kind that we're not really capable anymore of anymore.
You need a Hoover Dam kind of collective will in society.
And I still believe, based on what I know and what I researched when I lived in the region, that you can't have populations this size there.
You're going to have to downsize it to make it habitable in a sustainable way.
And at the same time, you've got to completely reimagine the architecture.
You've got to completely reimagine the whole urban design of Los Angeles.
Do we have the collective will as a society?
We're a pretty long way from the, in 10 years, we'll be on the moon, America.
Right.
Yeah, we're a pretty long way from those people.
Yeah, it can be done with collective will.
Do we have that as a society?
I don't think so.
Right.
Yeah, no, I don't think so either.
So inmates can make up nearly a third of those fighting California fires, according to Forbes here.
You know, it's an interesting side note to this.
I think it's Kim Kardashian, who I guess is studying to be a lawyer.
He's speaking about this.
Yes.
Well, that's the family business, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's going into the family business.
It's the family business.
She decided to be known for something other than her ass.
And a dirty video with Kanye.
As the shock of the Los Angeles fires and their effect on so many communities, businesses, and families is still being digested.
Lots of attention is being turned to those who are on the front lines fighting the flames.
Her ass could have gotten OJ off as well.
Could have.
I think she was too young at that time, actually.
Many people, although in Hollywood, anything goes right.
Many people might not be aware that one particular group has long been dependent on to battle wildfires, inmates.
While the 13th Amendment ended slavery in the United States, a loophole allows people convicted of crimes to be forced to work for public or private enterprises.
In this case, those tasked with firefighting volunteer for those positions and must meet certain criteria.
They are not assigned without their consent.
Their pay scale was doubled in 2023.
And depending on the skill level and the task assigned, they either receive 16 to 74 cents an hour or a maximum day rate of 580 to 1024.
Most of their lunches consist of a simple sandwich, two pieces of white bread with a few slices of bologna plus an apple.
Their daily food budget of approximately $4 per day is hardly enough to sustain them for their high volume of manual labor.
All right.
So it might be voluntary, but it's slavery.
These are slavery-like conditions.
And the circumstances under which you're volunteering are coercive because you get this article for some reason doesn't mention it, but you get two days off your sentence for each day that you do it.
So, you know, they got you locked in a cage.
Hey, you want to fight fires so that you could spend a little less time locked in a cage?
We'll give you baloney too.
We'll throw in some bologna.
Yeah, exactly.
Incarcerated firefighters have some of the highest injury rates among all prison workers and are four times more likely to sustain injuries compared to other firefighters.
Also, they work some of the longest hours and have some of the hardest tasks to execute.
They don't shoot water hoses.
They use powered chainsaws and manual hand tools such as axes with the goal of starving the fire of fuel to continue to the burn.
In some form, inmate firefighters have been used in California since the end of World War II.
The state has leaned on inmates to provide additional firefighting staff and hand crews to help contain the blazes.
These teams also respond to other disasters like floods.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has a conservation camp program that employs incarcerated people as firefighters who respond to emergencies at the local, state, and federal level.
The program started in 1915, and the modern protocol of training the inmates at camps began in 1946.
Today, there are 44 conservation camps, also known as fire camps, operated by the CDCR in partnership with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the LA County Fire Department.
In 2010, nearly 4,000 inmates lived in California's fire camps.
That number has declined due to the prison population shrinking.
No thanks to Kamala Harris, which we'll get into.
Sentencing reform and less inmate interest in this volunteer assignment.
Guess they decided living is more valuable than two days off the sentence.
CDCR has tried to expand eligibility to higher-risk inmates, but the program still represents up to 30% of the wildfire workforce.
For perspective, in 2023 to 2024, the Los Angeles Fire Department has 3,902 employees.
That's 3,246 uniformed firefighters and 353 professional support, and is the third busiest in the United States.
So that's about equal to the number of firefighters in the fire camps, at least in 2010.
So Kamala Harris.
Now, this is part of why a lot of people, myself included, have never had a lot of patience for the argument that you had to vote Democrat because Donald Trump's a racist.
I never bought it because of things like this.
Now, people like Kamala Harris are very necessary in this age.
If you want to continue to abuse incarcerated, mostly black and brown people, you can't really get the guy with the mirrored shades going, yeah, you get rabbit in your blood.
You can't go with that.
So that's how someone like Kamala, who has no particular talents to speak of, at least none that we can speak of on a family program, ends up in the position that she ended up in because they need to put a face like that on these kinds of policies now.
And they need someone sociopathic enough to do that.
And that's Kamala.
How Kamala Harris fought to keep nonviolent prisoners locked up.
On May 23rd, 2011, the Supreme Court found in Brown versus Plata that California's prison system was in violation of its prisoners' Eighth Amendment rights.
Despite its relatively conservative tilt, the court identified prisoner release as the most effective method for ending the state's constitutional violation in a timely manner.
By April 2023, just two months from the initial deadline given in that Supreme Court decision, California still had 9,636 prisoners, more than the court-imposed ceiling.
The state submitted a proposal that involved relocating inmates to fire camps to fight wildfires and preventing out-of-state prisoners from being returned.
The court found good time credits alone would do more than enough to close the gap and solve the problem for good.
Some 5,385 inmates were eligible for release under good time credits.
But Governor Brown, with Harris as his defense lawyer, this is Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam, way out on the left, he's supposed to be right?
Big lefty, with Harris as his defense lawyer, did not agree.
Harris's office launched into a campaign of all-out obstruction, refusing to answer why they could not simply release low-risk, nonviolent inmates to conform to the Supreme Court's request.
Quote, defendants offered no explanation, however, why they could not release low-risk prisoners early, the June 2013 ruling stated.
In late 2014, lawyers from her office claimed that nonviolent offenders needed to stay incarcerated lest they lose bodies for fire camps in the wildfire-plagued state, as Jackie Kucinich of the Daily Beast reported.
The Daily Beast, liberal rag in good standing.
Harris was quick to disavow the memo, claiming she had no knowledge of it and telling BuzzFeed News she was shocked by the argument.
Well, then you're grossly incompetent and you shouldn't be in public life.
But it squares firmly with the sort of arguments her office was putting forward for multiple years preceding it.
So for years, your office had this major case pending on prisoner release and you knew nothing about the argument that your office was making.
So yeah, this is why the idea that Trump is an existential threat because of his racism, as opposed to the Democrats, look, you can make a case against Trump, but that was always absurd.
At Christmas, I had somebody Say to me that he was horrified that Trump got elected.
I said, why?
He said, I just can't believe so many people in this country are racist.
I said, well, Kamala Harris fought to keep mostly black prisoners locked up.
She fought to lock them up for marijuana.
Joe Biden bragged about working with segregationists.
That was his opening pitch in 2019.
He bragged about the fact that they never called him boy.
Well, why would they?
You're white.
Why would they have called you boy?
He bragged about it.
He was very proud that they never called him boy.
So this is one more example.
They literally, this is Jerry Brown.
This is what the corporate media perceives as a lefty, right?
This is like a non-burning lefty, like a lefty that doesn't scare them, right?
This is what they define as the outer limit of establishment Democrat politics.
And they're fighting to keep these people in jail who are eligible to be released to use as slaves to fight fires.
Now, if you had that story in a red state in the South, MSNBC would never let that story go, much less if it were attached to a Republican presidential candidate.
They would have been talking about it every day about how they're going to re-enslave black people all over the country if they get elected.
Not a word about this in the corporate media.
Well, because this was obviously a story surrounding Kamala and that article that you just read was printed in 2020 in the summer of that year, which was after Kamala had already withdrawn from the race.
She had withdrawn in December of 2019, January 2020.
She was out before the Iowa caucuses.
So she had been long gone by the time that came out.
But, you know, I had somebody show me this article because this article's kind of been making the rounds, not the second one, the first one that you showed.
Yeah, no.
She was just running for president.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you see Chris Hayes jumping up and down about this?
I didn't see it.
Well, no, I mean, not with her as the nominee.
Absolutely not.
But, you know, somebody just shared this article with me and they said, oh, my God, did you know this?
And I said, yeah, I knew that I knew this.
And I didn't know specifically for this fire, but I could have told you that, yeah, of course, they're using prison labor for this fire because I knew from following the 2020 campaign that this had been standard practice in California, largely thanks to Kamala Harris.
And if you were paying attention, you would see reporting like that from outlets like the American Prospect during that cycle.
So that's why it was on my radar.
So, no, it's not shocking.
So much of what people are shocked by is not new.
You just have to have your ear close to the ground.
So much of this stuff comes to the surface when a major news event happens, like these just apocalyptic large-scale fires in Los Angeles now.
But no, this has been known for a while that California uses prison labor to fight fires, paying them just absurd wages.
And yes, the most extreme element of this is obviously keeping them in jail for longer so that they could exploit the labor to fight fires.
Yeah, we just covered because the AP, there's a reporter, Robin McDonnell, who's really on that story of prison labor being used as slavery.
You have prisoners working the counter at McDonald's.
People who are serving severe sentences with no supervision.
For anyone who hasn't read it, it's right behind me here.
This really gets into this.
The new Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
And that's why the 13th Amendment comes up in that article itself.
Slavery never ended.
They found a workaround.
They found a workaround to continue slavery.
A lot of the prisons in the South are literally on the old plantation grounds.
Angola is on a plantation ground, and they're continuing to use these people as slave labor.
Just in California, this completely Democrat-run state.
Oh, the good Democrats.
They do the same thing.
They do the same thing.
And it's easier for them to get away with it because they're able to virtue signal and slap a face like Kamala over those practices.
That's true.
On the other hand, though, there is a sort of detente around issues where there is bipartisan consensus, just like Israel and AIPAC.
Like, notice when Thomas Massey told Tucker that every Republican he knows has an APAC handler.
Notice MSNBC didn't touch that.
They didn't touch that because they know the Democrats have AIPAC handlers too.
So like that example that you just made of prisoners working to counter McDonald's, that's in Alabama.
So that's a very red state, obviously, where that happens.
You don't see liberal media jumping on it.
Why?
Because there's a détente because they know that the Democrats do it too, and they know that they're in agreement.
Israel, same thing, right?
Issues where there's that kind of consensus.
Yeah, both the media ecosystems just kind of let that go.
They just kind of leave that be.
Well, didn't California have a referendum and the voters decided to keep prison labor?
Yeah, there was some referendum about prison labor.
It's funny how the most progressive economic policies on ballot measures in 2024 passed in the reddest of states, but California shot down an anti-prison labor measure.
I forget what it was, but you're right.
It was something about, you know, basically, you know, some sort of ballot measure to, you know, empower prisoners so they weren't exploited in some way.
And yeah, they shot it down.
The good liberal progressives of California, they voted.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yep.
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