Ezra Levant and Joel Pollack expose Los Angeles’ wildfire failures, where Santa Ana winds and jet stream left 80% of Pacific Palisades destroyed on January 7th—yet Pollack’s home survived due to private brush clearance and windbreaks. Mayor Karen Bass’s absence in Ghana while fires raged, alongside her refusal to prioritize relief over DEI spending, contrasts with Rick Caruso’s private firefighters saving his Palisades Village Mall. California’s climate policies and EV mandates worsened hazards, like burning lithium batteries, while wealthy enclaves thrive independently. The episode reveals systemic neglect, questioning whether federal oversight or a leadership shift can prevent future disasters. [Automatically generated summary]
One of our favorite guests on Rebel News is Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com.
Well, he's used to reporting on the news, but recently he's been in the news.
His house was in the middle of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles when the firestorm broke through.
And he actually put one of the key questions to President Trump about the recovery of the Pacific Palisades.
We had a one-day visit with Joel in Los Angeles.
I scooted out there and got right back to Toronto as soon as I could.
Fascinating and terrifying story.
You'll see that ahead.
And that's why I want you to get the video version of this podcast.
You know, really, it's a visual story to see the devastation, to see how close Joel's house came.
It's a story of pictures, not just words.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month, which might not sound like a lot to you, but boy, it sure adds up for us.
So please consider subscribing.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, what's the truth about the fires in Los Angeles, in Jasper, Alberta, and in Maui?
It's February 7th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Rebel News is across the country.
As you know, Drea Humphrey is out there in Vancouver.
We have folks all the way out to Montreal, our dear friend Alexa Lavoie.
By the way, did you see her ask a good question to the Premier of Quebec the other day?
How come you don't agree with Premier Smith's idea to build a new oil and gas pipeline to diversify our export markets so we are not only trading with America, given Trump's tariff threat?
So she said that it would make Canada stronger.
Do you believe that too?
I just answered this question.
It's the same thing.
We talk about energy or GNL.
I think that we need to have social acceptability.
And if Danielle Smith or whoever tabled projects, we'll look at them.
But we need to have social acceptability.
I like the fact that Alexa is out there speaking English and francais.
Of course, we also have Avi Yamini and a small crew with him in Melbourne.
My point is, we really focus on Canada.
We do international things.
As you know, we went to the World Economic Forum in Davos for a week, went down to the U.S. inauguration to talk to Danielle Smith, but we try and stay focused on the big stuff in Canada.
That said, I believe that there are things that happen outside this country that reflect on Canada, that give us a hint of what's to come.
That's why I sometimes visit the United Kingdom, because I believe the censorship and the mass immigration and the Islamification of the public square is relevant to us.
But I'm very conscious when I take days away.
So I did something last week.
I zipped out to see the fire in Los Angeles on the weekend.
And then from Los Angeles, I took the flight to Maui to see how the fire recovery is doing there.
And then I came back and we did that whole thing on the weekends.
So I was able not to miss my Canadian duties.
Maybe I should have taken some more time out there, but I was able to cover the ground well.
The reason I went there is because I think those three wildfires I described earlier, Los Angeles, Jasper, Alberta, and Maui, what do they have in common?
Quite a bit, I would say.
In every instance, it was government failing to prepare by giving in to environmentalism when it comes to not clearing the deadwood in the forest, when it comes to emptying reservoirs and dams of water, terrible emergency response, and most incredibly, the long-term delays to rebuild bureaucracy and permits.
I want to show you what we saw in Los Angeles.
We had a sort of tour guide there, our friend Joel Pollock, who lived right in Pacific Palisades, the neighborhood in LA that was torched.
Joel's house itself was thankfully not consumed by the flames, but most of the block he was on was.
We talked to him about the fire itself and then a neighborhood in Pacific Palisades that wasn't touched by fire because it had a different political leader.
In the days ahead, I'll take you to Maui, our super quick trip there, 18 months since that fire burned out.
You will be shocked at what is happening there a full year and a half later.
Anyways, I wanted to explain what I was doing and I wanted to tell you that we did it in such a way as to not take away from our work in Canada because obviously that's most important.
But would you agree with me that learning about how to prevent wildfires destroying property and learning how to rebuild from wildfires is something we could use in Canada too, including in places like Jasper.
We really kept our spending low, about $1,000.
I mainly used my frequent flyer points for this trip.
But if you can help cover our out-of-pocket expenses, I'd be so grateful.
Please do that at thetruthaboutthefires.com.
Ezra Levant here.
I'm in Pacific Palisades, which was scorched by wildfire short days ago.
This is a basketball torched in the backyard of my friend Joel Pollock, who happens to be a resident here.
He's also the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, you've been taking us through the streets.
Utter devastation.
It really feels like a massive bomb went out.
Tell me about the day the fire swept through your neighborhood.
The fire began on the morning of January 7th.
We had been warned of extreme wind, so I had spent the early part of that morning taking down anything that might blow away.
I took down my flagpole.
I took down my son's baseball net.
We've been through some high winds here before.
In fact, if you see the ficus trees over here to my left, one of the reasons I don't cut them down, even though they interfere with the view, is that they are a natural windbreak and they keep the wind off the house.
We don't have a very windy climate generally, but there are a few months in the winter where you can get these winds called Santa Ana winds that come down from the mountain.
And when they move through the canyons, they become very strong.
So we were preparing, and I took my third child to her preschool.
I went to the gym, then I went to Starbucks to check email, do some work, and I received a text message from my nanny, who was walking our fourth child, our baby, and she said that she saw smoke and smelled it.
And I started checking social media to see what was going on, and the fire was reported to be near the Highlands, which is a neighborhood on top of the Pacific Palisades not too far from here.
I wrote back to my wife and the nanny and said, we have to pack our bags.
They are going to evacuate us.
I knew from past experience with reporting on fires and reporting on water that this was a close fire.
And I didn't expect that the fire would actually reach this area, but I thought it was possible that we would be in the evacuation zone.
So we packed up in 15 minutes and we left.
And we managed to avoid the traffic jam that was building up on Sunset Boulevard.
We took a couple of shortcuts that I know about and we got onto the Pacific Coast Highway and we evacuated to Santa Monica where we remain today.
But that traffic jam became a major problem about half an hour later when residents were stuck in the traffic and the smoke began coming closer and closer and closer and people abandoned their cars and fled on foot.
To block the roads, the fire department had to bring a bulldozer to move the cars out of the way.
Anyway, the wind was extreme, not just an ordinary Santa Ana.
It was amplified by the jet stream and it blew flaming embers through this neighborhood and began to blow them everywhere.
And as you've seen, probably 80% of this neighborhood has been destroyed.
And when we left, we thought, well, if the house goes up, there's nothing we can do about it.
We have fire insurance.
We are lucky.
Our insurance company didn't drop us, but many of my neighbors had lost their fire insurance literally in the days before the fire because California has a socialist policy of capping insurance rates because the California government, in its benevolent and omniscient wisdom, has decided that the price of fire insurance was too high.
And therefore, the insurance companies started going out of business.
They left the state where they dropped their customers.
We had our policy, but other people either had no insurance or were forced onto the state plan, which is a much poorer plan.
So we still had our fire insurance, and I just made the peace with the fact that we were perhaps going to lose our house.
I monitored the progress of the fire overnight, and it seemed to me that our house was perhaps just outside the perimeter of the fire.
It turns out that was simply coincidence.
The fire maps online couldn't actually keep up with the spread of the blaze.
And nevertheless, I checked with a colleague of mine in another news outlet whether they were letting journalists back into the fire zone.
This is about 24 hours later, Wednesday morning.
I was able to use my press pass to come in.
I couldn't drive up here because there were downed power lines, but I walked up from where I parked a couple blocks away and I found my house still standing, but surrounded by smoke.
And this is what I found.
I found the fence burned, portions of the retaining wall outside the fence on fire.
I looked around the other side of my house.
That fence was on fire.
My neighbor's fence was on fire.
My neighbor's trees were on fire.
And I started looking for water.
There was not enough water pressure in the fire hydrants even for the firefighters.
I turned the tap on my garden hose in back, which was closest to the flames.
Nothing.
I went inside my house.
I still had my key, and I found the vases of flowers that I had given my wife over two successive Fridays every Shabbat in our house.
I give my wife some flowers.
That was the water I started with.
And then I noticed there was a river of water really flowing in the gutter from homes that had been destroyed uphill.
So I was able to take the vases and go back and forth, bringing water to where the flames were.
And then I remembered my son had a bucket of baseballs in the backyard.
I dumped the baseballs out.
I took the bucket.
Two guys pulled up in a truck.
I didn't know them from before.
They said, do you need help?
I said, yes.
They came.
We found two more buckets and we had an assembly line going and we put out the fires on these fences, the neighbors' fences, neighbor's property.
And the other thing is, you asked about my garden hose when we were driving over here.
I found my garden hose extended over the yard from where it had been kept in the front yard, which meant to me that some neighbor or perhaps a firefighter, but somebody, some anonymous person had actually taken the hose and had fought the fire before I got here when there was still water.
That's the kind of community Pacific Palisades really is.
It's a community of neighbors helping each other.
And that's the only reason this house survived.
That and probably the ficus trees, maybe some topography.
We also had a natural fire break here.
There's been a lot of debate about brush clearance.
There wasn't enough brush clearance.
Certainly where the fire started, there was a lot of brush.
But the neighboring property here is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
And I had actually asked them in the past to cut the grass on their property because it is a fire hazard.
And they did so.
They actually came and they cut the grass and they maintained it after I intervened.
And so we actually have about 50 meters of clear space between us and the next structure.
So that probably also helped.
But in general, lack of water, lack of brush clearance, no police to guide the traffic, no preparation.
There was no water in the reservoir at the top of the hill, 117 million gallons, almost completely empty, no water available.
This was an act of God or act of nature.
It was a natural disaster.
You can't do anything about the strength of the wind.
We believe it was started by human beings, probably accidentally, but perhaps arson.
We don't know.
There are some things you can't do anything about.
We did not, collectively, I mean, we as a city, as a community, we did not do the things that we could have done.
And our city government is to blame.
And our state government, but especially the city.
You know, we met one of your neighbors whose house survived.
He said he has an insurance policy where the insurance company has their own private fire trucks that come because I guess the insurance company does not rely on, they obviously don't think they can rely on the city fire trucks.
So there were instances of private companies putting out fires when the city firefighters couldn't.
That's such an unusual but also such a telling story, isn't it?
When you drive around Pacific Palisades, there are neighborhoods that were protected by private firefighters and private security companies with water tanks, even if they weren't professional firefighters.
Generally speaking, although some of the damage is random, sometimes you'll find two homes that survived and in between them there's a home that didn't.
Generally speaking, if you had access to firefighters and water, you survived the fire, generally.
And you'll see more of that if you go to the village and see Rick Caruso's Mall, Palisades Village Mall, which survived because he had private firefighters and private water tankers.
But yes, some of the insurance companies do offer private firefighting services, especially when you have wealthy properties that would cause massive losses if they burned down.
The private firefighters are made available by the insurance companies.
They just don't want to risk relying on the city.
Private Firefighting Solutions00:12:48
I mean, it's crazy the water reservoir was empty.
The mayor, I mean, even before the fires hit, she had decided she was going to go on a sort of a junket to Ghana, a country in Africa.
Even when it was clear to everyone that the fires were coming, she wouldn't call off that trip.
I know she was scrummed in a jetway on an airport.
Here's a quick look at that.
Just painful.
She wouldn't say a word.
Take a look.
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?
I don't want to make this too partisan, but how can you not say there were decision makers who either didn't make a decision at all or made terrible decisions?
I'm not very happy with her performance.
Mostly I think people just weren't very well prepared for the fire, even though it was anticipated that there would be problems.
There's those that will be held accountable for whatever's happening.
Again, there's perhaps some controversy as far as how it was started.
It's a natural disaster.
I think that she did everything that she could.
I think that the public services have been tremendous.
Karen Baird shouldn't have been out of town.
They had a lot of warning.
They haven't filled up the reservoir.
The city gave him over $17 million to help the fire department.
They used it for something else.
Not a bad person.
But her response sucked.
She was out of town.
When this was going on, I don't think it was great.
The public officials were more concerned with DEI and getting people and equity in place in the higher branches, but they didn't know how to conduct sweating the city.
Their priorities were in the wrong place.
There's thousands of people who work for LA Water and Power.
There was no water.
There was no power.
How much of the devastation here could have been stopped with better decision making by city and county and state leaders?
Some amount.
We don't know what amount exactly.
Certainly, at the origin of the fire on the mountain, it is possible that they could have stopped the blaze if they had firefighters pre-deployed.
They were not pre-deployed because the city did not want to pay overtime.
They cut the budget to the fire department.
The mayor proposed even deeper budget cuts.
They didn't want to pay overtime.
So for the lack of a million dollars for overtime, we have $300 billion of damage.
They could have put the fire out fairly quickly.
Once it got going, it was very difficult.
As one firefighter told me, you don't fight that kind of fire from the ground.
You fight it from the air.
We couldn't get the assets in the air.
We have these wonderful Canadian super scoopers.
We couldn't put those up because the wind was just too strong.
But there's no excuse for running out of water before the fire.
And you were saying it got to a point where firemen stopped coming because there was just no water in the hydrants.
So what was the point?
Well, they would come and they would do what they could.
Once an attic, for example, would catch a light, they would just leave that property and try to establish another perimeter and another perimeter.
They did manage to save some property, but with no water, it's pretty tough.
Very, very hard without water.
You were scooping it out of the gutters with a bucket and a vase.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
We had to become our own volunteer fire department.
Maybe you're not paying enough taxes here.
Oh, boy.
You know, now I saw a clip the other day.
It was very interesting because Donald Trump is a man of action.
He's a man of words, but he's also a doer.
He's a builder.
He gets his hands dirty.
It was a very interesting panel.
They were sitting around the panel, and the mayor was being asked by citizens, when can we get back on the property?
And she was humming and hawing.
Trump said immediately, how about tonight?
Here's a quick look at that clip.
But we are going to move as fast as we can, but we want you to be safe.
And we want you to be back in your homes immediately.
But the people are willing to clean out their own debris.
It doesn't process.
And they can.
You should let them do it because by the time you hire contractors, it's going to be two years.
If a family...
People are willing to get a dumpster and do it themselves and clean it out.
And they can.
There's not that much left.
It's all incinerated.
That's right.
And, you know, it's just going to take a long time.
You can do some of it, but a lot of these people, I know that guy right there that's talking.
I know my people.
You'll be in that thing tonight, throwing the stuff away and your site will be, it'll look perfect within 24 hours, and that's what he wants to do.
So on the one hand, you've got the mayor who didn't give a damn about the fire, who is fine with, I think they were talking about 18 months to have the government remove debris.
And then you've got Donald Trump who's demanding it to happen.
I think he was saying tonight.
Trump has made a bit of an impact, but each community is doing the best that they can.
I think he probably pushed them to act faster than they otherwise would have acted.
Eventually, they would have let people back on, but the city just moves very slowly unless somebody's lighting a fire under them.
No pun intended.
I think that had absolutely nothing to do with it.
I think that the EPA and all the public safety departments are doing what they need to do to keep people safe.
It's a disaster and it's going to take a long time to clean it up.
I think he's a jerk.
I think he made the situation much worse.
Those places are contaminated.
There are a lot of toxins in these places.
Yeah, I think he kind of made embarrass him a little bit when they're saying it'll take another week.
And he's saying, well, why does it need to take another week?
Why can't you let people go back tomorrow?
So they started letting people go back the next day and it, you know, it worked out okay, I think.
I think he makes an impact.
Yeah, I think that helped to do it.
Who's going to be the boss of this?
Is it going to be the mayor, the president, or someone else?
Because I can't think of two more different people than the DEI woke mayor of LA and the get-er-done president, Donald Trump.
Well, I think it's going to have to be Trump because we can't rebuild L.A. without federal funding.
So the federal government holds the purse strings.
And what I suggested at that meeting, I proposed that Trump name a special master as they had after the September 11th terror attack to handle the victims' compensation fund.
I would like to ask you to follow the 9-11 Commission precedent and appoint a special master to watch the money, to make sure that every federal dollar that gets spent here is spent on fire relief and rebuilding and not on everything else.
Good idea.
That individual in that case was a guy named Kenneth Feinberg, and he made sure the money went to the people who needed it, who were supposed to get it.
We here in California have lost confidence in our local government and our state government.
We do not trust Gavin Newsom, our governor, or Karen Bass, our mayor, to spend the money appropriately.
If you have to put your trust in somebody, you have to pick either or Trump or Mayor Bass, who would you pick to handle the situation better and why?
Well, I think that I would choose the mayor.
I mean, I see that there's been some bad publicity.
Mayor Bass.
Trump is a completely incompetent and everything that comes out of his mouth is nonsense.
I don't think Trump would be particularly good at handling it at the detail level, but I think Caruso would be very good at handling it at the detail level.
He just gets things done.
He may be outspoken and he may not speak kindly of people sometimes, but you know what?
That's his personality.
But when it comes to getting things done, he knows how to get it done.
Oh my God, Bass, a thousand times.
To handle the situation.
Oh, God, yes.
Yeah, he doesn't care what happens to people.
She does.
She doesn't do it very well, but she cares.
If I had to pick one of them, it'd be Mayor Bass because she's here.
She's local.
This is her job.
He's stronger.
It seems like in that town hall meeting in the Palisades, Karen Bass was just very quiet and almost afraid of Trump.
If you give $300 billion to California, they will spend it on homeless shelters, they will spend...
Drug injection sites.
Yes, they'll spend it on transgender surgeries, whatever.
But they're not going to spend it on rebuilding the Pacific Palisades.
So we want a special master to control every dollar that comes from the federal taxpayer to California because as you implied, we pay high taxes in California and get very poor services.
The federal taxpayer is not going to stand for that treatment.
We are stuck with it.
It's the government we elected, for better or worse, in California.
But federal taxpayers are not going to want to play that game.
And so they are going to want to know that the money they're spending is being spent responsibly.
Voters are fed up here with Karen Bass.
Maybe Gavin Newsom is still getting away with it, but this neighborhood did not vote for her, and now they're getting the results of her poor governance.
And I do think this neighborhood is going to fight to be rebuilt.
And there's even talk among some people of moving out of LA and incorporating as their own city.
I think that's complicated, probably unlikely, but people are talking about it.
This neighborhood wants to make sure that we rebuild as soon as possible.
And what was interesting to my neighbors, I think most of whom didn't vote for Trump, was to see that Trump was on their side.
And I don't know if it's going to be...
feel that like do they do they overcome that trump derangement syndrome and say absolutely absolutely You can talk to people here who say, I never voted for him, but he's the reason I'm here today.
No one else is willing to cut through the BS.
Right.
And he's also a builder who understands real estate.
So he understands intimately the problems that my neighbors are going through.
You will be able to go back soon.
Mr. President.
We think within a week.
That's a long time a week.
I'll be honest.
To me, everyone's standing in front of their house.
They want to go to work and they're not allowed to do it.
And the most important people to be safe.
They're safe.
They're safe.
You know what?
They're not safe.
They're not safe now.
And they want to go in.
The people are all over the place.
They're standing and they say, why aren't you going in?
We're trying to get a permit.
And the permit's going to take them.
Everybody said 18 months.
You said 18 months.
You said 18 months.
That was last night.
And that was last night.
So he understands as a real estate guy.
And I think people in this neighborhood may still have their doubts about Donald Trump, but they understand that he's on the side of rebuilding.
I really appreciate my congressman advocating for money.
We need the money from the federal government.
But I also understand Americans who are tired of spending money on California and disasters happen.
And the California government passes $50 million to oppose your policy.
So they have $50 million for that, but not for moving people into rental homes or helping people relocate or rebuild.
But before he gives that federal money you're talking about, I think he's going to make some demands in return.
Has he made demands?
And is the city or the state willing to do it?
Or are they going to say, are they going to be purists and say, we will not accept Trump's money because it comes with strings attached?
He didn't make demands here when he was here, but he did make demands when he was in other parts of California when he landed.
He said that he wants California to get rid of their current voting system and install voter identification systems to verify the votes.
And Trump has said, as a condition of receiving federal money, you're going to upgrade your voting system.
What I would also demand is that we change our water policies, our forestry policies, our emergency management services.
And Trump was talking about this before, and they all mocked him.
He talked about raking the forests.
Remember that?
It was with the president of Finland and he said, we have much different.
We're a forest nation.
He called it a forest nation.
And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don't have any problem.
And when it is, it's a very small problem.
I mean, raking the forest sounds goofy.
Ha ha, that stupid Trump.
Yeah, he knew a little bit of something.
When you're dealing with areas near where human beings live, you have to do what the Native Americans actually did, which is to have controlled burns and brush removal so that you can live in harmony with nature.
You can't just let it be because there will be extra fuel.
There will be parasites like bark beetles that kill trees and so forth.
And you've got to maintain it.
This idea of a pristine environment is nice to have, and we have national parks for that reason.
But we also have national forests, and those used to be open to forestry, to logging companies, and they would cut natural fire breaks on logging roads, and they would remove the brush.
And California and the West Coast in general has abandoned that.
And they've also started to destroy dams.
Walking in an Oven00:03:10
Right.
Or to undo dams.
Undoing dams because of Indigenous rights and because of the salmon runs that used to run on these wild rivers.
There are workarounds for all these things, but they've decided to destroy the dams, the hydroelectric capacity destroyed, the water reservoirs destroyed.
Now, they started in the Klamath Basin, which is in Northern California.
They have plenty of rain, not a problem for them.
If we tried to do that here, we would all just die of thirst.
So it's not really feasible.
California needs to get serious about water policy.
Let's go see Rick Caruso's mall that survived because he was thinking like a Republican, not a Democrat.
Let's go take a look.
Joel, we're about five minutes drive away from your house, Sunset Boulevard, very famous street.
And back there, it doesn't look like anything's been touched by flame, whereas behind us, absolutely scorched, nothing standing but the concrete and brick.
You say that this is the great divide.
Tell us about where we're standing.
So this is the heart of the commercial district of Pacific Palisades.
We call it the village.
And almost every commercial structure here burnt down.
The building that you were pointing to earlier is the business block.
It's the oldest building in town, built in 1924.
It's now a ruin.
Behind it, there are other streets that have little mom-and-pop shops, popular restaurants, all completely destroyed.
And yet, across Sunset Boulevard, there is this mall called the Palisades Village Mall, and it is almost entirely intact.
In fact, if you walk through that mall, they've now put security booms in front of it to discourage potential looters.
But if you walk through that mall, you would find it absolutely pristine.
The shops still full of goods in the windows, ready to open for business.
I can see there's a Lululemon, there's St. Laurent, there's restaurants.
You wouldn't know there was a wildfire.
The owner of the mall is billionaire property developer Rick Caruso, and we were talking about him earlier.
He ran for mayor in 2022 and he lost to incumbent, now incumbent, Democrat Karen Bass.
She was a member of Congress before she ran for mayor.
He lost to Karen Bass, but what Karen Bass was supposed to protect burnt down, and what Rick Caruso protected is still there.
And he protected it using private firefighters, including several large mobile tankers with water in them.
Those tankers were here for days afterwards.
There were dozens of them.
You've seen tanker trucks on the highway, usually filled with gasoline.
These were filled with water.
And they had professional firefighting crews who were working all night on Tuesday, January 7th into Wednesday, January 8th, to make sure that nothing burned at the mall.
So that was when things were in the very early stage, if I understand the dates right.
At the height of the blaze, I spoke to people in this neighborhood.
Private Firefighters Save the Day00:06:11
There are some residential homes here.
I spoke to people who evacuated late.
They tried to save their homes.
They decided they couldn't.
They left right before midnight.
They said, where you and I are standing right now felt like an oven.
It was too hot to stand.
The moment they got out of their cars, they got right back in the cars.
It was like walking in an oven.
And yet, Rick Caruso had private firefighters who were willing to endure those conditions with their equipment and so forth to keep the blaze away from his mall.
He also built it with newer fire-resistant materials.
That's part of the story as well.
But essentially, Rick Caruso protected what he had because he had enough manpower and enough water.
And both of those things are because he had enough foresight and a sense of responsibility.
Yes, and money.
So there's the argument that it's not fair.
The rich guy got to protect his property because he had more money and he could hire more firefighters.
Well, nothing's richer than the state of California.
Exactly.
And the other side of the argument is if he had the ability to protect his property with enough water and enough firefighters, then the rest of LA could have done the same.
We could have saved all of this.
People who say it's just too big a natural disaster, the wind was too strong, the fire was too intense, it didn't stop them from saving the village mall.
So the answer really is that the public services failed and the leadership failed.
We see here the stark difference between private services and public services.
Now, there's no excuse for public services to be this bad.
They don't have to be this bad, but they're bad with poor leadership that prioritizes the wrong things and spends money where it shouldn't.
You know, I'm an outsider.
I love California.
I think the whole world loves California, or at least the idea of California.
But when it comes to crime, California is out of control, but the wealthy have private security.
When it comes to education, California is out of control, but the wealthy have private schools.
In so many ways, California is a failed state where ordinary people live.
I mean, I'm not going to compare it to a third world country, but it's a disaster.
And there are pockets of wealthy people who can survive despite the government, not thanks to it.
Governor, I live here, Governor!
That was my daughter's school, Governor.
Please tell me what you're going to do.
I'm not going to hurt on my promise.
I'm literally talking to the president right now to specifically answer the question of what we can do for you and your daughter.
Can I hear it?
Can I hear your call?
Because I don't believe it.
I travel a lot and I've spent a lot of time in South Africa.
And I have friends who are content to live in South Africa despite the collapse of public services, the lack of electricity, and so forth, because they have their own services, their own security, their own boreholes, their own generators.
That is what life in California is becoming, that the wealthy who still pay taxes and have money left over can create their own private services.
It shouldn't be that way.
Do you think this is a wake-up call for LA or will they keep voting for Mayor Bass?
It's definitely a wake-up call.
Mayor Bass, I think, will be voted out if she doesn't resign.
I don't know statewide if we're going to see that effect.
What I do think Californians are going to try to generate, if they had the ability to invent a political candidate, it would be a Democrat who agrees with them on social issues, but who knows how to run things.
Rick Caruso used to be a Republican, he switched to Democrat.
We recently elected a new district attorney, public prosecutor, to replace the old George Soros-specked DA who let the criminals run free.
That gentleman, Nathan Hawkman, is doing a very good job arresting and prosecuting looters.
He also used to be a Republican, switched to Democrat.
So what's going to happen is Californians are going to try to work this out within the Democratic Party, but they're going to reject the woke Democrats like Karen Bass, who are in Ghana instead of Los Angeles when a disaster happens.
So I do think there's hope, and this area in particular did not vote for Karen Bass.
It voted for Rick Caruso.
Also, I don't think anybody voted for this.
I think if people understood the full potential, but I did actually.
I mean, there are people who understand fire safety.
I have stopped kids on the hiking trails from smoking pot on the trail, and I've literally said to kids, if you smoke that at home, I don't have a problem with it.
If you smoke it here, this whole town is going to go up.
I have literally said that to people well before the fire.
So they need to start listening to people who understand how to run things and what the risks are.
And final point on this.
In California, we like to dream.
We plan for utopia.
We plan for things to go well.
But that's not the task of government.
Government is there for you when everything's going wrong.
Government's there to protect you.
We have to start thinking about worst-case scenarios and plan for those.
Instead of raising all this money to pay for health care for everyone and fixing the entire world's climate by cap and trade systems and making gas cars obsolete, all of that utopian stuff doesn't work.
And the irony is they're all forcing us to make purchases of electric vehicles now.
You know, the gas-powered cars are going to be unlawful after 2035.
What's the biggest source of hazardous waste in this fire?
It's electric vehicles, because when the batteries burn, they create all kinds of hazardous gases and other things.
So we have to stop living for utopia and start living for people.
Joel, great to see you.
And I'm glad your house was spared, although there was some fire damage.
Thank goodness that you were there with the bucket and the vase putting it out.
And I hope this part of the world returns to prosperity and safety soon.
And I think politics is a big part of it.
Keep up the fight.
Thanks, Ezra.
Thanks for being here.
There you have it.
Joel Pollock, Senior Editor-at-Large of Breitbart.com, who lived in the heart of the fire.
Well, that's our show recorded on the weekend in LA with our friend Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com.
I'm very glad his house was spared.
It's heartbreaking that so many others were not.
By the way, he can't live there because the water is not potable.
There's a lot of obvious problems there.
And that's one of the political questions is how fast will they be able to rebuild and get back to life?
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters in Canada, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
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