Piers Morgan Uncensored - LA Wildfires Unpacked With Amala Ekpunobi, Jillian Michaels, Adam Carolla & More

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

At the time of this video’s posting, one of the worst natural disasters in American history, the Los Angeles wildfires, is unfolding in California. Thousands of people have lost everything they hold dear, and now, their collective gaze is turning to the authorities responsible for the city’s management; namely Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. Could this horrific event have been avoided? Or at the very least, mitigated with better preparation? Is the Democrat obsession with DEI a contributing factor? On tonight’s Uncensored panel, Piers Morgan is joined by host of the 'Keeping It Real' podcast Jillian Michaels, host of 'The Amala Show' Amala Ekpunobi, host of 'Night School' Marc Lamont-Hill and activist and influencer Michael Mezz. Afterwards, Piers turns to radio host and comedian Adam Corolla and actor Dean Cain for their takes on a tragedy that affects them both personally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leadership in California is absolutely accountable for this. They are the ones who are in charge of mitigating these kinds of disasters. She was rolled out as a woman who's lesbian. The very same for the assistant fire chief who says she won't pull a man out of a fire. We don't have to call them diversity equity inclusion hires. They will do that themselves. I think a lot of people voted for her because she was a black woman, not because she's any good at her job.

You're calling someone who is democratically elected a DEI hype. Let me finish. Newsom's incompetent and that he doesn't really care about the sort of boring part of politics. He's a liar and he's sociopathic. You know, I'll say it, Pierce, make California great again. And it ain't going to be Gavin Newsom. But a politician scolds an opponent for playing politics. It's normally because they don't like where the politics is going for them.

Of course, California Governor Gavin Newsom didn't start the wildfires of devastating Los Angeles. neither did the small army of local officials and fire chiefs whose records and prior statements are now under the microscope. But they stand plausibly accused of chronic collective mismanagement with appalling and deadly consequences. I want to know 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 on my own team saying, what happened? And I want to get the answers. Mr. Newsom, you are the governor of California.

It's the people who want to be. answers from you. And I'm not sure why they should have to get them from a smirking appearance on a what looked like a very calm, unhurried podcast recorded while the biggest city in the state is literally burning to the ground. Newson was scolded President of President of Trump for spreading misinformation during this crisis, but doesn't even seem clear about what that information is. The reservoirs are completely full of the state reservoirs here in Southern California, that mis and disinformation, I don't think advantages or aids any of us. Responding to Donald Trump's insults, we would spend another month.

I'm very familiar with them. Every elected official that he disagrees with, very familiar with them. We do know, though, from reporting here locally that that one reservoir that serves the palisades was not full. And that's exactly what triggered my desire to get the investigation. Sorry? You understand what you just said? Now, L.A.'s mayor, Karen Bass, who was 8,000 miles away in Ghana, for some inexplicable reason, when this inferno took hold, has denied the funding cuts to the fire department have had any impact on its abilities to fight fires. The city's fire chief, these people are risking their own lives to save others, doesn't agree. Let me be clear. The $17 million budget cut and elimination of our civilian positions like our mechanics did and has and will continue. to severely impact our ability to repair our apparatus.

So with that, we have over 100 fire apparatus out of service. And having these apparatus in the proper amount of mechanics would have helped. And so it did absolutely negatively impact. Well, someone is lying, and my money is on the politicians. After all, if that fire chief was lying, she'd now be an ex-fire chief. The fire service itself is now facing difficult questions over an apparent obsession with diversity. This clip of an assistant fire chief released as a promo

or as DIEP policies as age like sour milk. You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better. Is she strong enough to do this? Or you couldn't carry my husband out of a fire,

which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire. hundreds of thousands of people are in the wrong place and they couldn't give a damn whether the fire thought is a black, white or bright green, let alone their sexuality or anything else. They just want to save their lives and their homes. The comedian and radio presenter Adam Carolla, who I'll interview later from the show, gave this testimony before Congress in 2017. 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. food stamps and I said, can't I get a job as a fireman? And they said, no, because you're not

Black, Hispanic or a woman. We'll see in about seven years. Well, the point about DEI is not that gay, black or female people are unfit to be firefighters. It's about a systemic misjudgment of priorities. It's about a state that spent 24 billion to end homelessness, ended up with more people living on the streets. It's about a state that suffers dozens of massive fires every single year, but leaves its biggest city with empty hydrants in the middle of the worst fire in its history. I'm stuck in the middle of all this are the people whose lives are being turned upside down

including many of my friends and neighbours. I have a home in Beverly Hills. This crisis is nowhere near over and when it is, they will expect answers and change. Way to debate, I'm joined by the host of Keeping It Real podcast, Gilliam Michaels, by Amala Ekpinobe, who's the host of the Amala show, by the night school host, Mark Lamont Hill,

and the activist influencer, Michael. Well, welcome to all of you. Let me start with you, if I may, Mark Lamont Hill, because you've been getting into it with lots of people about the whole issue of DEI and whether that's had any involvement here or whatever. What's your overview here? Do you think it's played any part?

Are you uncomfortable about the advert I just showed with people who looks like to me that they're playing the DEI card to justify their position? Those are two different questions. I answer them both, though. So the first thing is, do I love the commercial? No, I think the commercial misses the mark for several reasons.

And it doesn't get to the heart of why you would want a DEI effort at the fire department. At the end of the day, the most important thing, as is the case whenever you have any kind of intervention like this, is that qualified people are there and that everyone has a fair shake at a high-quality job, that no one is underqualified or unqualified for the job. in terms of the fire, which is your first question, I don't think that DEI has anything to do with these fires. I think there's plenty of blame to go around, and a lot of it has to do with Democrats,

Democratic mayor, Democratic governor, Democratic councils. I mean, there's a lot of criticism to go around. There's a lot of targets here, but DEI, to me, isn't the issue here. I'm more concerned with how the police were overfunded and fire departments were underfunded. I'm interested in climate change and having that conversation. We have to have a conversation about the kind of homes we have

and the kind of homes we build these days. There are lots of things to talk about, but I don't think DEI is the blame here. Okay, Gillian, you lost a home in a previous fire in L.A. in 2018. You've had to evacuate your own mother in these fires. I've got to say, you know, my place is in Beverly Hills, which thankfully has not been hit yet, although the next 48 hours will be pretty crucial, I think, as to what happens, because the Santa Ana winds are going to come back with a vengeance, we're told. And if they head northeast, as they did a couple of days ago,

They jump the 405 freeway, and everyone in Los Angeles knows what that means for Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and potentially everywhere else in the city. So these are pretty scary times for everyone who has a property there. What do you feel? I mean, as someone who's watched this play out before and suffered a horrible loss yourself, what do you feel about the blame game, the accountability part? Well, I think that leadership in California is absolutely accountable for this. They are the ones who are in charge of mitigating these kinds of disasters. And I want to play complete devil's advocate here. Let's go with, we do know that California is prone to wildfires.

Santa Ana wins. We all know this. And if we, I'm not a climate change and expert here, but if we play that card and I'm more than happy to do it, you should have been that much more prepared. And we know for a fact that if we were doing prescript. prescribed control burns, forestry cleanup, creating fire breaks. If we had the reservoir filled that was uphill from the Palisades, the one closest to the Palisades, we probably could have put that fire out more effectively

by getting it done sooner rather than days later. If you manage the states water more efficiently, and there are so many issues with that, considering how many billions of gallons go to growing shelled nuts, it's like 80% of the state's water, which is 2% of the state's GDP. If you reprioritized where you're putting the state's budget instead of giving homeless people drug kits and maybe invested in desalination plants, I mean, there are so many things that we can talk about

in this episode that are grossly negligent and would have had a massive impact on saving lives and saving people's homes. Yeah, I mean, my feeling, Michael, I'll bring you in here, is having had a home in L.A. for three, 15 years and lived and worked there for 20 years. This issue of the fires has been ever present. I mean, the big fear has always been another big earthquake.

But everyone's been very aware that there's been a lot of fires, and they seem to have been getting more prevalent, not less prevalent. And everyone's been like, well, what's being done to protect everybody? And there was perhaps a false complacency that stuff was being done that meant this stuff we're seeing now couldn't have happened.

But it has. And yet, as I say that, I'm mindful of a clip of Joe Rogan that's doing the rounds on social media, which is from last summer in which he talks about a previous conversation he had with a firefighter. Let's take a listen. I talked to a fireman once. This is one of the reasons that freaked me out. And he was telling me, he goes, dude, one day, he goes, it's just going to be the right wind. And fire is going to start in the right place.

And it's going to burn through L.A. all the way to the ocean. And there's not a fucking thing we can do about it. I go, really? He goes, yeah, we're just, we just get lucky. He goes, we get lucky with the wind. She goes, but if the wind hits the wrong way, it's just going to burn straight through L.A., and there's not going to be a thing we could do about it. Because these fires are so big, dude.

They're talking about, like, thousands of acres that are burning simultaneously with, like, 40-mile-an-hour winds. And the wind's just blowing embers through the air, and those embers are landing on roofs, and those houses are going up, and they're landing on bushes, and those bushes are going up, and everything's dry. and once it happens, it happens in a way where it's so spread out that there's nothing that can do. Now, I mean, Michael, very prescient there. So people can't claim they didn't think this might happen.

Literally, Joe Rogan, the biggest podcast of the world, is openly telling everybody what a firefighter told him was likely to happen. And that was a few months ago. What is your take on what you think has really been behind all this? Well, I think that in terms of what actually caused this fire, we're still, We're still trying to figure that out, but it's clear that L.A. is a city that's built in a fire zone. Wildfires are endemic to the land. And we need to take that into account with the way that we govern this city and the way that we budget for emergency services and fire prevention. And I think that the city leaders do need to be held accountable for managing and preventing fires in a realistic way.

We only spent $42 million per year on fire prevention. And I think we need to talk about how that budget is being allocated compared to other spending, like billions of dollars going to policing and, you know, the repairs on a reservoir that should have taken a week have taken more than a year. I think that those types of things absolutely should be coming under the magnifying glass. But I think that the point that Joe Rogan made in that in that clip is right, that this type of thing is going to happen. it's impossible to prevent fire devastation in the city of LA, but we can definitely mitigate it, and we need to be doing a really good job at mitigating it. And I think that this fire is showing that there are some gaps in our plan.

It's really tragic. Yeah, I mean, it is an absolute tragedy. And there is an argument, Amara, that no one could have done anything to stop something quite like this because it's been a freakish set of circumstances of a Santa Ana wind, which anyone, as I say, if you live in L.A. long enough, you know all about the Santa They come like the mistrials in France.

And when they come, you wake up and you're a lot of howling wind and your winds, your gardens covered in crap, and we're all used to it. What's different here is the winds were at 100 miles an hour. It's hurricane force winds. And it coupled with a fire. And when you have 100 mile an hour winds blowing across a city with a fire, it's a perfect hellish storm.

So let me preface this by saying, you know, it may be nothing could have stopped, this from doing what it did. However, I think you have a view, contrary to what Mark said, that DEI and wokeness have played a part in the failures here. What do you say about that? Yeah, I think there's a lot that we're going to learn in the days to come about these fires. As Gillian and I believe Mark mentioned, we're still waiting to see the cause of a lot of these fires. It's totally understandable to me that this is what happens in LA, that we can pretty much imagine that this is going to occur to some extent. But we can also see a

that has, in my opinion, wasted time and resources on these woke agenda pieces like diversity, equity, and inclusion, where could that time and where could those resources have gone? What could they have been allocated to when it comes to response to these fires? Not only that, I'm seeing reports on social media. I don't know about anybody else. Of arsonists, looters, and this is sort of a culture that we've created here in Los Angeles, here in California, with the way that we've been soft on crime, with the different policies that we've pushed forward. So honestly, I think we're at this moment of just waiting for information. But as Gillian said, you can also see that reservoir that held what should have been

117 million gallons of water was not working. The brush cleanup that should have been happening for decades was not happening. You have Rick Caruso here in Los Angeles, who was running for leadership. He managed to save his land, his properties, and he did so through proper planning and being proactive. So what could we have done in this city probably a lot? Yeah. I mean, Mark Lamont Hill, you know, I saw you're shaking your head there, but I'm not quite sure what you're shaking your head about it.

Because anyone who lives in LA, like I said, it's been clear. Two things have been clear. Newsomers had a lot of rhetoric about being tough on crime and sorting out the homeless problem and so on. And the complete reverse has happened. Even in Beverly Hills where I live, and I go to lots of other parts of a city when I'm in L.A., but even in Beverly Hills, the degree of homelessness,

the degree of crime, violent crime involving guns, right in the middle of Beverly Hills at lunchtime, shootouts, in restaurants and things. That never used to happen. I can tell you, it was never like it is now. So there's no doubt, to my mind, that when Amala says what she said there about issues like the crime increasing and so on,

it's indisputable. If you live there, you know it. Right. I mean, if one were not watching this video and only hearing it, they would think that I shook my head when we were talking about crime and homelessness. I did. Well, you seem to.

What I shook my head. I'm sorry. What I shook my head to was the issue around the quote-unquote woke policies and DEI policies. That specific is what I'm a judge. So we don't have to guess. I'm telling you what it was. The idea that there's some relationship between the fires and the department's investment in DEI policies, even Amala herself has said, you know, we're going to find out if that's the case.

But why are we beginning from a premise that that is the case? Is anything possible? Sure. But there's no evidence of it. Also, the idea of calling it a wasted effort to me is a bit bizarre. As I'm sure you know it, or maybe you don't, I'm talking to the audience, not you two in particular, the department had a significant problem with sexual harassment. The department had a significant problem with racial discrimination.

It's acknowledged that. The department had multiple firefighters sued. The department acknowledged that they were overrepresented by white men and underrepresented by other groups. And to be clear, that's a statistical analysis. That's not a subjective assessment. It's not a moral judgment. I'm saying you're overrepresented demographically. So in light of that, my question would be,

if you don't think they needed an inclusion or equity initiative, how should they have responded? This is to Amala, how should they have responded to the proven cases of discrimination, sexism, and harassment that were happening in the department? What should they have done instead of having an initiative? Okay, fair enough. Amala? Yeah, sure. I can answer that.

Yeah, when we're looking at those cases that you've, that you've just spoken about, sure, we should hear out every single case of sexual harassment and discrimination, especially if we can prove that it's on the basis of race, or we can prove that there is ill intent within a department. Now, that's not what's being articulated by the LAFD. They are saying that they are looking specifically for people of certain races, of particular gender backgrounds, and we should be moving towards a race-neutral future. If you want people to be judged on the content of their character, of their abilities, their intelligence, their strength, which is very important when it comes to the fire department.

You should do exactly that. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're a woman. It has nothing to do with your race. And as we saw that assistant fire chief state, she's speaking about diversity, equity, inclusion, through a lens of wanting people who look like her to be in the department, wanting to be able to show up to houses of California residents that apparently look like her so she can serve them better.

And she's not really speaking to her capabilities. As she even stated in her own video, she'd be incapable of carrying a man out of a fire. So your articulation of diversity, equity, inclusion is very different from what we're getting. And let's not forget that diversity, equity, and inclusion is based out of critical race theory, which is fundamentally flawed. If we truly want race neutrality and people to be judged based off of their abilities, we should do exactly that.

Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, Mark, I'll come back to you quick. Well, hang on, Mark, I'll come back to you for a quick response, and I go to Gillian. But Mark, you know, it's come at the same week that we saw Mark Zuckerberg basically ending all of matters DEI programs, along with a complete reversal of everything else you could call woke policy. I mean, it seems to me that the wind is blowing, football won't use that phrase, because there's obviously a much bigger, more problematic wind blowing, but there is a change in direction from companies that you would say were very liberal skewed, like META and others, to just

get rid of all DEI programs, because they've concluded, and you may have a view about this, that they actually, they are wrong. They promote mediocrity. They're not meritocratic in the way that companies should be, in my view. And it's happening quite fast now, since the big Trump win over Kamala Harris, who represented all this woke stuff to her bootstraps. What's your response to that?

Well, I think you're right to say that corporate investment in DEI was always cynical. They never cared about diversity, equity, or inclusion. They did it because it was popular. After the uprisings and following the murder of the, George Floyd, it was popular to say you were down with DEI, so they did it. And a lot of those companies never actually even turned in the money. They never actually followed up on the promises that they made. And now that it's no longer popular, they're pulling back. Corporate America does what's good for business, not what's good for people. But I reject your claim that

DEI is not meritocratic or undermines meritocracy. The data contradicts that. The decades of studies contradict that. I also reject Amala's claim that the fire department was doing something systemic in response to something that was individual. You know, she said they should have adjudicated those cases, but not going on this big initiative to have different hiring practices. I think maybe what you missed was the complaints themselves were about a systemic failure to hire qualified black people, to hire qualified women. So again, when you talk about DEI, it's not about getting unqualified black and brown

and women in a room of qualified white men. It's about saying there's 10 qualified people in this room. The first six we've hired have been white men. maybe the next four shouldn't be when demographically there's enough black people here or enough women or whomever to fit the whole as well. But that's exactly the point, which is when it comes

to firefighting, actually no. Sorry, I just want the best people for the job. Sorry, I do. If I'm a homeowner in L.A., I don't care what color they are, what sexuality they are, what gender they are. Man, hang on, hang on, ma'

I don't care about any of it. I just care. Are they the best of available people to save me from a fire. End. You're misrepresenting the issue, though. No one is saying that the best qualified people shouldn't be hired. The issue is, again, there are 10 people in a room. They're going to hire eight of them.

The first six they've hired have been white men. Yeah. Of the remaining people, there are qualified white men and qualified black men and qualified black women. The issue historically in that department has been, even when the women have been qualified, even when the black men have been qualified, they still have not gotten hired. It's not that black people have gotten not hired and they're unqualified,

it's they've been qualified and not hired. And so they're trying to respond to that by being intentional about saying, hey, let's bring in some qualified black people to augment the qualified white men as well. So no one wants an unqualified firefighter. You know what I mean? No one wants an unqualified surgeon. But if you keep not hiring qualified black people,

we've got to do something about it. Okay, let me bring Gillian in because obviously the L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is a black woman. I've got to say of all the people in officialdom that I've seen since this disaster started, she seems to me to be the most woefully incompetent. One, when it started, there had already been warnings

that there may be a big fire issue coming, and she gets on a plane, and she goes all the way to Africa to the inauguration of the new president of Ghana. Now, this is someone who the New York Times has established two years ago, actually said on the record, while campaigning to be mayor,

not only would I, of course, live here, but I wouldn't travel internationally. The only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York in relation to Los Angeles. And yet there she is at the inauguration of an African president while her city's burning.

And when she came back, she was jumped by a very good journalist from Sky News here in the UK, David Blevins. and the response was pathetic. Let's take a look. Madam Mayor, David Blevins from Sky News in the UK. Fire chiefs say that they're really stretched to the limit and running out of water.

What have you got to say to that? Have you no response to that? 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? I mean, I'm sorry, Gillian, that was just so pathetic, wasn't it?

I mean, she's the mayor of Los Angeles. Say something. It's absolutely outrageous. And, again, I can't speak to the DEI component because I don't really know the history of who they did or didn't hire. I'm currently under the impression that the fire chief wanted more bodies, no matter what color, what generally. or what sexual orientation, and if I'm wrong about that, please educate me. With that said,

Karen Bass is incompetent. I don't care if it's because she's a woman of color. She's just flat out incompetent. When your fire chief writes you a letter in December of 2024 after all of Northern Malibu has just burned down again and says, do not cut my budget, it will be a catastrophe. You don't cut the budget. I just I'm absolutely outraged and disgusted. It is gross negligence, period. And then you have nothing

to say when you're questioned about it. What are you doing in Ghana? You are a local, you're a mayor. You're not an ambassador. You don't work for the federal government. What is going on? We could point to so many of these things. It's just

outrageous. Yeah, I completely agree. I think she's been completely incompetent. and exposed as incompetent. In fact, all her public utterances make me cringe. Let me bring Michael back in here. I mean, I want to play a clip, Michael. This is from the fire department chief, Christine Crowley, who, as things stand, to me,

sounds the most credible of all of them when she speaks. Let's take a listen. Do the city of Los Angeles fail you in your department and our city? It's my job to stand up as a chief and exactly say, justifiably what the fire department needs to operate to meet the demands of the community. Did they fail you? That is our job.

And I tell you, that's why I'm here. So let's get us what we need so our firefighters can do their jobs. Did they fail you? Yes. I mean, she couldn't be clearer there, and I believe her. You know, I mean, no one has actually refuted what she said, and she hasn't been fired. So, Michael, I'm doing the mask with my old journalism hat on,

and it's coming up pretty well for, for her and pretty badly for the elected officials. That's absolutely right. I think she's been amazing during this crisis. I think that she's been honest with the residents of LA. I think that we really trust our fire chief here after all of the appearance that she's made. And as it relates to the debate about DEI, I agree with you, peers. I don't care what color she is, what gender she is.

The fact that she's a woman doesn't matter to me. She's doing an incredible job. Right. The fact that she's being called a DEI hire is actually pretty frustrating, and the fact that that's what some people in the media are using to spin it, because she was in the fire department for 22 years. She's incredibly qualified. She's clearly really good at PR, and I think she's really good at her job.

I don't think she's a DEI hire. I've got to say, Karen Bass, though, is a different matter. She smacks to me of a DEI appointment in a sense of how the hell does someone like that? She was democratically elected. Fine. I know. How does a Democratic elected... I know. How was a democratically elected mayor at DEI?

Let me tell you how that happens in Los Angeles. Because until this fire, actually, and this may change everything for the political dynamic of Los Angeles. If you live in L.A., as much as I have for the last 20 years, you are living in Woke Central. You're living in a place where a large number of the electorate literally would vote for people because of their skin color and because of their gender. We've already, just from that thing I read out, established she's an absolute liar when it comes to what she promised in her campaigning and what she then did as mayor

in terms of getting on the first plane that came along to Ghana when she said she wouldn't leave America. So to me, the DEI thing runs endemicly through some of these places. L.A. has become a woke. That's racist. I'm telling you. I'm going to be very clear.

That is absolutely racist. Let me be very clear to you first. What I'm saying is there are large numbers. Calling someone who is democratically elected a DEI hype. Let me finish. No, I'm telling you what I mean by that. She won as a democratically elected person. That is true.

She's the mayor. However, I think a lot of people voted for her because she was a black woman, not because she's any good at her job. That's an L.A. woke problem. Do you have any evidence of that? Yeah. Look how incompetent she is. How many black people have been mayor of L.A.?

You say it's been decades of wokeness and skin color voting? How many black mayors have been? worse and worse and worse in Los Angeles. How many black mayors have they been in the history of LA, peers? I'm telling you, in her case, I believe she is woefully incompetent, should never have got the job, and people voted for her because in their head, all they're getting told all day long, in places of like Los Angeles is D-E-I, D-E-I, D-E-I. What qualification was she, what qualification was she lacking to be mayor?

Have you watched her pronouncements? Have you watched her pronouncements? I've watched her for 12 years in Congress. I've watched her advanced legislation. She's utterly useless. I've watched her have political experience prior to joining the U.S. Congress and being a standing number of Congress. She was qualified.

You may not like. No, I think she's incompetent. It's worse than that. I don't care if I like it or not. Her political credentials are pretty strong. I think that her reaction to this crisis has been really bad, and this is the first time a lot of the world is seeing Karen Bass, unfortunately, and it's not good for her.

I agree. But she was Democratic. But that doesn't make her a DEI hire. No, I'm talking about a culture. What I'm talking about, and Michael, I'll put this to you. It just seems to me, I have noticed in L.A., it's been getting woker and woker and woker and woker, right? Right from the top of the political sphere, right the way down. It's tangible.

You feel it. You have a lot of people there that buy into this woke crab, right? And I just think that it's been insidious to every society where this has happened, anywhere in the world. But L.A. is like the epicenter of this crap. And I think it's come back to haunt them. When it, I'll get to that in a second. When it comes to the election of the mayor, we had a decision between Karen Bass and Rick Caruso,

who's a billionaire real estate developer. I think that the people of L.A. made a decision that they wanted a career politician who, sure, is a black woman, but I don't think that's why she got the votes. I think she got the votes because she seemed like the more qualified, well-credentialed candidate compared to a billionaire who's felt very out of touch

with the typical working class person in Los Angeles. I think that's why Karen Bass won the election. When it comes to the culture of DEI in Los Angeles, you know, I think a lot of people love to paint Los Angeles the way that they see it. They love to paint the culture of California in a certain way. I don't feel like I'm living in a DEI city. It doesn't feel that way. I think that diversity is important to people in Los Angeles.

It's one of the most diversities in the entire world. and we are proud of that. But that doesn't mean that we're... Nothing wrong with being proud of diversity. Listen, I'm as proud of diversity as you are and Mark as everybody else is. Nothing wrong with being proud of diversity. No, I don't think you are. No.

Well, actually, I am. I am. But what I believe in... I disagree. What I believe in in everything is that meritocracy should trump mediocrity and should Trump woke box ticking. That's what I believe. I believe that...

But you're arguing that somehow she wasn't... She didn't have merit. She was more qualified than her opponent. I'm arguing that... A black person can be... A black person can do a bad job and that's fine. Criticize them for doing a bad... Gavin Newsom's doing a bad job.

But no one is... Yeah, he is. He just did a bad job. Karen Bass is doing a bad job, you say. Then criticize her for that. But every time a black person does a bad job, if you call them a DEI hire, that becomes nothing more than a dog whistle

and a racist slur. Yeah, but I'm not talking about... I'm not talking about everybody. She was hired. She was elected because, because she was qualified and because the voters wanted her. But she was a lenient about Martin, you're missing my point. You're missing my point.

I'm not missing your point. I'm disagreeing with your point. That's fine. And you're perfectly entitled to disagree with it. But don't start talking about dog whistles because it's entirely down to her. It's a dog whistle. No, it's entirely down to her incompetence. And I'm telling you, there are lots of people in L.A. When confronted with a billionaire candidate or her, we're going to vote for her

because of the color of her skin or her gender. I'm telling you. That's what L.A. is like. Or because he's billionaire. We don't. Yeah, that's my point. All around the country, people, all around the country, people vote for Donald Trump and other people because they're white men. Identity politics plays across the board.

And you would be the first to say that's wrong. But the point here is not that. You would be the first. You would be the first to say that's wrong. Calling them a DEI hire is questioning their competence, not their performance, but their fundamental qualification for the job. She was qualified for the job. She just hasn't done a good job. That's fine.

But that doesn't make her a DEI hire. Ben Carson was wholly unqualified to be the job. to be the head of HUD, right? But no one called him a DEI hire. Why? Because he was on the right. Whether you think he did a good job or bad job, he wasn't qualified, but every time he makes a mistake, I wouldn't call him a DEI hire,

even though he had no qualified, he's far less qualified for that job than Karen Bass was to be mayor of L.A. You have to understand here that DEI hire is itself a dog whistle when it's weaponized against black and brown people and women and trans folk and queer folk, whenever you don't like the job they do.

It says they're unqualified. I hear what you're saying, but you also have to recognize that this relentless woke bullshit has actually turned large numbers of people into people I just don't even recognize as having a brain where they literally buy into all this stuff.

They walk around and their first thought, their first thought is diversity, equity, inclusion should actually be a priority over any meritocracy. They genuinely believe that. That's not what anyone has ever argued. At that point, society starts to fragment... Pierce, that's not true.

What I'm saying is... It's true. DEI initiatives begin from the premise that people who are qualified are being left and locked out of the world. I know the premise. When we advocate for people to... I know the premise, Mark.

No, but that's not... I understand you... The premise of being... Hang on. You're missing the point. The premise of being... The premise of being... The premise of being woke, right,

was originally that you would raise awareness to social and racial injustice. I agree with that. By that criteria, I'm woke. That is not what woke became. Woke became a form of censorious virtue-signalling fascism. And what we're seeing now is the very rapid, actually, disintegration of wokeism, because people have woken up to it.

And what I hope is that people like the people of Los Angeles who've seen their city getting ravaged by this crap, wake up, smell the cappuccino, and vote according to reality, and not to what they think they should be doing based on things like. Forget about climate change, forget about unchecked capitalism.

No, no. All those things are important. Let me bring in Gillian, who's been shaking air. Gillian. Well, here's the reason, I think, in particular, people are targeting this issue. There are two quantifiable moments that are pretty outrageous.

So the first one is, I believe it was Kristen Larson, who said, hey, you know, you're worried about me pulling her husband out of a fire. Well, then he got himself on the wrong place. She should have been swiftly fired for that. Yeah. Regardless of her color or her gender, that was an outrageous thing to say. I don't care if she was a white man. If a white man said something like, well, your wife got herself under the wrong place, we would all be outraged. She should have been fired. And now we have to ask ourselves why she wasn't fired. And then the next thing is the lady, I think her name is Janice Quenonis, who was in charge of making sure that reservoir on the palisades was full was caught in an interview saying that her top priority was DEI. Legitimately

verbatim a quote. And I think that is exactly what Pierce is talking about. I can't speak to Karen Bass or how qualified she was or she wasn't because I'm no longer a California resident. So I didn't vote for her. I didn't do my homework on her. And I do agree that

regardless of DEI, she's doing a crap job and regardless of Republican or Democrat, Newsom sucks. He is the worst and he has been the worst forever since 2018. When he got the job, in 2019 and how he's run the state since then. He sucks. But there are two very clear examples of what Pierce is speaking about. Yeah. Marlon, I want to play a clip of Gavin Newsom who keeps smirking.

I just don't understand why he keeps smirking. Let's take a look. 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. People, There's immediacy and lies travel the proverbial world and it's hard to get the facts out there unless you have the backing of those facts and you can communicate them soberly. And so that's what we're trying to achieve as well as well. But I have 10 other things we're doing concurrently as well. I mean, across the board on recovery, on 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.

And every appearance he's made, Marla, he just can't stop this little super-sillious smug-smug. So what are you being smug about? Right, yeah, I'm not sure what's actually going on there. And I have seen him smirking in other interviews where he's talking about reimagining L.A. And the plan that he already has for the city. So we'll see what that actually looks like. And quickly to the point of DEI for Mark and Michael, we don't have to call them DEI hires.

They call themselves DEI hires. When we got this fire chief rolled out, she wasn't rolled out as a woman with 22 years experience as a firefighter. and an engineer. She was rolled out as a woman who's lesbian. The very same for the assistant fire chief who says she won't pull a man out of a fire. The very same for Cignonas, who Gillian was just speaking about. We don't have to call them diversity equity inclusion hires. They will do that themselves. Yeah. And I think, Amal, the point I was trying to make to Mark, where I'm not quite sure he grasped what I was getting at, is that large sways of the electorate in L.A.

I think have been contaminated by this woke virus. And they start to think that DEI has, has to be the be or one end all of everything. And they start to vote accordingly. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we are seeing a culture that's been created in this city where we're pushing forward these initiatives. If I took a thousand California residents and I showed them a photo of a white man and a black woman

with giving them no qualifications, no idea about their education, and no idea about the job that they'd be going into, they would pick the black woman. Let's be honest about where the culture has been set in the city and look around to see that the city is also. on fire. Okay, let me bring Michael.

Can I just say one? Yeah. It just might be worth knowing that for the last three decades, there have literally been hundreds of scientific studies that have done the very thing you're talking about, usually through resumes. And what the evidence shows with the scientific data from conservatives, Republicans, black, white, independent, political,

apolitical, whatever, have all said the exact opposite of what you said. There has literally not been one empirical study in which the person has proven a black person over a white person, systematically. Also, when the names are blocked and they think a single person, hang on, you don't think a single person in Los Angeles has ever voted for somebody based on skin color. Are you being funny? That is the most, that is a Beacom yoga stretch. I, I, there's nothing of what I just said is what you just said. I just said, I was talking about employer hiring and you just

flipped it and made it seem as if I said no one in LA has ever voted on the base of race. everybody votes on the base of race not literally everybody, every country, every state. So you agree with me then? People who vote on the basis of race. I guarantee you, all white men in Mississippi voted on the basis of race

and I don't think they voted for Kamala. Black men in New York or black women in New York voted for president on the basis of race and they didn't vote for Trump. People vote on the basis of race all the time. So you're not to feel that it's not my point. The point is that systematically, Black people are harmed

when people vote. So you accept my preference. that Karen Bass in Los Angeles could have got a lot of votes and people based on her skin color because they bought into the whole DEI argument. No, that's not what I just said. It is. I said that everybody does it. The difference is you agree with me.

You only seem to think that black people, no, let me finish the sentence. Let me finish the sentence so we're clear. You seem to only think that black people voting on the basis of race or brown people voting on the basis of race. I'm saying black, white, red, yellow, in my opinion. They all. No, I'm saying it. You have no evidence for you. You just said everybody votes according to race, which is also bullshit, by the way.

They don't all vote according to race. But the point, but you actually, without realizing it. But Mark, without realizing, hang on, without realizing it, you've confirmed my thesis, right? Because you've basically agreed that there are large numbers of people in Los Angeles who probably voted for Karen Bass because of her skin color. And now she's turned out to be useless. I want you to hear, I want you to, I want you to try to hear what I'm saying. First, I want you to allow for the possibility

that I could completely comprehend what you're saying and just disagree. And second, I want you to allow for the possibility that you may see this differently. Thank you. This is what I'm saying. Your premise is Karen Bass was elected partially, at least, because the people who voted for her

voted for her on the basis of race. And you're saying that I have affirmed that thesis through my statement. What I am saying as my rejoinder is, no, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is both candidates and all candidates get votes on the basis of race. A billionaire white man also gets votes on the basis of race.

And I am not suggesting, contrary to what you've just suggested, that the number of votes for her by virtue of race are any more than the votes for him by virtue of race. I never said that, and I don't believe that. So at least, even if you disagree with me, you can at least acknowledge on national television that I did not affirm your thesis. If you comprehend, if you comprehend, I didn't affirm your thesis.

I think we're ending towards a greater comprehension of his other's position. because the point I'm making is that... I always comprehend it. Okay, but the point I'm making is that DEI has become such a massive thing in someone like L.A., that inevitably is spilled over to the electorate when they vote for elected officials. And I think that's what happened with Karen Bass, who has now exposed herself to the world as being utterly useless.

That's my point. Let me bring Michael back in. On Gavin Newsom, look, he's a slick operator, no question. He's a kind of guy that if you were building a politician, he'd look and sound like Gavin Newsom. you know, or Barack Obama. They look the part, they sound the part, they're articular, whatever.

I think he's getting found out here. I think there's a supercilious smuggery about him, particularly when he was asked about Trump going after him about reservoirs, and he started saying, there's nothing wrong with any of the reservoirs. And they said, well, literally one of the biggest reservoirs, the biggest near Pacific Palisades,

was not working. Let's take a look at that. The reservoirs are completely full of the state reservoirs here in Southern California. California, that mis and disinformation, I don't think advantages or aides any of us. Responding to Donald Trump's insults, we would spend another month. I'm very familiar with them. Every elected official that he disagrees with, very familiar with them.

We do know, though, from reporting here locally that that one reservoir that serves the Palisades was not full. And that's exactly what triggered my desire to get the investigation to understand what was happening with that local reservoir. That was not a state system reservoir, which the president-elect was referring to as it relates to the delta. and somehow connecting the Delta smelt to this fire, which is inexcusable because it's inaccurate, also incomprehensible to anyone that understands water policy in the state. Now, he was squirming and tap dancing around there, Michael. I mean, to me, he got called out. Yeah, I think he did get called out there because one of the reservoirs was empty,

and it shouldn't have been empty, and it was empty because it fixed to the cover that should have taken a week, ended up taking more than a year and costing, way too much. And this is an issue with, I think, the way that we spend money and the way that we manage projects in the state. And that needs to get fixed. But I'm glad that's the focus, because there's so many other things being brought into this conversation that I think are distractions. I think, you know, the fact we're debating whether Karen Bass got elected because she's a black woman is, is frustrating. I think Gavin Newsom is reasonably frustrated about the smelt and the way that Donald Trump tried to blame the water shortage in California on this, like,

endangered species, which is not correct. I think that what we should be talking about is why wasn't the reservoir reservoir for reservoir, thank you. That's hard to say. Why weren't we ready for this fire? And how do we hold our government officials accountable? Regardless of their race, regardless of their gender, I don't care, right? Like how do we get better at this? And I think that that is a question that we really ought to be talking more about. And I appreciate Gillian for. for bringing up at the beginning of this conversation, the fact that we should be doing controlled burns, the fact that we should be doing brush clearance,

the fact that we should be hardening our structures so that wildfires don't spread so quickly in this city where wildfires are endemic and they are going to happen again. But here's the point I make to Michael. Here's the point I'd make back is that I don't think you can divorce the two things. I don't think you can divorce the politicking that's gone on in the election of certain officials and the incompetence we now see laid bare.

You can't divorce that from that because ultimately these decisions get taken by elected officials. It's all interwoven. You need very, very good people to run a city like Los Angeles. You don't need someone like Karen Bass, in my opinion, as an Angelino half the time. Well, Gavin Newsom is white and privileged as it gets. He certainly wasn't a DEI hire, and he's the tip of the spear here. And he is responsible for so much of this catastrophe. I could point to specific bills in California that pass the entire state's legislature to manage forestry that he personally vetoed and said, well, you know, I'm worried about the ongoing cost.

Well, how much is this going to cost to fix the state? You're going to pass it on to the taxpayers across the country? I mean, we know for a fact that fire breaks work, and I'll give you a perfect example, because the fire stopped in northern Malibu where it had already burned. That's why you do controlled burns. We know that it works. It just worked in these conditions where it already burned. And there are so many different issues with how water is mismanaged. Why haven't we built any of those new reservoirs that were commissioned in 2014 under Proposition 1?

Not one of those reservoirs is complete. And you can point to all of this red tape, but now he says, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to cut through all of this red tape and make sure all this stuff gets done. Well, why haven't you previously? This is not this guy's first rodeo. We have a fire every single year. And the one where I lost my home in 2018 was catastrophic. And let me say one more thing about that, just to really shine a light on this guy's negligence.

PG&E was responsible for that fire. privately owned utility company that had equipment on power lines that was a hundred years old. They donated to his gubernatorial campaign in 2018. When he was elected in 2019, he facilitated their ability to walk away Scott free. I cannot tell you how many people died, how many people lost their homes, no infrastructure has been updated. I could go on and on and on about this guy. And he isn't a DEI hire.

So I can kind of play both sides of this argument. And this is where I kind of defer back to. you, let's look at what the hell needs to change, period. Yeah, I mean, Amar, there's a clip of Donald Trump appearing with Newsom from 2018 in a California forest. Let's take a look at this. President of Finland, and he said, we have a 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.

So I know everybody's looking at that to that end, and it's going to work out. I mean, he was right, wasn't he? Amala? Yeah, it seems like Donald Trump has been right on several occasions in looking at California and specifically Los Angeles and sort of predicting what was going to happen here. And what's devastating is that we can find so much evidence of people predicting this exact thing taking place, and yet it seems as though nothing was done. I got the opportunity to go into the palisades to see what has happened on the other end

of these fires. It is absolutely devastating. But what's important is that our communities have really come together. I mean, first responders, shout out to every single one of you that has shown up to fight these fires. And the community members, the people who are living in these houses, who stayed to fight and to keep their property

and to help others around them, it seems as though our regular citizens and our first responders, people who we would consider lower on the rungs of leadership have really done better than anybody else in this city. And yeah, as we saw in that clip, the fact that we could have seen this coming, and we knew exactly what to do

to prevent the devastation that we've seen. It's just harrowing. Yeah. Mark, a couple of issues, obviously, which are slightly detached from this, but are going to come into play. One is the talk about things like the Oscars, the Olympics in L.A. and so on.

Huge events where L.A. would be the center of global attention. Some people thinking the Oscars should be put off now, that maybe the Olympics might be jarring with people, spending all that money on a huge event like that. I've got to say, I don't agree with that. I think that actually it's a great chance for Ella to show us back on his feet and do what they do best. But what do you think? I think the Olympics is such a big hall.

It's so lucrative. It's such a big stage. It's such a big spectacle. And it's so unwieldy. I can't imagine relocating it easily. And I think to your point, it certainly helps a narrative from a state branding, even national branding perspective. It makes a lot of sense for them. The Oscars, you know, I could live with seeing the Oscars in New York.

I could live seeing the Oscars somewhere else once or twice in terms of for the rebuilding of it all. We certainly had to make adjustments during COVID in that way. So I think that's a far more likely switch and a far more manageable switch. But at the end of the day, the last thing I just wanted to say was, again, I think the powerful, the people who benefit the most from environmental abuse,

from the negligence that we've seen from the top down, all the people who benefit from us continue to drill, baby drill, as the incoming president is saying, and as we continue to cook the earth. All of these people want us pointing our fingers at each other. They want us focusing on who's what color, who's this, who's that. Because as long as we're distracted by the identity politics, they can continue to exploit us, extract from the land,

and make money hand over fist while the vulnerable get more and more precarious. Interesting point. Michael, I want to end on just with climate change quickly because a lot of debate about whether climate change has played a factor here. I mean, I only know that L.A. has gone through a lot of periods in its existence. We have very dry periods, then very wet periods, but almost uniquely, in the last three years, it had two very wet winters. And then this year, it was quite wet, and then suddenly incredibly dry.

And the theory is that this has led to a lot of extra vegetation, then getting very, very dry. And that acting like a gigantic reinforced tinderbox when this fire came with the Santa Ana's. How much of that you think is connected directly to climate change? I think that's the direct result of climate change. What climate change does is it makes weather patterns more extreme. So I'm glad you mentioned last winter because last winter we had an incredible amount of rain. It was actually we had a hurricane last year. It was the first time I've ever seen a hurricane in LA and I've been here my entire life. And then we had eight months of drought following that that torrential downpour and a hurricane. We had eight months of drought.

So these extremities are being caused by a warming climate that is getting warmer. 2024 was the hottest year on record in human history. So there's no doubt that the drought and the hurricane were both the result of changing weather patterns due to climate change. And what that means is that the weather is getting more extreme, which means that the fact that we have a city in a wildfire zone is becoming a bigger and bigger problem, right? Because this was always going to be a problem, but now it's becoming an emergency level problem. And if we don't get better at preventing wildfires and dealing with them when they happen, this type of thing is going to continue to happen. And it's a huge tragedy now.

My heart goes out to everyone who's been affected, but I think it's the responsibility of the residents and especially the officials here in LA to prevent this from being so bad ever again. But the climate change is going to make that an uphill battle. And finally, Mark, I wanted to ask you one thing about something you said in your YouTube channel, that you raised the idea, the concept of potentially, would there have been this kind of global attention on these fires if it wasn't affecting rich white people disproportionately?

Would it be the same if the fires were ravishing the hood, as you put it? I mean, you've got a bit of blowback on that. Do you still think that's a theory you want to put out there? Well, this is the first blowback I've gotten is right here with you, so I appreciate it. Do you think you're living in an echo chamber? Maybe right now I'm literally in an echo chamber, but I love talking to you. And I think that, you know, this country has a different response to poor people, black or white,

than they do rich people. We simply respond differently. Our response to Katrina versus the response to those fires. But if 12,000 homes had literally, if 12,000 homes have burned down in South Central, L.A., for example, there would have still been enormous attention to it. I don't think people would have cared what color the people were who lived there or how impoverished it may be in parts of that. Again, your powers of psychological interpretation are stunning. I mean, you're always saying what other people would care about.

I tend to go by data and things like that. No, again, I go by research studies and data because I feel like science is a better indicator than our journalistic instincts or vibes. And so when you look at national opinion polls, you look at people's responses to say Hurricane Katrina, for example, You see that many people actually didn't have the same empathy and sympathy levels. You even had people like Barbara Bush, you said, oh, this worked out just fine for them. People who got dislocated and moved to Houston permanently. I mean, it's just not true to say that we deal with poor people tragedies

the same way we do rich people tragedies. There's no historical precedent where that has ever been the truth. No one has ever said, whoo, they're poor, they'll be fine. You know what I mean? It doesn't work that way. Amalad, do you want to just respond to that? Yeah. Oh, sure.

Gillian, you want to say something? Gillian, you go. No, no, you go. Please, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'll say, I guess, like, on small scale, I can grant exactly what Mark is saying. If we looked at a celebrity house setting on fire

and then compared that to a normal middle class or lower class person, of course, the built-in audience and the built-in interest, I think, is going to really expand the view of what's happening. And we can see that play out in the palisades and the eat and fire. But I think, without any doubt, this has been the largest, you know, wildfire in all of L.A. history. And this was going to get the press that it's gotten regardless.

But I can't say that, you know, we don't have certain people who care more about the rich and famous than they do the lower income in the middle class. Okay. Gillian, finally you? Okay. I actually don't really care to watch celebrities' homes burn. And I know this is a terrible thing to say, and I feel very bad for celebrities who've lost their homes. I lost my home in 2018, and you know what, I was fine because I was well-insured. I lost some family heirlooms. It was sad. It was very inconvenient.

I was fine. The reason this is actually so upsetting is because there are many people who are poor, and many people in Altadena, that's a very diverse community, actually. And those are the people that should be getting the press, because these are the people whose lives are going to be financially destroyed. I know one person who doesn't make a ton of money, he's got to pay his $9,000. mortgage. He's got a $100,000 allotment from his insurance company for interim housing. It's going to take two years to rebuild minimum. He's got two kids. It's going to be financially

devastating for people. And I got to be honest, like I'm very sad that Perez Hilton lost her house. That's terrible. I'm sad for me. That's terrible. They'll be just fine. I was just fine. I don't really think they deserve a huge amount of sympathy. But I do know for a fact that there are many people that are not wealthy who've lost everything in this fire. And I think that is really what we need to focus on and where we need to deliver help immediately. Yeah, you know, my feeling that, you're not wrong. All I would say is it doesn't matter how rich you are when it comes to personal possessions involving beloved family members who may no longer be with you and stuff. There's no price you put on that.

And it's the same for everybody. So I think it's that stuff is the irreplaceable. I get it. But, I get your point. When someone's life is devastated. I get your point. You know what I mean? If you have the means to rebuild your life, I agree. If you have the means to build a place of your head again, I get it, I get it.

Great panel. Thank you all very much. Mark, always for pleasure sparring with you. Thank you to the rest of the panel. Great to see you all. Thank you very much. Thank you, Pierce. Thank you. Well, the comedian podcast with lifelong L.A. resident Adam Carolla has made headlines throughout this crisis with a stinging rebuke of the Democrats and their mismanagement of the state. He joins me now. Adam, great to talk to you. I've been watching your visceral rage pouring out in various ways over the last few days and cheering

you on. What is your view? As we sit here now, we're facing another barrage potentially in the next 48 hours. It could make this exponentially worse, this crisis. What is your view of where we are with this in terms of the political dimension? I should preface this by saying, peers, that I didn't pick the painting out behind me. I'm at a hotel in Burbank, California. I was a bit worried about your taste.

For that art. Yeah. You know, I, my takes, I lived here my entire life. I live in Los Angeles my entire life. And I was always, you know, Democrat, sort of left-leaning, progressive. I'm an atheist. I'm not a gun owner. You know, and I was with most of the policy, legalized pot, and, you know,

legalized non-consensual crimes, prostitution, stuff like that. You know, I'm a guy from California, and I was progressive. But I was sort of Bill Clinton, you know, Democrat. And then they sort of kept going with sanctuary cities and no one's illegal and open the borders and all the DEI and the LGBT stuff. And that's when I thought now we're getting into some territory that is going to be destructive. and I would sort of distill it to what we've done with the fires and everything else as sort of what we did with declaring we're sanctuary city.

It's great. We declare it. Everyone's a hero. Everyone pats themselves on the back. And then the first bus load of migrants gets dropped off in front of your house. And everyone runs in a circle and panics and yells, what are we doing? Yeah. And we were just having a debate about,

the DEI aspect to all this. And you saw the advertising that was being done by the fire department, almost making a virtue of, you want to have someone like me come and save you. When in fact, I don't know about you, but I just want someone who can save me. I don't actually care what they look like or what their skin color is

or what their sexuality is or any of those things. There seems to be a lot of projection on that side. about race, which is nobody I know cares a damn about who helps them, who, whatever, a paramedic, a first responder, someone coming into a, I mean, let's, I'll put it to you this way. I know guys who may rather be with a white prostitute than a black prostitute or an Asian prostitute. They have their preferences. I don't know anyone who has a preference. I don't know anyone who has a preference about who's coming into their home when it's on fire. Yeah.

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, it's as simple as that, isn't it? Where are you on Gavin Newsome and his performance? I have a long sort of running bad history with Gavin Newsom because he came on my podcast many years ago and started lying about race and agitating, race baiting and hustling and just doing whatever they do, which I think is horribly destructive. And, you know, what I want to say to these people is all your race hustling doesn't really hurt me. I'm rich. I'm fine.

It hurts the race that you're agitating constantly, trying to convince them that they're not wanted in a progressive city in modern times, which is insane. Biden did a ton of race hustling. The race hustling hurts the race you're talking about. It's essentially what I'm saying. Biden, sorry, Biden's incompetent, but Newsom's incompetent and that he doesn't really care about the sort of boring part of politics. The boring part of politics is kind of the nuts and the bolts, the feeling of the aqueducts and that kind of thing. You know, there's a kind of a fun part where you're on the, you know, parade float and you're, you know, and you get to announce we're doing something no one else has ever done, you know. we're going to outlaw gas-powered leaf blowers by 2013.

And everyone goes, whoa, you're the first to do that. And then the rest is a bunch of bean counting nuts and boring stuff that the progressive politicians don't want to do because it is kind of behind the scenes, very non-glitz and glamorous, boring stuff, but it is the most essential stuff. Yeah, and it was a fascinating exchange between a woman called Rachel Darvish,

who went up to Newsom when he was in one of the streets where there had been burned houses. Newsom claimed to be on the phone to President Biden, and this happened. 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 your call? Because I don't believe it. I'm sorry. There's literally, I've tried five times. That's why I'm walking around to make the call.

Why is the president not taking your call? Because it's not going through. Why? I have to get self-service. So let's get it. Let's get it. I want to be here when you call the president. You know, I found that a fascinating exchange because she was real, visceral, passionate,

and he looked increasingly fake and smile me and kept smirking inappropriately. And was clearly lying to him about being on the phone to Biden at the time or whatever it was. All of it was like a meeting of two different worlds, one the slick-willy politician and one the real-time woman who was seeing a school potentially disintegrating. Yeah, I agreed. I had this thought last night before I went to bed. I think that form of politicking is gone. It may be forever gone. You know, out with soap operas and just sort of bad over. the top theatrics. Like maybe it's all going to be, and they'll be a Democratic version of Trump, but I think it's all just going to be that from this day forth. And I think he is of the old chapter of politics where you just, you know, sort of kissing babies and just going, I've never

talked to my son one time about business ever and this sort of storming out of the room. I don't know, maybe we can't pull it off in the digital world anymore. I mean, he's, literally getting digitally busted because she's saying, yes, let me see. You know, in the past, you could have just said, I spoke to the president 10 minutes ago, and I'm calling him from my limousine, but you can't get away with it anymore.

And yes, he's a liar, and he's sociopathic. But people of California are really, they're not stupid, but they're so ideological that they will vote for someone who's a BS artist, like Newsom, if he fits the bill over. somebody like my friend Larry Elder. I mean, I got into an argument with Mark Lamont Hill earlier about Karen Bass, the mayor, because I said, you know, it's hard.

She was up against a billionaire candidate, and she won. And I felt at the time, and I feel it massively more now. But a lot of people in Los Angeles have been almost, like Elon Musk would say, had their minds invaded by the woke-mind virus. And they were just going to vote for the black woman candidate, whatever happened, against this privileged guy as they saw it. And he got very incensed by that and said, you know, you can't say DEI about a democratically elected politician. But in a way you can, if vast ways of the electorate, it seems to me, get infected with this mindset.

You can. Oh, yeah. Listen, my mom, you know, would have and probably did before she died vote for Karen Bass simply because we love the idea of having a female of color as a woman. the first, we get very caught up in the first. We're going to be the first to have this. We're going to be the first to have that. And yeah, it is. And it's interesting because it's not a DEI higher because it's a boat, but it's a DEI mindset. Yes, that's the point I made. Exactly that point. Yes. And I think it's real. It's real. Oh, for sure. And it's not that are, these people's hearts aren't in the wrong place. They really think to themselves,

look, we've had this type of person run the city for an extended period of time. Let's have another type of person. I will mention, because I've been here a long time, Tom Bradley, who's a black man who ran the city all through the early 70s. I mean, Tom Bradley International Airport in L.A. X is named. after Tom Bradley, it's been 50 years plus. So it's not like this is so new and so fresh. We were progressive enough to vote in Tom Bradley. And by the way, I don't even remember if Tom Bradley was Democrat or Republican.

He seemed to do a good job. And people seem to like him, regardless of skin color, 50-something years ago. There are various celebrities getting caught up in this in different ways. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as they call themselves, Megan and Harry, have been touring the damage from there. They came down to LA from their mansion in Montecito. And the actress Justine Bateman wrote online, Megamark and Harry, no better than ambulance

chasers, what a repulsive photo op they achieved. They're touring the damage. Are they politicians now? They don't live here. They're tourists. Disaster tourists. What did you think of that? I just think they're both zeros and I don't get why we're enamored with zeros and it's a real Hollywood thing.

Like they have, remember Michael Avanotti and all the ladies from the viewer in love with the criminal sheister, Michael Avanotti for 10 minutes. Everyone in Hollywood is so gullible and they're gullible and it's, they're gullible. It's sort of predictable and gullible and sad and that, oh, these people have money and they have a title and they speak. with a cool accent, so we're going to go worship at their altar. Those two are zeros. I don't think they have a thought in their head. They give them multi-million dollar podcasting deals,

except for they don't have anything to say. It's really sort of sad. We sit around and we kind of make fun of your system for anointing these people. Then they come here and we all fawn over them like idiots. Exactly. Exactly my point. At least there are monarchy. where you've got nothing to do with them,

and yet you still treat them with the same deference. I'm glad you don't. Yes, I know they're 40-year-old idiots who aren't fat. That's all I got. Adam, what do you think is going to happen after this? Once we get through this week, and the damage is what it is, and the repair work has to start.

I saw a very interesting thing you did a couple of days ago talking about permits, you know, a very simple thing, but that this Democrat-run city as part of a Democrat-run state, people are going to find out that however wealthy you are, actually getting permits through the bureaucratic system to be able to rebuild your home could prove to be incredibly difficult.

And that that process may lead a lot of people who may have been naturally skewed Democrat to end up switching and going red. Yeah, well, what I was mentioning was a couple of stories. One is Bill Maher, who, if you know, is get tacking toward the center. Because he tried to get solar at his home about three or four years ago.

and ran headlong into the bureaucratic state. And three years in with no solar and still trying to pull permits, he was like, what the hell is going on around here? So he experienced it firsthand. Suzanne Summers and Alan Hamill, Susan passed recently, but they're good friends of ours. They had their house burned down in Malibu, and they could not get it past the Coastal Commission.

I mean, Alan told me this. And Suzanne told me this. They said, look, seven years of arguing with these people. We said, F it, we're moving to Palm Springs, we can't do this anymore. You know, they weren't young at the time. We don't, you know, you're 70 years old. You don't have 10 years to dick around with the bureaucratic system. And by the way, it's not like the city pays for the rebuild.

You pay for everything. They just let you do it. You have to pay for the permits. He said, we couldn't take it anymore. We love Malibu. We loved our home. We couldn't do it. So if LA tries to pull that on these people, they're going to see a lot of flight and they're going to convert a lot of people from blue to red.

They better streamline and expedite it because you're going to have a lot of pissed off campers when literally the Winnebagoes that sell meth slide onto PCH and all the bums and junkies live there for free and you're still. arguing with this city, trying to pull permits for a house, it's going to take three years to turn the first shovel load of dirt over for, that's going to anger a lot of people who live here. Yeah. And incredible. Great to have you back on our sensor. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Beers.

As we're just discussing, California's the bluest of blue states nowhere more so than in Hollywood and Los Angeles. Because this crisis be a tipping point. One famous face thinks it might well be. I'm joined by the actor and former Superman icon, Dean Kane. who's lost three properties in these fires. Dee, great to have you on uncensored. First of all, my deepest sympathies

about the loss of all these properties. I know so many people. I have a home in Beverly Hills so far. Luckily, it's been spared, although that isn't necessarily going to be the case over the next few days we'll have to see. But the number of people I know who've either lost homes or been evacuated,

not knowing if they've lost their homes or no people who've lost their homes is staggering and terrifying. So my great sympathy to you, how are you dealing with this catastrophe? Well, I saw the writing on the wall, peers. I saw it years ago. And I've been railing about the crisis that was coming years ago. And I finally, I moved myself out.

I moved myself and my parents to Henderson, Nevada. My brother and my sister's still there. And obviously, properties and things of that nature. You know, it's just weird that things are gone. It feels like someone's telling me a story. your house that you lived in for this long is gone. But it's just absolute epic mismanagement. It's horrible.

It's like being a football coach and saying, you know, you're Gavin Newsom, you're a football coach. You're like our team is totally prepared. We've worked so hard. The game comes on and you lose 56 nothing. You know what happens and that happens in the NFL or college? You get fired. Yeah.

And he should get fired. He's got a horrible job. I feel my heart breaks for so many people. But you see, I mean, literally dozens and dozens of people that I know, everything is gone, everything from those homes. And listen, a lot of them are well off and God bless them. They've done well and they can rebuild. But there's so many people there who cannot. And you had Adam parole on right before this.

And Adam is super smart. And I love Adam. He's great. And he knows a lot about this game as far as contracting. And that's going to be the biggest test. When these people have to rebuild, they're going to face that bureaucracy that they all voted for. and it's going to smother him. So I hope that changes the way they vote in the future,

and they can streamline this process and get rid of the bad actors who are Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. And honestly, pretty much the entire California legislature, it's a joke. Yeah, I mean, it does feel like the chickens have come home to roost, doesn't it, in terms of California? Because it's been heading to people earlier, hard to describe until you actually live there a lot of the time as I do,

you know, a few months of a year I'm there. And just to see the change is somewhere like Beverly Hills, which used to be such a genteel, very safe-feeling place, to see the level of crime increase in the way that it has with shootouts in the middle of Beverly Hills and the middle of the afternoon in restaurants. I mean, completely unheard of 10 years ago. The level of homelessness as well and stuff like that

when they pledged to sort all this out. They haven't sorted it out. It's got progressively worse, ironically. Well, of course, and here's the funny thing. Who had a 10-year plan to end homelessness in San Francisco when he was mayor? Gavin Newsom. Now they've got half of the country's homeless are in California because they make it easy for them. They pay them.

They give them free drugs and needles. And it's not compassionate. It's actually the opposite. It's horrible for these people. If you walk around San Francisco, you can't. It looks like if I were to make a film set and tell you this is like a zombie apocalypse, that is San Francisco. It's insane.

It's absolutely insane. I was there recently, and I could not believe my eyes because such a beautiful city. But who ran it into the ground? Gavin Newsom. Do you think he's been found out here? Do you think this could be the moment where the Newsom bubble completely burst? Because obviously, he can't run again for governor. He's in his second term.

He desperately obviously wants to run for president, and many people have been pumping him up for that. It just seems to me that the scale of what's happened here and the level of his own bullshit, which keeps emerging in interviews and stuff, I feel like it's a tipping point for him. 100%. It should be a tipping point.

Again, I use another sports analogy because sports are merit-based. You know, I don't, and my dad used to say when I was a kid all the time, son, there are reasons and there are results. You're giving me reasons. I want results. Gavin will talk you around in circles and circles and circles,

but the results are homelessness is at an all-time high in California. The highest unemployment, you know, crime out of control. And all these things are because of his policies. So again, if you're an NFL coach, you're fired. If you're a college coach, you're fired. If you're a boxer or a UFC fighter, you are knocked out. And it's pathetic and you're gone.

And he should be drummed out. And the idea that he wants to make, you know, the United States like California, look, I love California, not because of Gavin Newsom or their policies, because it's a gorgeous, gorgeous place to live. Southern California, I grew up my entire life in Malibu. It's paradise, and it really is wonderful. Best weather, but when your policies are so bad that you're driving people out, the fact that Gavin Newsom is the poster boy, you know,

the U-Haul salesman of the year every year for 10 years running, it tells you something. And I really believe, and I hope and I pray, that people can see this absolute horrible leadership, make a decision to change California. You know, I'll say it, Pierce, make California great again, and it ain't going to be Gavin Newsom. Well, it's interesting, isn't it?

Because, you know, you can say that he was the most woken governor in California, and it seemed quite proud of that. Elon Musk has called it the woke mind virus and said several days ago, he now thinks that the virus has basically been eradicated. You know, the scale of Donald Trump's win against Kamala Harris, another one who's kind of woke queen of politics, if you like. It does feel like the backlash against wokeism is pretty overwhelming right now. People have just done with it.

Well, I've got to say, Elon Musk taken over Twitter is one of the great. things that have happened for free speech in the world. I mean, in the history of the wall, it's unbelievable how under threat it has been. I mean, I think we want to talk about the UK, the stuff going on there and getting, you know, seven years in jail for a Facebook post that isn't inciting violent. I don't understand that. Well, on that, all I would say on that, he actually needs to check that guy out a bit more because he was absolutely not only inciting violence.

He was instrumental in organizing it. So it wasn't quite how Elon, I think, thought. There have been other people who've been put in jail for social media posts, which I think is ridiculous. So I don't think the one he highlighted yesterday is a good example, but that's just either by. But being put in, no, I get it if you're inciting violence, if you're saying, let's go kill this or burn this down and let's do that, obviously that's an issue. But free speech is free speech. And I love what he's done with free speech. Look, I've been speaking my mind politically for a while. It's not a very popular thing to do in Hollywood, and you know that.

Yeah. But I'm speaking truth, and it feels to me like people are sort of waking up to this because there's only so long you can speak eloquently and be so magnanimous. And then all of a sudden your house burns down, and that changes. And Adam Carolla, before, you know, he had talked about this before, I heard him say something really smart, which is when these people start trying to pull permits and things, it's a nightmare. The Woolsey fire in 2018, it burned my backyard, sort of the corner of my house. But I was in New Zealand with my son.

watching it burn, we thought it was gone. Then I came back and there were fighter, fighter boots and prints all in my backyard, and they had been there and fought the fire. Amazing. I loved it. I was so thankful. My fire insurance dropped me right after that, you know? And the idea of having to pull these permits and do this stuff, it is going to be a nightmare. And I think that's going to change the way people look at things because the bureaucracy, that ridiculous bureaucracy that exists in California is going to smother them. There's conspiracy theories left, right, and center. And my brother's conspiracy theorist and I argue with him all the time he's saying it's all on purpose but it's well funny enough i was going to play you actually a clip of mel gibson it's like this you sort of

look well is it on purpose which it's an insane thing to think but one begins to ponder whether or not there is a purpose in mind what could it be you know i don't know i can make all kinds of horrible theories up in my head conspiracy theories and everything else but it just seemed a little convenient that there was no water and that the wind conditions are right and that there are people ready and willing and able to start fires and are they commissioned to do so or are they just acting on their own volition? I don't know. But they seem pretty well equipped some of these people that they're catching. Yeah, that was about that show on Fox. But what did you think of what he said there? Well, he sounds like my brother. He really does. I love Mel. But I mean, Mel is a genius filmmaker.

And he's got some ideas of what could be going on. And he's not the only one thinking that. I happen to know too many people in government to think that they could be anywhere near that organized. They're the most inept group. If you want anything done poorly and slowly, have the government do it. If you want it done efficiently, you know, Rick Caruso, there's a reason Rick Caruso's mall didn't burn down. He hired a private firefighting group and they took care of it. That makes sense.

But that should be the way it is done in all. of California. Do I know, do I have any idea? I mean, listen, there are people who are bad actors and they try to take advantage of a situation like this and they're catching them and then their firefighter suits and, you know, criminals, I mean, they can be genius because all they think about is how to rob people or do something, you know, awful. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Rick Caruso, you know, I was arguing earlier with people about Karen Bass and whether she won that election because of her skin color and gender. A lot of people voted that way against the rich guy.

Rick Caruso, but you think, well, who would have been better for fixing things like this? And maybe people are going to think about it and go, actually, maybe he would have been better. Yeah, but if that's that woke mind virus, and I agree that exists. They don't know what her positions were or are. She doesn't speak.

I mean, when the BBC reporter corners her getting... Yeah, no, the Sky News guy. It was terrible, yeah, terrible. Sky News, I'm sorry, yes. Oh, my God. That was the damning silence. Somebody had no answer to any of it. that was like a five-year-old getting in trouble for eating the birthday cake.

You know, has the chocolates, you know, frosting all over the face. It was like, it just doesn't answer the question. That was insane to me. There's no way she's qualified to me, mayor. Listen, if they want to do that, go ahead. But this is the kind of thing you're going to see. This is the kind of stuff you're going to have to experience. And I think people, after a while, you know, when your house burns down and you can't

rebuild it, you start to figure it out. But all I was going to say earlier is the 2018, the Woolsey Fire. like a fraction of those houses from six years ago, a fraction of them have been rebuilt. Yeah, I think that's going to be the massive thing. Also, also the thing that's going to happen, obviously it's going to become incredibly punitively expensive to get any kind of fire insurance after this, right?

So I have fire insurance on my place, but God knows when it comes to renewal, God knows what's going to happen to all these premiums, and a lot of people are going to get forced out of L.A., or they may even preemptively go, or it may be the insurance companies have to commit so much money to the payouts for this disaster, which is still going on, and might get a lot worse in the next two days,

given the way the predictions are going with the wind patterns, and God hope it doesn't. But if it does, this could be devastating for Los Angeles as a kind of commercial economic place to live. It might just be too difficult for people. I think you're going to get, you see a ton of people are going to flee. They're going to go someplace where the policies aren't so bad, the taxes aren't so high.

The, you know, criminals get prosecuted, things of that nature that makes sense. Again, anybody who could have left California who had the means to do so, so many people that I know, so many of my friends that I grew up with in California are gone. Yeah. They're gone.

So I think they're going to drive a lot of, a ton of people out. This is the beginning of a very long story. We're going to get sick of talking about it because you're going to have story after story after story after story. I mean, my heart breaks for some of these elderly people who have been in their home for, you know, 50, 60. It just, it's the human cost of it.

You know the saddest thing one of them said, I saw a guy in his 90s, and he was on one of the news networks. And he just said, it's like, it's taken my whole life. So it hadn't taken his actual life, thank God, but it had taken everything he'd ever collected in his life,

representing his entire life. And I felt so sorry for this guy. It's like at 90, everything was gone. Gone. All memories, you know, I'm sure he hadn't digitized half his stuff and things, you know, stuff he was going to pass.

I mean, it's just horrific. Yeah. And the thing is, look, I'm all for, you know, meritocracy. I don't care what color, creed, religion you are. If you're great at what you do, wonderful. But again, if this was a football game, these coaches should be fired, horribly prepared, terrible mismanagement. And the real life cost, it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

I mean, Karen Bass saying if you need emergency service services, you go to URL, I mean, that is insane to me. Just literally reading anything she could think of off the teleproms. I agree. Listen, what she was doing in Ghana at the inauguration of the new president when there were already reports that there was going to be a big problem with winds and fire. I mean, completely, for that alone, she should be fired. Dean, great to talk to you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate, Pierce. Thank you, sir. Good to see it.