Rev Left Radio - City of Ashes: The Los Angeles Wildfires

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

Alyson - a lifelong and current resident of Los Angeles - and Breht discuss the wildfires ravaging L.A. Together they discuss the acute and structural causes of the fires, the role played by Climate Change, the reactionary propaganda surrounding the fires, the class dynamics at play, the self-serving careerist motivations of bourgeois politicans, the organized grassroots community response on the ground, and what it all means for the future of California, the US, and the world.  Outro Song: Forest Fire by Mount Eerie

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace and Rev Left. We are here today to talk about the Los Angeles wildfires. Obviously, Allison is in Los Angeles, lives there. You've been, you've born and raised in Ellis, L.A., right? Yep. Yeah. So you've been there your whole life. You know the city very well. And, you know, I like most people listening, will just be watching these events from afar, gathering as much information as we can. But certainly you have that on the ground perspective that is going to be predominant throughout this conversation. I guess the place to start is any opening thoughts you might have, but also I like to talk about the current situation because we're recording this at roughly 11 a.m. on Saturday.

and it's an ongoing event. So can you kind of talk about any opening thoughts you might have and then where the current situation is before we get into the details? Yeah. So some opening thoughts, you know, some reasons that I think maybe this is worth talking about. You know, it's really interesting. This has been one of the craziest weeks in this city that I've ever seen. Like you said, Brett, I was born and raised here other than a brief college stint up in the northwest. I've lived here my whole life.

You know, growing up in Los Angeles, you are used to. to fires, right? This is like a very regular thing that we have. And there's probably a certain level of like urban and city privilege to this. But when you live in the city itself, the way you often see those fires is like those are off happening in the mountains, right? Might be happening in Malibu. Might be happening above Pasadena. Might be happening in Ventura. They're not a thing that affects Los Angeles itself. And this week has been, I think, really intense for the people of Los Angeles because that privileged kind of illusion, that there's this line between the cities and the mountains when it comes to natural disasters has just kind of been shattered, right? These fires didn't stop in the mountain communities. They went into the foothills. They went into the flats. And they burnt down neighborhoods that for the people of Los Angeles are seen as part of the city, right?

And I think that's what has felt so different. Everyone I know who's grown up here, the thing that they keep saying is, like, I'm used to these fires. And this is unprecedented. and it's unlike anything I've seen. I can't wrap my head around it. So this is kind of this huge event in that way. And I think this is an event. We'll get into its causes,

but it's an event that is worth thinking about politically because I think in many ways, this is climate crisis coming home, right? There's this Twitter post that went around a while ago that said something like climate crisis is going to be experienced as watching cell phone camera recorded videos on Twitter over and over again until suddenly you're the one recording, you know, it's at your doorstep.

And that's what it feels like right now in a lot of ways. And what's interesting is I think we are watching what is incontestably a result of climate change. And we'll get into that that the right is trying to downplay as something else that the city is responding to you with the mobilization of the police by mobilizing the National Guard, by making these absurd tyrannical appeals to a supposed crime wave that's going to happen in the wake of this. we are getting this little sample of what the rest of the world is also going to be seeing in the coming years. You know, 1.5 degrees Celsius is here. What the Paris Climate Accords were trying to stop from occurring 20 years from now is here today, right? So what we're experiencing in L.A. might be particular to our landscape, right? Not every place has fire risks in particular.

But the extreme weather conditions that produce this are going to increasingly be a global phenomenon. And so for us as socialists, for us as, revolutionaries looking at the world and trying to understand how to intervene in it, I think it's worth studying these early responses, these I think kind of flailing responses of the state and the right to climate catastrophe like we're seeing right now, because it'll help us understand what their playbook is going to be going forward, if nothing else. So certainly, you know, it's been a very upsetting week. It's been a hard time. There are quite a number of people I know whose apartments burn down, whose childhood homes are gone, who are homelessness.

And it's just, yeah, it's really devastating, but also I think there's political lessons to be learned here. And so I think beyond the personal devastation, it's worth starting to think about systematically and theoretically as well. Absolutely. You and your family so far are okay, but this is an ongoing situation. What's the state of the situation currently? Yeah. So the, you know, to be clear, we're recording this on Saturday, the 11th, January 11th. And the hope has been that this weekend things were going to kind of die down. You know, again, we'll get into the causes, but wind has been the big problem here, just these wind gusts that have kept the fire moving.

And so the talk had been that this weekend we were going to see lighter wind. What we've known for a few days now is that another Santa Ana wind event is probably going to come in on Monday. That's going to bring back those 50 to 60 mile per hour wind gusts, which are going to be pretty devastating, right? So the thought process had been that the weekend's going to see lower winds. Hopefully we can get this contained on the weekend so that when those higher winds come back on Monday, you know, they won't be driving these huge fires anymore. The kind of bummer in the last 24 hours has been that that forecast of a less windy weekend seems to not be the case. We're looking at 30 mile an hour winds coming in later tonight, carrying on into tomorrow.

And last night, the Palisades fire, the one in Malibu, turned back. towards the city. You know, everyone had kind of thought it was burning into the forested part of Malibu now, but last night I had friends' parents who had to evacuate in new evacuation zones as it's pushing back in. It's pushing towards one of the freeways that connects the valley to the city. Yeah, it's really just kind of coming back in. So what was expected to be this kind of slower weekend now doesn't necessarily look like it's going to be a slower weekend. From the firefighting perspective, the goal is kind of just to get everything as under control as they can before Monday. And hopefully Monday won't be another huge disaster.

That's kind of the current state. There's 100,000 people still evacuated within the city. Evacuation zones are still in urban areas in Altadena, Pasadena, and Santa Monica. So it's very much not resolved at this moment. Yeah, and I heard at least yesterday that at least a couple of the fires, these are multiple fires, but a couple of them were zero percent contained as of yesterday. Is that more or less correct? Yeah, so containment this morning on the two big ones, which is the Eaton fire, that's to our north in Altadena and the Palisades fire, has gone up slightly. They're not quite at zero, but it's not looking good in terms of containment.

And some of that could be lost in the next 72 hours. So kind of up in the air. Some of the smaller fires have been put out. People may have seen that a fire broke out briefly in the Hollywood Hills, and they actually were evacuating down to like Sunset Boulevard. This is like Hollywood, Hollywood. That was able to be put out relatively quickly. Some of these smaller ones have higher containment, but the two big ones that kind of have done the most of the more urban damage are in a pretty bad state still.

Yeah, so these next couple questions might be sort of naive. I've only lived in Nebraska most of my life and I lived in eastern Montana for a little bit. I had traveled to western Montana where it's much more mountainous and I had seen from afar, you know, small wildfires but they were never anything that was really conflicting or that was really a threat to the populace so i have no experience so two questions that i have up front is like one this is january um is it at all normal to have when is quote unquote fire season i think climate change is making that a 365 day a year threat but historically when has the fire season been and how unprecedented is it that it's happening in January?

Yeah, fire season is usually pretty predictable. You're often looking at September and October, sometimes August and November will also fit in there. But those are kind of the two months where it's usually most heavy. Those fall conditions tend to be where we see it most. January is pretty fucking unprecedented. To put it lightly, this isn't supposed to happen this time of year, right? This is, again, what's kind of, you know, so.

horrifying about the situation. You get used to these patterns living in L.A., right? You get used to there being a fire season, and you wrap your head around the idea that this is when these can happen. And this is very much outside of that. We've had record low rainfall this winter. You know, for the last few years, it looked like maybe some of the drought conditions here in California might be relieving, but this year we are right back to drought conditions. The mountains are extremely dry. The brush is extremely dry. And yeah, it is just conditions that we would not normally see in January at all. And that has coincided with the Santa Ana wind conditions because of pressure systems that have been pushing these really high speed winds through here.

You know, this last Monday when everything kind of kicked off, like our apartment was shaking from the winds that were coming through. It was very, very intense. So it's kind of this perfect storm of this climate change caused lack of rain, which very much is a result of these changes in the climate in the region. It's a place where we would normally expect that and this wind system that just came in at the perfect time to create this really horrible situation. Now, when it comes to the causes, the acute causes of a fire, there's multiple fires, obviously any little thing. I mean, something as simple as one ember could start a wildfire. How do these things usually start? Is it down line poles, is lightning strikes? Is it just

carelessness on behalf of people like what are some of the main actual acute causes of individual fires as far as you can tell yeah so it's always hard to say with these things um in california a lot of the more devastating fires that we've seen have often been from electrical equipment so a couple years back the fire up in paradise california that killed many people and destroyed a town up there turned out to be from pg and e electrical equipment in terms of these fires down here it's a little bit unclear at the moment. Early on, some LAFD firefighters had referenced the Palisades fire starting in someone's backyard. It's unclear what that was in reference to. Could that have been a barbecue? Could that have just been some electrical equipment in their backyard? Who really

knows? It also looks like there's some speculation now that the Eaton fire above Pasadena was caused by Southern California Edison electrical equipment. I know exactly the little electrical towers that they think that it may have been. They're on the side of this hill and this canyon that I've hiked past very frequently, where they are just surrounded by brush. So that is really one possibility. The other things that can happen is you can have vehicles that can accidentally ignite this, a backfire from a vehicle can definitely do this. One of the fires that started near the Eden fire, they believe, was somehow vehicle related. But also, people can flick a cigarette, and that's enough in these conditions, right? There's really all sorts of possible

causes. Wires can touch and just throw off sparks on regular power lines if they're not insulated properly. That can start it. It's really this terrible thing, right, where you have these conditions where it takes so little to start a fire that there's almost no way you could prevent all the possible things that would be sufficient to ignite it. And that's, yeah, that's kind of what the situation's been. And the ecosystem is such that, I mean, even outside of of human presence, wildfires in California are a natural phenomenon for millennia, right? Yeah. So California has this climate that is very prone to it. A lot of the Western Coast does, honestly. And the indigenous groups here had historically practiced controlled burns. That was

really true all the way up the West Coast as well. These practices had existed. But the Chumash people, who are one of the indigenous groups to the area burning, had historically practiced controlled burns, those controlled burns have ended. I think it's somewhat of an oversimplification when people say, like, that's what caused this. But that's a factor, right? Like, there was historical management of these fire systems that stocked them from building up to this level and having this much fuel just sitting there in the mountains ready to burn. So we've always had this. This is land that is very prone to that. You know, if you come to Los Angeles and you ever visit our mountains, you'll see it's mostly not trees. That's what they call chaparral. It's

like little shrubs and bushes and yuka. It's very easy for this stuff to burn. It dries out very intensely. That just covers these hills here. So historically, that was burned and controlled ways that stopped that from getting out of hand. But part of what Western settlement in the area led to was building these towns that are up in those foothills, right, and that are starting to kind of crawl up into the mountains. And no one wants to control burn that area because there's houses there, right? And so that's really stopped a lot of the ability to manage that. And the two communities that we've seen really hit by this, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena are both these communities that are very much like at the edge of Los Angeles right where the city starts to push up

against the mountains. You were mentioning the innocuous acute causes of wildfires. Anything can start this stuff. And I want to get into the structural causes more broadly, you know, the failures of the local government, etc. But in the wake of the, sort of, you know, inevitable uncertainty about how these fires were acutely caused. What you've seen on right-wing media in particular is an immediate demonization of homeless people. I even heard one commentator on Fox News assert as if it were a fact that what you have is you have junkies who are on fentanyl with the lit cigarette and, you know, they doze off and they drop the cigarette and that's probably what caused it. And he didn't state it as one theory

among many. He stated it as almost certainly the cause. So I don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit and then segue into these broader structural causes with the failures of possibly budgeting, funding, local government inaction, etc. Yeah. So that's been one of the big talking points that has been going on. So L.A., in addition to being this place with wildfires, is also kind of at the forefront of the homelessness crisis in the United States, right? This is a city that is unbelievably expensive to live in. It has really high levels of homelessness as a result of that. And honestly, I'd say the city's been in kind of a state of moral panic about homelessness

for several years now, a moral panic about this idea of crime and homelessness. You know, growing up in L.A., homelessness is another thing that you see a lot of, right? It is kind of something that you are used to encountering. But there's been kind of the buildup of homeless encampments throughout parts of the city where they haven't historically been seen, and that's led to a lot of this panic. And, you know, it would be incorrect to say there haven't been any fires and homeless encampments. Those have happened on occasion. None of them, to my knowledge, have burned into out-of-control fires, right? But I think because that has happened a few times within

encampments, there's this, like, image in people's heads of, like, the encampments as this, like, acute constant fire risk. And so while all this is happening, that's one of the scapegoats people want to go to. I think, you know, here's the thing that is like scary, right? It's a scary thought that we've changed the planet so much that the fire season extends into January. That's like a really scary thing to wrestle with. What does that mean for this city? Does that mean we're going to start looking at like year-round fire risks, right? What does that mean for the livability of the people in the foothills? That's a thing that if you live in Los Angeles is a very scary thought to wrestle with. And so I think a less scary thought is, well, some homeless person started this and it's an

anomaly because of that, right? And so the right wing propaganda has this psychological terrain, I think, that it can really latch onto by blaming the unhoused and homeless people here. And so I think that's what we're seeing in that. You know, I will say the other thing that we've seen is this panic about arson, right? So pretty quickly a couple days into this, people start speculating like, oh, is someone starting these fires? And, you know, I get the paranoia. There was a period in the last week where we had like seven fucking fires burning in this city, right? Which, you know, that's the other thing that's so extraordinary here.

We're used to like one fire, people evacuate from there. But there's people who evacuate the palisades to Hollywood and then the next day had to evacuate Hollywood, right? The just scope of these fires popping up left and right is also very unprecedented. And again, the scary thought is, oh my God, the conditions here are so very. bad that when it looks like this, just anywhere in the city, a fire could start, right? Which I think is the reality. And so an easier thought is maybe someone's out there starting those fires, right? Maybe someone's going and doing it intentionally. And unfortunately, the police have played into this a little bit. The discourse around arson, the right, is definitely

pushing this. And, you know, we had someone who got arrested up in the Woodland Hills area, supposedly having started one of the fires, the police were like, oh, we have an arson suspect we're treating this as a crime scene, blah, blah, next day, it turns out they didn't even have probable cause for arson. They couldn't arrest him for that. You know, it's, there's this panic happening that I think the right and the police, these reactionary forces are really latching onto. And I think it's useful for them, one, because it justifies their funding. It justifies the LAPD, L. L.A. Sheriff Department as these repressive apparatuses that are maintaining order somehow in the city, right? But for the right, more broadly, it's just ideologically a way to

downplay that this is what capitalism has done to our environment, right? This is the cost of the social system that we've built. And they would love to ignore that. And so the crime and the homelessness angles give them a scapegoat to keep people who are very afraid right now, who are very psychologically distressed, you know, buying into the idea that we need more policing, we need more repressive apparatus is that the response to all of this needs to be crackdowns rather than seriously addressing how we got here. Yeah, you know, thinking about structural causes, climate change has to come into the conversation as it already has, but obviously the right in general is really, I mean,

and I've purposely went through many right-wing sources on this front, looked in the comment section, Saul kind of got the pulse of what, you know, right-wing America is doing, and and they can't stand the idea that climate is even brought up. Anytime it's brought up, people immediately go to all these other things. It's DEI. It's corruption. They don't manage the brush well. You know, these things happen. They'll use the point that we made earlier that California has always been wildfire prone.

And that's the thing I think in all these disasters that has happened, is happening and will continue to happen, which is no event is 100% ascribable simply to climate change, right? It's a driver. It's an exacerbator. So in every instance of any natural disaster, there will also be a plethora of other variables that caused it on top of just the fact that, you know, fires do happen. Hurricanes do happen. You know, big storms do happen. Fluts do happen. So there's always enough ambiguity to assert that this has nothing to do with climate change.

And if you go into right-wing spaces and you try to make a climate change argument, they'll have a million other things to pull out and emphasize as actually these. are the bigger causes. But what we do see when we stand back is this is unprecedented. These are the biggest fire natural disaster in L.A.'s history, that this is outside of the normal time frame in which these wildfires occur. Obviously, the Santa Ana Wins are a natural phenomena that drives and propels wildfires that can't immediately be traced back to climate change. And I'm actually kind of, I'm actually kind of interested to learn more about, and maybe you have something to say on this about wind patterns and their intensification. I'm not exactly sure here in Tornado Alley, our main natural disaster threat, are tornadoes.

And with increasing temperatures, what you see is there's more retention of moisture in the air, which drives bigger storms. And it's not always obvious whether, you know, there's always been big storms. So it's not clear cut, but it's certainly a factor. And yeah, maybe tornadoes happen a little earlier than they used to, a little later than they ever have before. The rains that come along with them may be a little bit. bit more intense, but it's never fully clear. And that's always going to be the case. That's always going to be the case. And so that leaves just enough room for, you know,

naysayers to step in and disregard it as a variable at all. But one variable that we have taken into account, 2024 is the hottest, you know, hottest year on Earth since recorded history. And the top 10 have happened in the last 10 years of the hottest years on So that does contribute to destabilized, you know, yearly weather patterns, more insane dryouts. You might have rains earlier in the year, which does give growth. So, right, you might have like, hey, California had rains several months ago. Like, we had a lot of rain. And that's nice.

Some of the reservoirs filled up. It also creates growth that then for several months after that, you go into more or less of a mini drought and all that growth, that new growth, dries out. And now it's even more combustible. So I don't know if you have any. thoughts on that but that's one of the problems that we're going to have to continue to wrestle with going forward is the narrative and the ideology around climate change and you know the denialism it never sticks to what it was 20 years ago which is just outright it's not happening it's always

shifting we're always moving and shifting the goalposts and some people just refuse i mean they will rather think that it's homeless people immigrants DEI like one of the big arguments on the right is look at the firefighter in l.A she's like a woman and she said that she wants more gay gay people and women to become firefighters and because they're gay and they're women they're automatically incompetent what we need is like white guys and you know that's like the whole ideology and so they're blaming that more than they're blaming climate change right so i don't know you can pick that up however you want yeah so the climate change thing i think you know so part of what has to be done here i think so we have to talk about what the fuck we mean when we

say climate change, right? So one of the right-wing talking points has been like, oh, climate change is this meaningless word that the left uses as a catch-all in situations like this to explain everything, right? When in fact, like the fire is being caused by these complicated things. The Santa Ana winds themselves are produced by pressure systems to the north and the south. The drought is part of its own complicated process with other wind cycles throughout the year, precipitation, all of this. How can you just call that climate change? right? This is the talking point that the smarter right-wingers have articulated. And so they're almost saying, like, climate change is like this thought-terminating cliche. I think the simple answer

to that point is, yeah, fucking, of course, climate change is kind of a fill-in concept. It refers to the fact that climate systems across the board are becoming more extreme in both directions, right? That is what climate change is talking about. So no, we're not using it to not think about the complexity, but the simple fact of the matter is that colds have gotten colder and highs have gotten higher across the whole planet. And that has created changes in climate systems. And yes, we could spend time getting into how those specific changes impact things like the Santa Ana's. For example, the Santa Ana's this year were on the extreme high end of the wind speeds we've ever seen for the Santa Ana wins. And much more expansive in terms of the parts

in the cities that they affected than usual. is an unprecedented thing. The fact that that is unprecedented, alongside the fact that these fire conditions existing in January is unprecedented, gives us good reason to believe that if there's a process that is changing climate phenomena in new ways and more extreme ways, this is probably at least partially resultant from that process, right? That's just a very straightforward thing to be able to see. And yes, you could sit down with the climate scientist and they could show you all of these data points that affected these particular Santa Ana wins, but climate change refers to this broader process that affects all of those data points, right? And so I think the right-wing

talking point here sounds very sophisticated, but is quite stupid in the end. And also it's just so obviously ideological, right? They just do not want to wrestle with what's at play. Now, I think it's interesting to point out that this is not the only right-wing talking point. This is kind of like the smarter one, I think. This is like, what the fucking like idiots over at red scare podcast have been posting about and like trying to push this idea so you know that that's more the scene here but what i do the red scare push uh this whole idea of like climate change is a thought terminating cliche right that like is being used not to think about the nuance here yeah yeah um so that that's the sophisticated argument but you're right you go on fox news and they're hitting this DEI argument right of like oh well you know like the fire chief is a woman and actually a bunch of the high rank L-AFD people are women, and that's what's causing this, which is obviously absurd. Hearing that argument marketed to you should be taken as an insult, I think. It's such a fucking stupid argument.

But they're really doubling down on that. I will say, I don't think that one's really hitting home here in Los Angeles. The L-A-FD chief is really seen as a hero right now. She's seen as going to bat with the mayor at the moment and seen as really critiquing the city's mismanagement of this shit. And so even the right here, I think, actually really sees her as quite a heroic figure at this exact moment. So I don't think that that idea is penetrating Los Angeles itself or even the right wing in L.A. She's very much in the last week become almost kind of a populist figure here because of her willingness to criticize Mayor Karen Bass. But, you know, these are all the things that the right is throwing at us.

They're all obvious distractions from focusing on what is actually causing this, which is disruptions to the climate system as a result of capitalist and social society, just out of control, destroying the planet, and, you know, more localized structural issues that we can get into around funding that have definitely had an impact here. But it's all distractions. Yeah. Yeah, you said there's like the smart, or smarter conservative response. There's the midwit response probably highlighted by figures like the Red Scaregirls. And then there's the dumb ass ones. And the dumb ass ones are just immediate, and this is, you know, it's more people than you'd like to think. but it's just immediate conspiratorialism if they're talking about lasers

they're talking about this being done intentionally who benefits just a cesspool of nonsense so there's like a hierarchy of right wing responses to everything and on the lower end of that hierarchy you get a worldview where

anything that happens literally anything that happens is a conspiracy is a product of vague forces at play you know cabals of shadowy figures doing literally everything in their mind absent these this shadowy cabal right that that life would just never have bumps that it would just be smooth sailing but every crime everything is a false flag every mass shooting is a false flag every

natural disaster is a false flag aliens land here tomorrow it's a false flag and it's it's it's just obviously irritating, probably not very relevant to the overall functioning of society because this is like, you know, the bottom 10% of people that, you know, are thinkers or whatever. But, but, yeah, it's just, it's just always grotesque to see that element, always at play no matter what. And it's, and it's not totally marginalized on the right at all. But could you talk a little bit about, because, you know, some of the more sophisticated critiques do focus on failures with regards to, and I think even the fire chief has talked about certain budgeting, certain inabilities to get through to mayors. There was the whole Karen Bass finagle where she was in Ghana

on something like a vanity trip, maybe. Maybe you could bring more clarity to that. And then when she came back, she was being asked, I mean, admittedly sort of obnoxious questions in the airport, but just like shut down a whit catatonic, which is probably the worst thing that you could do. So what is the perspective on on karen bass is there anything we need to know about her and what's the the local and state failures um as far as you can tell yeah so i i think to set the scene somewhat uh los angeles is a place where i think people are very cynical about politics with very good reason uh this is a city that has like a massive history of corruption the city government is seen as highly corrupt um you know with fucking doj probes are pretty frequent into just like

blatant open corruption and embezzlement within the city. And this goes back, you know, throughout the history of Los Angeles. This really is how the government has often been seen here. And we have a local government that is really dominated by the Democratic Party. And I think interestingly, the left here tends to be very, very, you know, much more openly oppositional to the Democrats than in other places because of the Democrats' association with that corruption. And so there's all this kind of cynicism that happens there. So I think it's worth saying, Mayor Bass has been under an intense amount of criticism from the left and the right in this city for

quite some time. That's been about all sorts of things. It's been about homelessness, which has already been here. One of the big fights, the left's been gearing up for is trying to push back against us having the Olympics here in 2028. Bass has been under attack from both sides on that. And so, you know, I think regardless of what Karen Bass was doing in Ghana, the thing that people have latched on to is that we knew before she left that this historic windstorm was coming and that fire risk was all-time high and she still chose to leave. I think that's definitely created a lot of frustration in people. That clip at the airport where she just wouldn't answer questions has created a lot of angering people. And then just like honestly, there's this

cynicism about the Democratic Party here that I think is quite justified. Joe Biden came to town. don't know if you saw this clip um and you have this clip of Biden and Newsom and uh Karen Bass standing together and Biden demented old man that he is is like oh people's homes are burning down you know this terrible people are losing their lives but the good news is I just found out I'm a great grandfather and all these you know people around him the firefighters the politicians are like kind of awkwardly clapping at it and I think for people in L.A. that's just like this vision of these are our leaders, right? These incompetent, bumbling fucking morons. And so that's the image that exists here. So in terms of the actual policy, right, the big debate has been the

fact that the LAFD fire chief, Crowley, has claimed that their budget was cut for this fiscal year. The mayor has denied this. Most of the big California Democrats have denied this. The city controller, Kenneth Mejia, who's more on the left, has come out with, hey, I have the receipts the budget has been cut. This is like a whole argument. Some people who are kind of more on the left, like the majority report people, have come out in defense of the mayor, weirdly. It's turning into like a whole shit show, actually.

But I think, you know, the turning point was yesterday, Crowley, the LAFD chief, who had been trying to really tow this line and not openly criticize the mayor or the city, was asked over and over again by a reporter, like, did the city face? the LAFD here and after being asked it like three times she just said yes it did yeah yeah and so that was I think kind of this turning point part of the anger today is that in response to that mayor bass called her downtown for a closed door meeting where people were worried that Bass was going to fire her she did not fire her but now the talking point today is like why is our LAFD chief being dragged downtown to meet with bass when this catastrophe is still happened

and she could be making command decisions about the fire ongoing. So there's just this incredible cynicism here. The other thing is that LA's infrastructure hasn't held up well to this, right? The kind of talking point that came up was that the fire hydrants were coming up dry in Altadina and the Palisades. It's not because of an actual lack of water to be clear. It's because the ability to get the water pumped out there was affected by power outages that happened during the fire.

But obviously, that's still not good, right? We had these images of firefighters taking buckets. to get like the last drops out of their hoses to go dump on burning bushes, which looks pretty fucking bad. And so there is this broader conversation about whether or not the city has engaged in enough preparedness if the budget changes for LAFD affected this. Again, LAFD is saying they did affect this, they did impact this, they did limit their response. And so there's a lot of anger there. I will say, you know, I think a lot of the left in L.A. feels like they're in an awkward spot because I think that's a very fair critique of the city, but the right is

flatching onto that critique as well right now. And so ideologically, it's kind of hard to unpack a lot of this at the moment. Yeah, there's aspects of it that I heard I didn't really follow up on it too much that there's certain water issues because, you know, corporations take advantage of water supplies and use it in various ways that reduce the availability of water when it comes to situations like this. Water in the West in general isn't increasingly, you know, dire situation in many places. places. One of the things that is also frustrating about the narrative is people are so locked into the two-party paradigm that when you see the abject and obvious failure of the Democrats, there's this constant idea. It's like, well, California people, they vote for this. They'll never learn. This is what Democrat runs states look like, as if Republicans being in that position would, you know, solve these issues in any way that they would stop corporations from exploiting water sources, that they would build up infrastructure. their whole plan is to cut taxes and deregulate things like that's their solution to

California so the idea that just getting another party in and that you see this on both sides in various disasters well the red states that got disasters you know you guys vote for republicans is what you get and it's like how long are we going to be locked in this stupid fucking conversation um for real where my team could handle it no not neither of your teams do anything and another aspect of this whole thing is that politics is about career advancement It is not at all about service, about self-sacrifice for your community, any high-minded ideals that politicians, when they call themselves public servants, they like to implicitly state that we're sacrificing for you. They're moving up a chain of a certain professional hierarchy to get as high as they can. And I don't think it's totally unfair to say that a figure like Karen Bass and a figure like Joe Biden and a figure like Gavin Newsome, first and foremost, care about their own career advancement.

And it's all PR to them. It's managing their perception so that they can continue climbing this ladder. And it really has nothing to do about serving. This is bad for them in so far as it makes them look bad. It's not bad because they feel in their heart that they have failed people on a deep level. You know, it's never that. And so that's part of this whole liberal ruling class elite that these are just venal self-serving motherfuckers on both sides of the aisle that care first and foremost about their own advancement, their own wealth. And when you get to a position like Joe Biden, their own legacy above anything and everything else.

And that honestly can't be separated from the rampant corruption, the incompetence of both parties and, you know, these state officials as well. Right. So let's go into impacts. Yeah. So, you know, what have the impacts been so far? And interestingly, what are the class dynamics? Something that made this pop out is, you know, you see all the houses in Malibu on the coast burnt down to the ground. And I was watching, because I'm a masochist, I guess, Laura Ingram and Fox News's coverage, right?

And I do this all the time. I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the right and see where things are headed in that realm. But she's having on James Wood and Mel Gibson and their plights, right? The fact that their houses are burnt down. Laura Ingram can't stand it. She's almost in tears. I'm so sorry what happened. This is somebody that is the cruelest motherfucker when it comes to any marginalized community.

you know immigrants trans people gay people poor people she fucking hates everybody everybody's a fake victim blah blah blah blah the moment rich people are impacted oh my god my heart goes out to you this is terrible um and that feeds into this dynamic of fire insurance which maybe you want to talk about um where it's just i mean you know we can critique corporations all day and we should and there's plenty to critique here um but because of climate change it's just getting you know fiscally impossible For, I mean, these are profit-seeking corporations, so they're worry about their profit margins, ultimately. But just like, you know, from a business perspective, like, what, we can't pay out billions of dollars every year. So that that whole industry is in collapse.

You can see it in Florida, you see it in California. And I think that's going to increasingly become a problem. And you can see these state forms of insurance try to rise to plug the gap in both Florida and California. And I don't know how effective they are. But, yeah, maybe you can talk about the overall impacts, the class dynamics and the role of fire insurance and what that means for, you know, maybe working class people who have bought a home many decades ago probably because they're unaffordable for most of us now that have lost everything and they were dropped by their insurer last month or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I want to talk about the class side of things for sure because I think, you know, one of the things that I'm going to start by saying is that, um, so yeah, I've lived. in the city my whole life. I grew up here. I come from, you know, a Mexican immigrant family that came to Los Angeles. Very typical story here, right? Of people who came to L.A.,

they were able to manage to get into L.A. and get stable living situations before L.A. became super fucking expensive, right? And have managed to hold on by having a lot of family here, a lot of tight-knit community that takes care of each other. And, yeah, sorry, I'm almost getting like emotional talking about this. I think one of the things that's really been frustrating is that there's this image of L.A. in media and culture and a lot of the rest of the country that L.A. is like a rich people city, right? And to a certain extent, that is true. It's a very high cost of living city. You have to make a lot of money to be able to get by here. And yet, like, at the same time, there are a lot of people getting by here without making that kind of money. A lot of the time, that's because

their families have been here for a while. They've gotten into rent stable. housing. They are able to get by that way. There's a lot of people who are living in squalid conditions actually because of how expensive it is to live here. And so one of the things that I want to say to just kind of like frame this is that LA is like a normal city, right? What you see of LA in the media, what you see of it when you think of Hollywood is a small, small, small, sliver of what this city actually is. And so I've seen some kind of like class cynicism towards Like, what do I care if L.A. is burning, right? That's like rich people, West Coast elite shit. And that's not what most of the city is. And I think it's important to foreground that. There are normal working people in this city. Even those rich houses that are burning in parts of the palisades, there are dozens of working class people who make their livelihood off of working at those houses. Right? Like L.A. is this very class stratified city and it is horrific in that way. But there are normal people here who are suffering horribly as a result of this. So I want to say that on the class end.

The celebrities are getting all of the attention. You're hearing about what's happened to them. But I know people who are barely getting by in the city whose apartment buildings burned down and they have nothing now. And these aren't rich people, right? These are normal working everyday people who just lost it all. And no one's going to help them when it comes to this. There's not going to be state funding.

They don't have the insurance that's going to cover that. When those buildings they were in that were rent stabilized get rebuilt, the law says when you rebuild it, It doesn't have to be rent-stabilized anymore. So they're not going to have affordable housing to go back to. You know, that's the reality of what's happening here. It is the working people who got hit who are not going to be able to recover from this the way the rich people have. So, yeah, I want to say that.

The two neighborhoods that have really been hit are the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Pacific Palisades is definitely one of the more affluent communities in L.A. But again, even these affluent communities in L.A., that's a fairly recent history. historical thing. So I have friends from the palisades who are not by any needs rich people. Their families have just been there for several generations before that became the place all the celebrities want to live, right? And their homes are gone. And they'll never be able to go back to the palisades. Who knows if they'll be able to afford to live in this city at all after this? So even in those neighborhoods, because of how young of a city LA is, there are

people who have been there before those became the hip expensive places who are really impacted by this. Altadena, which just I'm heartbroken about, one of those beautiful little foothills cities in L.A. north of Pasadena, just this gorgeous city. I've spent quite a lot of time in it because I'm like a pretty avid hiker, and that's how you get into the mountains here. Altadina, huge chunks of it are just gone. And historically, Altadina was one of the cities that allowed black people to buy property early on in Los Angeles. And so you have a long, running far back black. middle class in Altadena who are not rich by L.A. standards at all whose houses are gone that had been in their families for multiple generations who have been hit really, really hard by what's

going on here. So yeah, I just want to emphasize that on the class end because I think there's this misconception about who's getting hurt here. And it's not just celebrities. It's not just Mel Gibson, right? It's like normal everyday people, unfortunately. So that's just kind of the one side of it. And then I guess, yeah, the other thing on the class side that you hit on is the insurance stuff. You're right. Insurance canceled fire insurance for a lot of these properties in the last few years. People aren't going to have them insured. People are not going to be recovered for this. That obviously means, again, that the rich people might have the money to be able to rebuild, but no one else is going to. Like I said, the apartments that built down,

when they come back, they're not going to be rent stabilized anymore. Rents are already going up in the city over the last week. It's illegal, but it's happening. I don't know if anyone's going to enforce it, but there were stories of rent prices on listings going up 15% in the last week because landlords know that people are going to be desperate and that there's now less supply in the city and they can jack it up. So what we're going to see in the wake of this is the increased cost of living here, class stratification, getting worse, just this horrible situation going on and we're going to see that it's the rich who make it through fucking Rick Caruso his mall is basically the only thing that survived in the palisades because he

bought a private fire department basically. Jesus that's the future to protect it that's the future exactly this is what is coming and so the palisades this community I don't know if you've seen the aerial shots it's just gone block and block of just the foundations of houses left and this guy's fucking mall is still up um that's where we're at so there there's there's going to be long-term class restructuring of the city, further class division, further stratification, the rich, solidifying their positions more and getting richer, being able to rebuild, being able to recover from this. While there are people who won't be able to afford to live in this city anymore because

they lost their rent-stabilized housing, and yeah, it's fucking dark, right? In terms of like the immediate impacts on the class level, it's not the rich who are going to suffer here and again regardless the public image of this city it's normal fucking people a lot of whom came to this city in adverse circumstances in the first place who are you know really going to feel the brunt of this yeah and you know wherever you see rich people you have to understand and this is true in medieval times all the way up to today if you don't get rich people without an army of poor and working people yep you can't because to produce rich people you need to produce it on the backs of a much larger group of people so you know

You know, to support a 5% 10% 15% affluent part of your population, you need that 80, 85, 90% of people who are precarious in constant toil, serving them, watching their kids, cleaning their house, tending their gardens, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So we always have to keep that in mind. And, you know, as Marks just, I think we know this, right? It's like people that are more confused about class being like, this is just all rich people who gives a shit. rich people can't fucking exist without working people. Right. But we can sure as hell exist without them. We do a lot better off without them.

But also another class dynamic is in the wake of any of these things. You see price gouging. I think California has warned against hotels and other certain services that are going to see an influx from price gouging. But I don't think there's any mechanisms in there to prevent them or even punish them after the fact. I could be wrong on that. But whether it's rent going up or hotel. spiking their prices for desperate people who are trying to find some shelter. This is a situation that's going to continue for a very long time.

This is not a quick fix. You know, parts of the city are devastated. The wildfires aren't going to fucking magically stop. They're coming back. Even if this, you know, round of them gets under control eventually, it's just a matter of time before the next one start. And so this puts the whole future of California into a real big question mark. And we can get into that. But before we do get into what this all.

means for the future of California and where things may go from here. I do want to talk about the response and organizing because you can see the devastation. You can see the grotesque class divisions and stratification. You can see this incompetent ruling class doing nothing to stop the underlying cause of climate change to address these problems. We know things are going to get worse and worse. But what we always have to also focus on and emphasize is that neighbors come together to help neighbors communities come together to help one another and organizing on the ground is so crucial for precisely at moments like this when you can put that organizing into effect so can you talk about left wing organizing on the ground mutual aid and the overall response from from regular

people in l.A. in the wake of this disaster yeah um it's been pretty wild to see i mean so if there's one thing that i think i'm like taking a lot of hope in from the last week, it's that here in LA, we've really seen that when something like this happens, people's first impulse is to help. Like straight up, right away, as soon as things started looking really bad in the group chats that I'm in, the community organizing spaces, I saw people say, here's my address, here's where I live, I have a spare bedroom. If you're evacuating, you can come here. Within days, we saw massive mutual aid mobilizations, and you know, like, look, I've had my criticisms of mutual aid.

I still do, but in a moment like this, right, where it's really acute, like, fuck it, it's what's needed. I'm not going to question that for even a second. And, you know, it's at the point where some of the centers in the city that people have set up, there's a bike shop, bike oven that does a lot of the work coming out of there have gotten so much supplies coming in. They've had to be like, all right, hold up. The mobilization of goods that people are bringing to get donated has been unbelievable.

the amount of mobilization of mutual aid has been really staggering. And I think building on networks that kind of came about during the COVID pandemic and still exist enough to be able to spin back up in a situation like this. The mobilization to help people has been really, really incredible. One of the kind of funny things that has happened is we've had really devastating smoke. Earlier this week, where I lived, the air quality index was like 350, which is like it's hazardous to breathe, just breathing it outside. And that's led to people needing masks again.

And I'll give it to some of these kind of COVID disability organized groups that have existed since the pandemic. They still got those masks supplies and they've still been collecting them. And so they were able to mobilize and get masks out to people throughout the city. The big group mask block, L.A. actually the city went to them basically my understanding currently is that both the city and the Red Cross went to them and said we don't have masks and asked if they could supply it so the the mutual aid groups here have mobilized better than the state in response to this it's really incredible to see and there's been this unbelievable impulse to help to get people by to make

sure people have a place where they can stay it's been really kind of incredible to see and I think that's important to say because the right and the state don't want you to think that that's what's happening right now. They don't want you to think that when a disaster happens, people's first impulse is to help,

right? You know, it's some fucking YouTuber, I don't know who he is, just one of these big multi-million follower accounts. The guy lives in fucking Dallas, right? So he doesn't know what's happening here in L.A. And he's making videos that are like, oh, if you're in L.A. right now, it's everyone for themselves. Like, if you're

woman don't go out on the streets it's just chaos it's bedlam like don't try to help other people right now you really need to be focused on getting by when stuff like this happens the worst comes out in people and that's like the opposite of what's happened right um actually it's brought out the best in people to a large degree and the right really doesn't want to acknowledge that and i think the other thing that's been really terrifying to see in a sense and i think tells us something about what the future looks like too has been the police response, because in a moment like this, what did the police have to offer, right? They're going to fucking shoot the fire? Like, that's not going to do anything. There isn't really a clear role for them. And LAFD, the fire department, has looked exceptionally heroic in this situation.

And LAFD has leveraged criticism at the police budget increasing while there's decreased. And so the police have kind of had to, like, justify their existence. And so a couple days into this, you have our sheriff and our police chief getting up and being like when looting happens we are going to stop it we are going to use the full force of the law DA comes out and it's like we are going to prosecute like you've never seen before with no evidence that looting is fucking happening actually is kind of what's wild we've now mobilized the fucking national guard in Los Angeles to impose curfews in these areas to quote prevent looting now what is the extent of the looting they can point to in the entire last week 18 or on suspicion of looting. That's it. 18 fucking people. And I really doubt that number because now that they've militarized these neighborhoods and imposed curfews from police and National Guard,

we've heard multiple cases of black residents of Altadena trying to get back to check on their house getting stopped by the police because they think they're looters because they're a fucking racist piece of shit police, right? And so I don't even buy the 18 people number. Like, it's been a week. And if 18 is all you can point to and there's good. reason to doubt that. It sounds like you've made up a problem to justify your existence and your budget and to crack down and securitize within the city. And so I do think when we are going to

think about what these crises look like, we should think about how every time something like this happens, the repressive apparatus of the state is going to use it as an opportunity to self-justify and expand and justify its expansion. And we really see that on the ground here. And it's so obvious bullshit. Because again, what I'm seeing in this city is the people of the city caring for each other and taking care of each other in this moment, not trying to fucking rob each other. Exactly. And I think that speaks to not only what the narratives are going to be going forward, like what we're seeing again and again and again. This is the American society's blueprint for how to handle these things going forward. And half of American society are,

you know, right wing, if not more, depending on how you want to draw that line. But there's a certain way in which reactionaries view human nature. And they view humans as fundamentally untrustworthy, fundamentally out for themselves. There's some projection there. And when a big blue state like California has something like this, what fills their minds? Criminals, poor people, immigrants, minorities. How could it go any other way than these people start animalistically praying on one another? And I think what we on the left have is a, you know, a rose of your picture of most human beings that most people are good

most people if they're operating with the right incentive structures will be good and if you give people an opportunity to help somebody else they're not doing it for profit for self advancement they're not trying to fuck somebody else over that's capitalism that's what capitalism does but people in real

dire extremists will come together again and again and again there will always be one asshole and there always be a million assholes you know on the sidelines watching from around the country, like you said, the asshole from Texas is doing, trying to foment fear and project their insane Mad Max worldview onto situations that it just simply doesn't apply. And it's actually quite astonishing how little chaos there is in the wake of something like this with regards

to inter-relation, you know, inter-people relationships, where people just do come together. They do help each other. They sacrifice for them for one another. They bring in their neighbors. You know, your friend from across town lost their home. Come live. in mind, you know, stay with us until we can, you know, going back and trying to get pets. And then just the whole idea of looting, of course, there is some general chaos

that if there were looters could be taken advantage of, but you look at a lot of these places that have burned to the motherfucking ground, what are you looting? You know, what are you looting? Every, every, the craters in the ground where a house used to be, and it's smoldering ash, you know, and so just like on a logical level, it's sort of absurd,

but this feeds in to a right-wing narrative about human nature, but specifically about California going back to the 2020 riot you know going back through all of history it's it just slides into their already existing paradigm and then they project that on to people but the fact is most people are willing to roll up their sleeves help their neighbor and as we see time and time and time again literally put their own life on the line to help other people yeah and that's the aspect of human nature that we want to emphasize that we want to build a society around not this horrific view of people as evil out to get for themselves fuck

everybody else sort of you know don't tread on me but tread on everyone else mentality that flourishes on the right that has to flourish in a society of exploitation of inequality built on settler colonial genocide built by slavery maintained by imperialism you know and maintained at home by a brutal police state that is more and more having to fill the gaps where a actual functional functioning society should exist. And so there's an ideological struggle on that front for damn sure. And, you know, having you somebody on the ground in L.A. And, you know, people in L.A., regardless of their political inclination, they time and time again talk about neighbors and communities and people having each other's back.

It's often people from the outside, on the sidelines, watching news channels and right-wing YouTube videos that are trying to, you know, create this story of chaos and human evil, right? it's disgusting yeah yeah um but the the organizing response is fascinating the fact that the state has to come to the left wing mutual aid organizations to get the help they need that just shows you the importance of our organizing the complete incompetence of the state to come and help people when shit hits the fan if anywhere anywhere you live in america a disaster is coming your way you know it's only a matter of time and so if you can start organizing now start building up infrastructure now. Not just doing mutual aid, but that should be a component of broader organizing efforts, knowing what's coming down the pike, and then knowing your local conditions.

Here in Nebraska, we're not worried about hurricanes and wildfires, but there are going to be horrific fucking tornadoes and horrific thunderstorms happening more and more and more flooding, all those things. You can prepare in that specific way to deal with those specific events, just like in California, you can prepare for those specific events. So I think that's something that our listeners should keep in mind, regardless of where you live, take stock of what your situation is and try as best you can to start organizing in that direction because this shit's only going to get worse. This is the coolest year on record for the rest of our lives. These wildfires are only going to get worse. Hurricanes are only going to get worse. Storms flooding. This is just

baked in at this point. And as you mentioned earlier with the Paris agreements, there's been some progress on the margins, but on the whole, globally and specifically, you know, nationally here in the U.S., there has been a pathetic response to what's coming and it's nowhere near the change that is needed because the change that is needed is going to have to infringe on profit maximization. The real change broadly that will have to be implemented to deal with the world of catastrophic natural fallout is going to. to be a world where you cannot no longer base entire

societies around profit maximization for a few entities. You have to base it around human flourishing for the many, and that cuts at the heart of what capitalism is all about. And so they can't ever even look in that direction as a possible solution, and so this is

what we're going to get instead. And it's as horrifying, you know, it's fucking horrifying. There's nothing else to say, yeah. Yeah, do you have any thoughts on that or do you want to move into what this all means the we've talked about the future we can talk about the future of california in particular if you have anything today and what the ultimate solutions or even the local acute solutions could be or better solutions

could be a long term for for a place like california which is particularly susceptible to this yeah yeah we can dive into that um so what this means for the future uh it's pretty fucking bleak, I think. I'm trying to feel hopeful. I guess, let me throw one other thing into the piece here, which is California is a state that has a

super high prison population. You know, we're a state of extremes, right? High homelessness population, high prison population, all of this shit. We have really high prison population. And right now, not that far from me, like, you know, seven miles from me, basically. There are

a thousand prisoners fighting these fires. right now, which is because in California, one of the things that they do is if you are a prisoner and you meet certain criteria, you can go be a wildland firefighter while you're a prisoner. And they'll send you out there in a crew. You'll make $5 a day, which by prison money, pretty fucking good, but abysmal by any standard. You will fight fires. You could die out there. You will definitely inhale some carcinogens that are going to affect you for the rest of your life. And when you get out of prison, you will be banned from working as a firefighter for the rest of your life because you're a felon. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Really fucking something. We have a thousand of them out fighting right now. Those guys are fucking heroes. You know, they are in some of the most dangerous spots fighting this. They're the reason that the neighborhoods that, like, are right here aren't in danger right now. And their lives are going to be ruined because of what they're out there doing.

and the state is bragging, oh, we save $100 million a year by making prisoners fight our fires. Just fucking horrific shit. And I think stuff like that, that's kind of what the future looks like, right? More repressive state apparatuses, more prison fucking slavery mobilized in the face of disasters like this, because that's what's cheap. And because that's what doesn't threaten the actual capitalist incentives of this society. fuck it we can arrest people if you steal some shit maybe because you suffered in a catastrophe like this you could be out fighting the fires as a prisoner soon right it's just this horrific system that has been built and i think we'll see more and more of that um so i did want to shout that out because the story of

those prisoners doesn't get told enough and it's fucking unbelievable and infuriating um what this means for california or los angeles i don't really know right um this is kind of what's like we to think about like the palisades are basically gone uh 70% of structures i think is where we're at and like a huge chunk of altadena is gone too and i think a question that everyone's going to be asking is like should we rebuild that right if if we rebuild those are we going to just end up right back here right um and probably yeah if we rebuild it we will end up right back here but but the corollary to that question too is if we don't rebuild it, then does that just mean the line for the next fire is even closer to the center of the city, right? Does that mean that now the chaperole goes to the edge of

Santa Monica and the fire will be pushing up against Wilshire Boulevard this time? Maybe, right? And so that makes you wonder what this means for the future of this city. Again, these evacuations in Santa Monica raised this really crazy question that no one seemed to have an answer to, which is if this crosses the big street into Santa Monica and apartments start building. What happens? That's never happened in L.A.'s modern history, right? Where it hit the dense populated parts. And a lot of these kind of newer luxury apartment buildings that have been built are wood frame buildings, right? And so there was pretty big fear here of if it hits those parts of the city, is that just a tender box, right? Those aren't questions we ever had to ask before in L.A. that will probably be asking.

for the next decades, right? The livability of a place like this and the kind of buildings we've built here, I think, is up in the air. So that's, you know, the dark side of the future. I think the future broadly is what you said, Brett, which is that if you're listening to this, wherever you are, something like this is coming to you, right? Might not be fires, it can be tornadoes, hurricanes. I mean, fuck, if you're on the East Coast, the hurricanes that you saw in the last year already did this to you in a lot of cases, right? this is going to happen where you are and so the thing that you need to be wrestling with

is how do we get ready for this and some of that's building organizational capacity some of that's recognizing that like these crises are tied into these other struggles around prisons these struggles around homelessness these struggles around all sorts of things you know fucking tenants are getting evicted as these fires are happening here still so it's tied into the broader struggles that we've engaged in here around renters um you know organizational capacity is going to be important. Understanding the interrelation of all of these things is going to be important. And I think like being able to build trust in communities so that when these right wingers and the state come out and try to tell them the story of like what's happening right

now, they know that's not the case. They already have relationships with left wing organizers who can disprove it to their face by pulling them into organizational efforts and showing that people are actually coming together and being able to disrupt this kind of right wing ideology at play. But climate catastrophe is here. That's kind of my takeaway. We are at the point where that's just a reality we're going to have to deal with. And so wherever you are, you need to think about what building capacity to face that looks like. Yeah, that's my take on the future. I think study what's happened here in L.A., study what the left has done. I'm sure there will be a lot of write-ups coming up in the next couple of months and look into it and figure out what you can learn

from it because even though right now this is like a very uniquely LA thing with the wildfires something is going to happen where you live and you're going to have to face a lot of these same questions absolutely and the bigger picture of organizing is that these contradictions of our society our society as i was talking about earlier organized around profit maximization for a few that that's an unsustainable model it literally can't survive the century it will either collapse under its own weight or it will be replaced and the replacement strategy is better because at least we could we could have some control over that process but in lieu of that what we're going to see is these contradictions mounting mounting mounting disasters mounting mounting mounting swathes

of countries our country and countries around the world becoming uninhabitable at least at certain times of the year and it's going to put pressure on the system like never before this is the worst era to have neoliberalism. We know where neoliberalism strips the state, sells it off, massive corruption. Our society is run by corporations who only care about profit maximization. That's whose interest get met. And in order to actually deal with the situation like we're seeing and like we're going to continue to see is to have a robust socially, you know, social welfare oriented government that has money to spend on its own people that take. It takes proactive action to protect its people.

But in order for that, you would have to have a government and a class of politicians and, you know, leaders that care about other people other than themselves, their own money, their own safety, their own career advancement. And we don't have anything like that. So while it's horrifying, these contradictions are only going to fucking heighten and things are only going to get worse. It also, unfortunately, you know, it takes these horrific situations to topple fucking governments, to put. pressure on governments and to open opportunities for new ways of being because what these situations do as they rack up and rack up and rack up is they radicalize regular people regular people understand that there is no livable future under this system that this system is unsustainable and we've already seen tremors of our entire society and civilization you know

coming to terms with this at different rates at different speeds manifesting in different ways um you know something like occupy is a tremor right just a little tremor it fizzled out but it's like people trying even the rise of bernie and trump are these like shitty distorted deformed pathetic but still real attempts at trying to move somewhere different ideology is still weighing on motherfuckers like you know like a like um like an anvil like people can't see past the ideology of capitalism and we see that come out time and time again but this does raise consciousness this look at just just something like Luigi taking out a CEO and just the the tremor and the ripple effect that that had people are waking up it's never as fast as we want there's a lot of

ideology to to to shove off but it is happening and as more and more people are directly fucking impacted as more and more people's lives become unsustainable regular people will be looking for alternatives and we've been in this position historically before where the where the predominant orthodoxy and thus the center of a given society's politics absolutely fall out under the pressure internal and external of catastrophe, of war, of economic collapse, of environmental collapse. And these open up opportunities for both horrors as well as for hope and optimism and new ways of being.

And because most people are not evil, because most people, I think, do have a good heart, we have the capacity within the human spirit to build something new. but unfortunately more people are going to have to become uncomfortable before that becomes a material reality as a possibility and we all are already uncomfortable and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse this system cannot respond to these issues it cannot reform itself it cannot do anything different the ruling elite are so utterly detached from the realities of regular working class life that they cannot even see the problems much less have any desire to to solve them or change them And when you have a country like ours that spends trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars

blowing up countries, funding proxy wars, spending a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon, you know, the U.S. imperial apparatus is the number one non-state contributor to climate change as it's helping conduct a genocide. Its own people are burning alive. I mean, these things are deeply connected. And this creates a situation that is utterly unsustainable. And hey, everybody, this is one point. 5 degrees of warming and it's not stopping here we're blasting past this no end in sight for the

continuing creeping up of the global temperature so what is two degrees this is only 1.5 above baseline what does two look like yeah what is 2.5 my god what does three look like we're talking yeah huge swathes of the planet that are uninhabitable we're talking about mass extinction that we still haven't even come to terms with you know we're talking about destable is of political and social systems unprecedented in human history precisely because it's a global phenomenon. It's not isolated. It's not

a war on this continent or a famine over here. It is global. It is never ending. It is relentless and it gets worse year by year. That's the reality that we're fucking living in. As for the future of California you know, rich people can move.

Eventually rich people like no matter how many millions of dollars it has, if you don't have fire insurance, for your $25 million home, that becomes a financial thing that you're like, I'll move to fucking Vegas, you know, maybe I'll move northward, eastward, maybe I'll move to fucking Texas, maybe I'll move to Phoenix, whatever. All those places have their own issues, by the way. Right.

But you can see, but poor people, they don't have the opportunity, the means by which to pick up and move their entire lives. As you were saying earlier, Allison, and I know this in my own life, so much of being able to get by, no matter where you are, is to have a fucking net. work of people who give a fuck about you. And if I don't have my friends and my family to have my back when push comes to shove, if my house is destroyed and I don't have friends and family to go live with, you know, then there are no options. And so poor and working people understand this very clearly. We don't have the money that can buy us, you know, protections from these

events. And so I don't know what's going to happen with California, but at some point, enough is enough. Rich people start to move out. They extract their their tax base. Poor people don't have options. And you can see this situation happening very quickly where we're epic, classic quintessential American cities like lost fucking Angeles. You know, there's a there's a possible future trajectory where that place becomes unlivable, at least for parts of the year. And what does that mean for regular fucking people? So these are things that, you know, Allison and I have been talking about for years at this point. And we're not the only. ones many other people are realizing more people are waking up every fucking day um i know as long as

people tune into to our show that alison and i are unfortunately going to walk you through many more disasters i mean we've walked you through you know insurrections we've walked you through upheavals like the 2020 uprising we've walked you through genocides multiple natural disasters and those things aren't stopping anytime soon and um and so you know i think that there is long-term for change simply because this system is unsustainable as it is, but short and medium term, I think the dial on human suffering is only going to get cranked more and more and more. And that puts a responsibility in front of all of us, that there is no opting out of this reality. There is no waiting for other people to take care of it.

There is no hoping somebody's coming to save us. This is our responsibility. This is the generation that we were born into. this is the point in history that we gained consciousness in and so like it or not we got to deal with the situation at hand and that that is that is an overwhelming responsibility but each one of us has to rise to it there is no other chance there is no other choice so yeah do you do you have any final thoughts on this situation or anything you want to leave people with yeah no i mean that's incredibly well said uh wouldn't we all wish we were living at a different time right but this is where

at. It's what we have to deal with. Again, like, I'm a fucking mix of a lot of emotions right now, a lot of hopelessness, but also, like, a lot of hope at what I've seen in the last kind of a couple days. And so I do think, like, people are ready to mobilize. People are ready to do what's right in these situations. And I think that, you know, in this city, man, I see so much beautiful organizing taking place, whether that's on the tenant front, whether that's the work being done with mutual aid groups right now. Like, there is a left movement. in Los Angeles right now, it is growing, it is strong, and we are seeing it flex its muscles right now in a way, right? To the point where again, the fucking state had to turn to it, right?

Like, that gives me hope. It really does. So we're in a shitty situation. We are living in a time of unprecedented crisis where the contradictions of capitalism really are coming to a head where, you know, we've always said these contradictions are inherent to capitalism, but the fucking rate of the crises they produce at this point, right? It's just, just so rapid that's hard to keep up with but that's just all the reason that there's more work to do and it's our job to do it and that fucking sucks but it is what it is i think this city has shown in the last week that like people want to do the right thing that people care about each other here i think again partially because like a lot of the country has a really low opinion of los angeles

the people of los angeles have a lot of pride in it as a result of that um like the the people of LA love this city. They love each other and you really see that. And so that gives me so much hope. Obviously, I think that repression is going to get worse. I do think we're going to see the expansion of repressive apparatus as a result of this. I think when we talk about like eco-fascism as this emerging phenomena, it's going to look like things like, sorry residents of historically black community, we're going to arrest you because we think you're looters when you try to go see if your house survived. Shit like that. The deployment of the National Guard to city streets, all this stuff. We're going to see more of that.

But at the end of the day, we also are going to see a response to that, right? The people who are facing that are going to see the fucked up nature of the system. And that's opportunity for us, right, to organize them, to pull them into these coalitions that are actually able to fight back and to build something bigger. So there's a lot of reason for hope. And ultimately, I think that's what I want to end on. I don't know what the future of this city looks like. But I know that people want to fight. I know that I see people, you know, in the Middle East fires, these tenants still fighting these eviction battles.

coming together as communities, caring about each other, it's just beautiful stuff. So there's a lot of reason to be hopeful. We're up against really fucking scary and shitty stuff, but I think ultimately history belongs to the masses, man. I think that's really what it comes down to. I believe that to the bottom of my heart, and we'll see how it goes.

But yeah, that's kind of what I got. Yeah, when everything else fails, when everything else is stripped away, all we have is each other. And that is the thing we have to keep in our mind. and that is the thing we have to pursue in our lives, make connections, build relationships, you know, the right-wingers are stacking a thousand guns.

What's going to matter more in chaos? Networks of human beings that love each other and come together. And we see that time and time again. That's the best of us. And salute to everybody on the ground that is doing that sort of work in L.A. under extreme conditions, and our heart goes out to everybody in L.A.

dealing with the wildfires and everybody around the world suffering from climate-induced. horrors beyond our comprehension things that we you know at one point we're only abstract possibilities and now we're living through the realities of every single day so love and solidarity to everybody out there listening we'll keep updates as much as we need to as these you know current events continue to develop and yeah we love everybody out there love and solidarity stay safe and we'll be back with you soon this whole past summer was a lingering heat wave And I remember late August

Our open bedroom window Going through your things With the fan blowing And the sound of helicopters And the smell of smoke From the forest fire That was growing billowing Just on the edge of town

Where are we used to swim They say a natural cleansing devastation Burning the understory Erasing tray of There is no end But when I'm kneeling in the heat Throwing out your underwear

The devastation is not natural or good You do belong here I reject nature I disagree In the hazy light of forest fire smoke I looked across at the refineries And thought that the world was actually was actually constantly ending

and the smell and roar of the asphalt truck that was idling just out the window tearing up our street I missed you, of course and I remember thinking the last time it rained here you were alive still and that this same long heat that I was in contained you and in the same heat I opened the window next to you on your last morning so you could breathe and then so you could ghost away

and now so the room will hopefully stop whispering The grind of time I'm not keeping up with The leaf on the ground pokes at my slumbering Grief walking around, severed lumbering But slowly Sovereignty reasserts itself

I don't want it though and betrayal winds who and how could I live Thank you.