The Megyn Kelly Show - Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Episode Date: January 8, 2025Megyn Kelly begins the show by discussing the horrific wildfires throughout Los Angeles, the lack of preparation by government leaders, how the LA fire chief was focusing on DEI and identity, and more.... Then The Fifth Column hosts Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch join to discuss the California mismanagement and subpar leadership that led to the wildfires devastation, ways this could have been mitigated, the leftists who dismiss LA wildfires damage because it only affects the rich, how un-American that point of view is, how it's absolutely false that the fires have only affected rich, the major news that Mark Zuckerberg is stopping Facebook censorship, his decision to adopt "Community Notes" like Elon Musk and X, how "fact checkers" are disappearing and free speech is winning, why the corporate media is panicking, if Trump is serious about buying Greenland and if Greenland is “MAGA,” whether he actually could use "military or economic coercion," surprising praise for the idea of buying Greenland from some, and more. Fifth Column- https://wethefifth.substack.com/ Birch Gold: Text MK to 989898 and get your free info kit on goldKars 4 Kids: Don't Wait! Call now 1-877-Kars4Kids or Donate online today at https://Kars4Kids.org/MKAncient Nutrition: Enjoy 25% off your first order at https://AncientNutrition.com/MEGYNTax Network USA: https://TNUSA.com/MEGYN Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
It is unbelievable what is happening in California right now.
An American jewel of a city is in ashes.
The Palisades area of Los Angeles is burning.
House after house after house of one of our most precious areas is on fire.
And residents have been under a mandatory evacuation order, including, I mean, folks
who are my dear friends. One of my best friends is out there.
Her house is gone. Brian Friedman, who was on the show yesterday, evacuated. Like they're all,
these are our fellow Americans who have been forced out of their homes because these predictable Santa Ana winds came and the local officials apparently would not do what was
necessary to be done to protect the residents from the foreseeable risk of fire.
There are three massive wildfires burning right now, being flamed by Santa Ana winds topping 60 miles an hour.
It is so windy that firefighting aircraft are not able to fly in many cases.
Nearly 100,000 people are under these mandatory evacuation
orders. At least 13,000 structures are under threat. The video is absolutely horrifying.
Take a look at this tape here as a fire swarmed a home in Los Angeles.
For the listening audience,
it is right outside this guy's patio.
I mean, he's inside his living room
and the flames are right on the other side
of floor to ceiling windows and sliding glass doors.
You gonna be okay?
You gonna be okay?
Hi?
There's your dog.
You gonna be okay?
Oh, shit.
Don't worry about that dude. Look at that. Oh shit. It's scary. Yeah.
The plastic is gone dude.
Yeah.
Fuck.
The plastic is the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah.
It's the least of the best.
Yeah. It's the least of the best. Yeah. It's the least of the best. Yeah. The plastic is gone, dude.
Yeah.
The plastic is the least of their concerns at this moment. Okay. That gives you the flavor,
but it is an incredibly dangerous thing to have been in that home at that moment.
The person who shared the clip goes by Kevin Dalton. That's his name on X.
That clip has already been seen more than 2 million times by early Wednesday. It was also
used by the Daily Mail as their lead this morning. Kevin said in an update, I am told the dog and
both of his humans were able to safely evacuate the property. That's as much as we know there.
Let's hope Kevin is correct. When you see the video for the listening audience, you don't even
know where these two folks who are talking inside and that dog are going to run. The house seems to be
engulfed. One side seems a little less engulfed than the other, but it makes you wonder how on
earth this happened. But the winds take the fire so quickly from home to home, it can happen in an
instant, which is why the cities issue these mandatory evacuation orders. The wildfires began so quickly that many, many people were caught off guard. And when the
roadways became impassable, people just abandoned their cars to flee on foot. Look at this tape
here. You see a bulldozer bulldozing the vehicles that were just left in the road out of the way
so that emergency vehicles and
others can get through. One woman who abandoned her car told News Nation that police came up to
her and said, get out of your car, run for your life, and head toward the ocean. You can believe
it. Going back to that first video we showed, and if you're just listening, go check us out on
youtube.com later. You'll see it right at the top of the show. You wonder, all I could think was just at least open
the doors and let the dog run for his life because a dog would know what to do. His instincts would
take him away from the fire and he could probably outrun some extent of it. Run toward the ocean
seems like a good idea. Fox's Charles Payne tweeted out this photo and wrote, I'm descending
into LAX right now and I can smell
the fire. Many on this flight in panic or heartbroken, knowing their homes are already
gone and listening audience. What you see here is an aerial of Los Angeles up against the water.
And the top third of the photo is in flames. The top third, you know, if you've been to LA and I
know we all rip on California for all sorts of good
reasons, but we actually love our brothers and sisters in California and absolutely don't want
to see this kind of danger or carnage unleashed on them. And what you're seeing right now is
part of one of our jewels, yes, Los Angeles, which has got a long history and a beautiful
one in many ways in this country, on fire and burning to the ground.
It's the Palisades neighborhood. You got Venice, you got Santa Monica, you got Palisades and
the Palisades. I don't know whether they will still be there when this is done. In Pasadena,
senior citizens were rushed out of a senior living facility. Imagine this,
some still in their hospital beds.
What were they going to do? What was the alternative? They had to get them out.
As this fire rages, so does the anger among the residents who are saying that while wildfires are not uncommon in California, the state's disgusting mismanagement going back for decades is indeed partly to blame here for these fires not being
better contained. The city's mayor, Karen Bass, is in Ghana right now. She's on her way back now,
but she's not even in the country. The LA Times reporting that firefighters have been radioing their stations with reports that the hydrants were dry
in the Pacific Palisades. Firefighters couldn't get water. It makes it really tough to fight the
fires, especially when the winds are so bad that you can't take the aircraft up to do it from
overhead. The fire hydrants were dry, which was a risk they reportedly knew about,
a problem the city reportedly knew about, but failed to fix.
Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who ran against Karen Baz for mayor, he called himself a dem,
but it was pretty clear this guy was about as close as you could get to a Republican in California
running for office, right? You have to say you're a Dem to win for Los Angeles and mayor. So he called himself a Dem, but he was an independent basically.
He was an outsider. And the way he talked sounded much more red than it did blue.
And he lost. Elon Musk had endorsed him, but that union vote came in late in the game.
Before he knew it, Karen Bassett pulled out a victory. So Rick Caruso went on local TV and raged about this fire hydrant issue. Take a listen.
They can't fight a fire without water and the resources that are needed.
Everybody knew these winds were coming. The real issue to me is twofold.
We've had decades to go remove the brush in these hills that spread so quickly.
And the second is, we've got to have water.
And my understanding is the reservoir was not refilled in time and in a timely matter to keep the hydrants going.
And it's all about leadership and management that we're seeing a failure of.
And all of these residents are paying the ultimate price for that.
The LA Times reported that in November, right, we're beginning of January, in November,
the lack of water from hydrants was also to blame for the difficult efforts combating the
mountain fire in Ventura County. They have been aware that there's an issue with the water
not being in the fire hydrants. And what did the LA mayor do to protect her citizens?
Well, we'll get back to you when she gets back from Ghana and someone has the chance to ask her.
As if all of this is not enough, it turns out that in recent years, LA's fire chief
has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity. Diversity
is at least among the top priorities for the department. Her name is Kristen Crowley. She's
been fire chief since 2022. And in an interview shortly after she was elevated to this position,
she talked about being super inspired to make the fire department more diverse.
I'm super inspired.
She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future.
One that includes a three year strategic plan to increase diversity.
People ask me, well, what what number are you I say, I'm not looking for a number.
It's never enough. Out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 are women right now.
When it comes to inclusivity and diversity at this department,
she's a proud member of the LGBTQ community. That just kind of opens the door of people
that thought, wow, I didn't even know that that was an opportunity for me.
Who gives a shit if the fire chief is gay? I'm sorry, but who gives a flying fig
about who she likes to sleep with? Can you fight the fucking fires, madam?
That's the relevant question. We don't care about your lady parts and we don't care who you
want having access to them. Can you fight fires? Can you make sure there's water in the fire
hydrants? When you realize in Ventura County, this is a massive problem. When you realize that
California is going through a drought where they haven't had rain in weeks and months is I don't care who turns you on. And you know why they have only 100 women in a squad of 3,300?
Because women tend to be smaller and not as strong. And unless you lower the requirements
to become a firefighter, most women can't pass the test. Trust me when I tell you that someone my size cannot run into a building and rescue someone even Doug's size.
Never mind an Arnold Schwarzenegger who actually happens to live in L.A. or California at least.
This is an absurdity.
This is just like the Secret Service and what happened with Trump.
We needed all these women in there who weren't even tall enough to protect the six foot three president.
Under this woman, Ms. Crowley, the department created a diversity, equity and inclusion bureau to train firefighters not on refilling the hydrants or what to do when they're empty, but on the importance of DEI.
Our diversity, equity, Inclusion Bureau, now we actually have the staff to do the work when it comes to doing a deep dive in regard to how we do business, how we take care of one another in the fire stations and in our work environment.
We don't care. We don't care about any of that. I don't give a shit about how you're taking care of somebody inside the firehouse.
Take care of me and my home and my kids and my animals when the fires hit. That's your real job,
madam. Joining me now are our pals from the fifth column, Camille Foster, Michael Moynihan,
and Matt Welsh, who you can find at wethefifth.com. Guys, welcome back to the show.
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and claim your eligibility for free silver today. This is unbelievable. I realize certain natural
disasters hit and that's life in the world and in America and in California. But this was
foreseeable, and I think we're seeing largely preventable. Your take?
You're going to have this happen in Southern California. I mean, the Santa Ana winds blow.
There was going to be a fire yesterday, no matter what. Some people are like, oh,
is it a gender reveal party that sparked it? Was it this? Was it that? Was it a homeless encampment? Probably one of them was. But on days when
there's 100 mile per hour Santa Ana winds coming down from the canyons and there's no humidity,
there's going to be a fire, especially if there's some brush in the hills. So the question is,
what do you do to prepare for it? There's a couple of things that California has done
very, very badly, not just in terms of fighting the fire, but you're going to hear in the coming
days people talking about how, oh, it's weird. I don't have insurance for my home. Fire insurance
companies or home insurance companies have been fleeing the state because of California's price
controls on the insurance industry for years. So California tells people who live in
fire prone areas, like let's say Malibu, which is going to be evacuated if it hasn't been already
today, very, very fire prone, steep canyons, drought conditions, wind comes through.
So your fire insurance, your homeowner's insurance should be more expensive. California says,
oh, we don't want that. We're going to put a price cap on it. And meanwhile, they're going to also raid from the
money of the home insurance companies to have their state managed lender of last resort insurance,
the fair insurance, fair access to insurance requirements. So that basically encourages
people to build in dangerous places with subsidized insurance that they steal from
insurance companies. So what do you do if your state farm, you leave? So they've been leaving
the state, broadly speaking, because they can't make insurance pay because we're not allowed in
a price control situation to let insurance markets tell us how dangerous it is to leave in places.
And so there's a lot of people who are going to have their homes burned down, who are not going
to be able to rebuild at all, or maybe don't have insurance to begin with. All that is a state managed problem. It shows that
people don't have a basic sense of economics of how to deal with a predictable risk. And again,
this risk has been predictable since the time of the Tongva and the Chumash sitting on the hills.
We have a fire ecology in Southern California where I'm from, and we all
have dear friends who we're worried right now and crossing our fingers that their homes haven't been
destroyed in the Palisades and also in the foothills. And it breaks my heart. And we need
to do a better job. California needs to do a much better job of mitigating and planning for these
very, very predictable catastrophes that happen.
This Trump, by the way, has weighed in via Truth Social saying as follows.
Governor Gavin Newsom refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him
that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north
to flow daily into many parts of California.
Excuse me.
Including the areas that are currently burning
in a virtually apocalyptic way.
It goes on from there.
Camille, what do you make of what's happening here?
Well, I mean, I was thinking a lot about Mayor Bass today
and the reporting that I
just saw that she had cut the fire department's budget by like $17 million this year, which is
not a great look for her. All of the stuff that Matt underscored being a good California boy,
and I currently reside in California, are all things that I'm pretty familiar with as well.
There was a huge piece back in 2020, and we see this every once in a while about the Forest Management Service and various other government agencies. So it's, you know,
federal, state, and local who are fully aware of these problems, who have not nearly done enough
to get rid of a lot of this like undergrowth, this fuel, this dry fuel that is just waiting to burn.
I think that what had been recommended back in 2020 was that they'd be burning something like
a million acres per year. And they're not anywhere close to that and haven't really gotten much closer to that.
At the same time, as you underscored, the fire chief talking about diversity, equity and inclusion.
L.A. is cutting its budget for the fire department while they continue to spend money on things like these reparations, exploration committees and all kinds of other insane nonsense.
I mean, your heart goes out to the people who are affected by this. It's also the case that you have to wonder about just the
systematic routine failure by every level of government with respect to California.
And I think that the not so much subsidized, but the state mandated policies, there are a huge problem.
That program is nearly tripled over the course of the last couple of years.
So this is a massive problem that isn't going away anytime soon.
And it's certainly not going to get better if they continue to prioritize all of these kind of social programs over the actual things that you need in order to live in this region at all.
All right, Moynihan.
Now I've added a cough drop to my approach to the show, which I never do.
It's rude.
Sorry for my listening.
I was going to say, it's a cough drop, yeah.
I've had such a nasty cold this week.
I took six steroids yesterday and five steroids this morning.
How they give you the packs? And it dwindles?
So take like two in the morning, two in the afternoon.
I took them all before yesterday's show.
And I took five.
I got my roid rage going.
Wow, you're like the RFK of SiriusXM.
I'm here.
I'm here.
And I'm doing the job.
But this is what I wanted to say.
L.A. Times, excuse me, New York Post reporting that L.A. Fire Department had its budget cut by a staggering 17.6 million this financial year.
Drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second largest cut to come out of this mayor's fiscal year budget.
She had initially wanted to cut it even more to $23 million.
I mean, look, on these issues, I cede everything to Matt Welch, who is a Southern California boy,
hasn't lived there in a long time, but never stops talking about it. Matt should maybe go back.
Former LA Times employee, and Camille actually lives in California. But I see things like this, and I see something, you know, like a $17 million budget cut. And, you know, as somebody from the outside who has
no particular expertise in the fires that are always afflicting Southern California,
one would presume that, you know, beefing up the fire department, not cutting $17 million from the
budget would be the first thing that one might do, particularly considering that California has one of the heaviest tax burdens of any country in the state, in the union. I mean,
you look at how much money that they're gathering in taxes and where is it going? I mean, that's
what I would love to see of like where in L.A. County is that money going? Otherwise, I mean,
obviously they have an enormous amount of money in their hands to deal with a homelessness problem, which has not, you know, been dealt with. So maybe we. So, you know, I feel OK saying it is that our friend Kennedy has a house in the palace.
And Matt and I were talking before this, like we were looking at videos and we're like,
oh, my God, is that Kennedy's house?
Because we've all been there.
And, you know, so we have friends that are just on the front lines of this.
And the second thing is, is because of the unbelievable silliness of the fire chief that
you showed clips of, it's like, I don't, why are you telling me about staffing?
Nobody cares about the staffing of the post office in California.
What are you telling me about your staffing policies?
We don't need to know,
but they're telling you that because they want you to think good.
Look at there's such great people,
but let's move away from her for a second,
who seems like a thoroughly ridiculous individual and, and, you
know, just praise the firefighters. I mean, two people have died. Look at that photograph from
the plane that looks like CGI from an apocalyptic Hollywood movie. And I looked this morning in
terror and I say, I don't, this must have killed X number of people.
God knows that that number is unfortunately going to increase,
but I saw that we have a confirmed two people died in a fire that big.
They should have never gotten that big. It should have been contained.
There should have been positive.
We know that this is what happens in Southern California, but on the positive side, if we can find a small silver lining is that,
you know, the people that are fighting this fire are,
you know, doing, you know, yeoman's work here. They're doing quite a job that they should be
praised for. I am just reading now. This is unbelievable. This is today. Karen Bass
has sent out a tweet. Here she comes, underdog, to save the day.
That reads as follows.
As Angelenos start their Wednesday morning,
there will be notable impacts to air quality
with winds pushing smoke across the LA area.
Please limit your exposure by remaining indoors
with windows and doors closed
and wearing a properly fitted mask.
Oh my God. That's her messaging. That's underdog. And what she's going to do,
where's the tweet about the fire hydrants, about what the plan is to save the lives of your
citizens. Stay inside and wear a mask. Matt Welsh, all over the world right now, we are seeing people
push back on these leftist politicians and the messes they've created. Is this going to happen
even in California after something as disastrous as this? California has had ample opportunity to
push back against leftist politicians over the past X number of years, including the aforementioned
Rick Caruso.
I think back to a guy who was a friend of mine who was an actual Republican mayor of California, Richard Reardon.
He, unlike Karen Bass, responded to the many tragedies that unfolded in Southern California in the early 1990s.
And I'm not just talking about the OJ trial, but especially to the
Northridge earthquake. That's where he found his footing as mayor. And, you know, that damage is
way beyond the city limits of LA. And let's remember that LA County is a much more important
like entity, government entity than the city council and the mayorship. And they handled
twice as much of the fire action, for example, But Richard Reardon went out and he helped and he led and he stood in the rubble and
he did stuff to help rebuild the area.
Karen Bass being out of the country is inexcusable.
As soon as you know it's a red flag day with 80 to 100 mile per hour winds, you turn the
plane around.
You just do.
There are things for you to do if nothing else than to show your
face and to be with your people who are actually fighting these fires. She was in Ghana at the
request of President Joe Biden to honor an inauguration ceremony of some sort. Why does
a mayor of any city need to go to a federal inauguration at the behest of the federal
government? Don't we have like a federal government to do that kind of stuff and some ceremonial
people?
You've got business to do.
I mean, for generations, we've known that you don't leave if you're a mayor or a governor
of Southern California area or California.
You don't leave in October.
October is when these fires usually happen.
It's when the Santa Ana season comes.
She should have turned that thing around.
It's infuriating.
The mask, I understand.
This is not a COVID situation.
If I was in California today, I would wear a mask.
Let me tell you something.
We actually went through this in Connecticut.
I don't remember the month.
It was like over the past 12 months where we had bad fires from Canada that were blowing smoke.
And it was bad. Like It smelled. It must have been
in the summer. I don't know. It was close enough to the summer that the kids were in the pool,
in any event. And the instinct was actually to put on a mask because it was like, oh my God,
I can smell it. I can smell it strongly. And then we consulted with some doctors who were like,
it does absolutely nothing. No. Once again, unless you have a real hazmat mask, that mask will do
nothing for you. The point is, if it's bad enough, you should get out. Get out. And they can't get
out at this point, many of the residents, because of those streets the way they are.
The car is backed up, the smoke and the fire everywhere, and it leaps quickly from place to
place. But let's just go back, okay. Because number one, you raised a very good point
about the insurance. This is, and I want to tell the audience, I know it sounds like this is all
rich people, but it's not, you know, you just hear the word Malibu or, you know, Pacific Palisades.
It's not, trust me, my friend who's in the middle of this is far from rich and her neighbors are far
from rich. And, you know, they're just regular people who have regular
jobs trying to make a living and who cannot get insurance because of the reasons that you just
stated, that the insurance companies did want to raise the rates. And Gavin Newsom said, no,
you know, supposedly as this champion of the people, you know, I'm going to keep the rates low.
But the insurance companies did what they are always going to do in that situation, which is they took their ball and went home like F off.
We're not required to insure you.
The same thing happened up in Montana.
It's happened in state after state across the union when it comes to things like flood
insurance, fire insurance, and other massive disaster insurance situations that these insurers
are afraid of, right? of. It costs a lot.
So they want to jack up rates.
There's a federal policy associated with this.
That's why it happens in Montana as well, which has different governance in general
than the California does.
And it's a classic unintended consequences story.
The FAIR requirement, F-A-I-R, Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, came as a result of the riots of 1968.
It was basically a response post Martin Luther King assassination when there's inner city riots that you could see the scars from space in Washington, D.C. along K Street and 14th.
So they said we need to pass this.
So government will be the lender of last resorts in inner cities that the insurance companies are too scared of. That was the initial purpose of it. The practical effect of it is that it ended up subsidizing because of bad management, hurricane beachside residences in Florida, foothills residences in California and people who live in floodplains in Texas and in Central Valley of California.
So this federal requirement is at the heart of some of this. Then if you have some price controls
on top of it, then it's a disaster. But I really want to, in case that there's anybody out there
listening or watching this and doing the, oh, it's rich people in Pacific Palisades, boo-hoo.
And already I've seen some people come at me and other people about that. If you really want to go that way, which you shouldn't, because that's not American at all.
So knock it off. I wouldn't do that to anybody in this country.
But the other there's four fires currently going on, at least that have names.
But there's a couple of others. But one of the biggest ones is the Eastern Fire, which is happening around the Altadena, Pasadena area, La Cunada, Flintridge, Altadena, Pasadena.
This is where my friends go to buy houses because they can't afford it anywhere else in Los Angeles.
This is the place where people who are schoolteachers buy houses and they are all in evacuation zones, too.
It's a really ugly tendency. We saw it during covid from blue states towards Florida of saying, oh, you know, it serves you right.
You're going to die because you don't take the stupid measures that we're doing in blue states.
Don't do it in the reverse way. There are people who are really, really suffering.
There are difficult public policy questions that California and L.A. need to do a hell of a lot better job.
But be empathetic towards your fellow Americans for crying out loud. Let me just tell you something. My friend who just found out that her house is
gone is a divorced single mom. She's got two young daughters and a dog. She just told me,
I asked her, describe your neighbors, um, mainly elderly, retired flight attendant,
a retired family practice doctor, a real estate agent, a retired social worker,
retired college professor. These are normal Americans. They're, they're not rich. They're,
they're not at the bottom. They're just normal. You know, this is a middle-class neighborhood
that is gone, gone. And I guarantee you not one
of them had insurance and, uh, and they're elderly too. So how exactly is it that, you know, the,
the retired flight attendant is now going to rebuild her life and, and, you know, get her
things back together. This is a nightmare that was foreseeable. And let me just tell you, because what Trump, he hates Gavin Newsom,
totally understandably. It's fine. I agree with him. I understand why he calls him that and I
have no issue, but he and Gavin Newsom have been fighting over things like this for quite some time
now about a disagreement on how to prevent against this. And there's a clip that's going
viral on X right now from 2018 when Trump was president. He was standing in a forest with
Newsom. Look at this. There's been a lot of study going on over the last little while. And I will,
I will say, I think you're going to have, hopefully this is going to be the last of,
of these because this was a really, really bad one. And I know Gavin's committed,
we're all committed, I'm committed to make sure that we get all of this cleaned out and protected.
We've got to take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forests, very important.
That's right.
You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it's a whole different story. It was with the
president of Finland that 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. I mean, it's a fair point and it's a debate that's been had many, many times with mostly
conservatives on the one side saying, get in there and do the advanced cleanup and the
calling of the trees in the forest that needs to be done to keep people safe.
And left-wingers like Gavin Newsom pretending that they're just such tree huggers, they
don't want to do it.
But meanwhile, how many trees just burned?
How many homes just burned? How many
homes just burned? How many people just lost everything, not to mention potentially their
lives, because we wanted to let those little, that 50 feet worth of trees stand instead of
culling the area? If I can go backwards on one small thing, which is, I think, a really important thing.
Matt said something that I very rarely hear him say, because I've known him for a very long time,
is that something is un-American. And I think that he's right about that. Because I want to
just point out that, as you said, Megan, and as Matt said about his friends in the Pasadena area,
not all these people are rich. But my response to that is,
yes, that's clearly true. But also, who cares? What if they all were rich? That is fine. I didn't
grow up rich. I'm not rich now. I'd have no special fealty to a class of, you know, a social
and economic class of people. That's not my concern. i mentioned our friend kennedy and on twitter someone responded her
talking about her house potentially burning down and someone responded sucks to be rich
and to which kennedy responded go fuck yourself which is an appropriate tweet by the way that's
eat a bag of dicks so that's i think that's the next one that's queued up. This is a bit of that, you know,
Luigi Mangione kind of class warfare that we have kind of accepting these days. Like, well,
if it's rich people, then who cares? They can pay for it. Well, that's what I heard when I was in
Wisconsin. Uh, you know, the day that Donald Trump was there after the riots burning down swathes of cities in Wisconsin, it was a well, you know, they have insurance.
It turned out a lot of them didn't have insurance. But even if that were the case, there are memories there.
There are, you know, family photos. There's your entire life.
And for someone to say, well, you're in a high tax bracket, so it doesn't matter
as much. I agree with Kennedy that these people should go fuck themselves.
So, you know, I keep thinking about the fact that California is a place where
they plan to do things like outlaw cars that run on gasoline, like these really sweeping,
ambitious prohibitions that are aimed at transforming the nature of the state
itself and trying to capture the future, it would be wonderful if they adopted that sort of approach
to fire mitigation, like something audacious and aggressive that they continue to talk about year
over year. I mean, California is, I mean, we, I live in Mill Valley, California now. Mill Valley
is similarly at very high risk of fire and actually has a pretty aggressive approach to these things, but is subject to a lot of people hear talk of sort of climate change in the context of these conversations about wildfires and imagine
that mitigating climate change is kind of enough to address this, in which case doing something
about fossil fuels will perhaps help to mitigate this problem. And it just, it does not. It is not
nearly the same thing. And you actually do need more of a serious focus on this. The other thing
that I think a lot about now is at what point, if they don't do something dramatic and audacious, they
have to just stop rebuilding in certain places. Because if you won't do the things that are
necessary to make it feasible to live there in the long run, then perhaps you just kind of give
this space back to the wild and allow it to have this natural process.
These fires rage annually.
It's crazy to think about.
Have you guys been around the Palisades?
Like, it's absolutely beautiful.
The thing that I love about it, and I've spent a little time in like Malibu, which is a lot fancier and on the ocean.
But the thing I love about the Palisades is it's all these
really cute, charming little homes. You know, there are a couple of the grand estates and so
on, but like for the most part, my experience there is it's these really pretty homes. Some
of them have the Mediterranean roofs. It's the stuff you read about when you think about LA from
like the 1950s and how people had these little haciendas
and they were, I was just, it's so much Americana there, just utter charm around every corner.
And not just the-
And the thinking of it just burned to the ground like some dystopian horror film seems impossible.
Go ahead, Matt. Palisades also has a historical role in the 1930s, especially.
It was home to a bunch of Jewish refugees of Central Europe and Adolf Hitler in particular.
So it became a great and grand and important refuge, as did Southern California and the film industry and a couple of other industries as well, which greatly enriched the culture of America, but also is just sort of a beautiful gesture
because it started as a Methodist refuge, and then it just became in this grand American style,
a melting pot style, a place where people could flee bad situations and then create something new
and beautiful and small. And that's Pali High that we're talking about here.
This isn't just any high school that was burning yesterday.
You know, how many movies have been shot at that place?
It's a really lovely, lovely area.
And also, let's remember that the fire jumped PCH.
So PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, which we all mostly know from Nick Nolte mugshots, is the
artery that goes through Malibu.
Look on a map. Look on a topographical map of Southern California.
What are you going to see?
There's only six ways in and out of that place, right?
There are so many huge, tall, steep mountains around the Southland.
And PCH is one of them.
And when the fire starts jumping these things, people can get hemmed in pretty
darn quick. I've always looked at that topographical map with a sort of a paranoid eye and imagine what
would happen if there was a ne'er-do-well on a red flag day. It's pretty easy for people to get
boxed in in a hurry. So if anyone's out there still like wondering whether they should evacuate,
I would say evacuate, dude.
Well, it goes really, really, really fast and the fire will jump.
I think about this because you were saying, you know, Moynihan, you're not rich.
I was not raised rich, but now I'm pretty rich.
And I think about like, God forbid this happened. Of course, life, the life of my family and my pets would be my number one
thought, but then just think about it, rich or poor, what would you grab if you had a
moment?
You know, it would not be your fancy clothes or your, you know, designer car.
It would be like your wedding album or like the photos of your kids when they were little
before we had the iCloud in some of our cases. And it's not re-gettable. For me, it'd be like
pictures of my dad who died in 1985. I can't recreate them. Those losses would burn deep
and it doesn't matter what's in your wallet. And there are so many people out there. It's all gone. It's all literally up in smoke,
not in some remote country, but in one of the busiest, most urban, most lived in cities,
one of the jewels, yes, of America, in the whole world. It seems almost impossible
that they could have let this happen. I mean, I realize, yes, Mother Nature too, but there were
too many hands involved in this that let this happen from the refusal to call appropriately
to protect these folks in the first place, to the focus on DEI at a fire
department that had other needs. You live in Norway where we went in June. You're probably
good on the water supply. Everything is surrounded by water. There's a fjord out everybody's window.
I don't know. Yes, you're in Los Angeles. There's an ocean there, but they
have not been adequately sourcing the water for some time now, and they know it. So there's
multiple problems out there that let this happen. Here's one thing that just came in
as follows. Stand by. California's wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan in 2022 emphasized
that, quote, rare plants and species diversity must be protected when clearing forest floors.
Now, why, why, McNeil, why must the rare plants and species diversity be protected, right? The whole point in clearing a forest
is to protect human life. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously not an illegitimate concern to be
worried about the diversity of the forest, obviously. But it is a matter of having some
sort of qualified concern for those things and actually attacking the issue in a very serious way.
And unfortunately, this is a decades old problem, as Matt already alluded to.
And it's not something that has only become an issue since 2014. particular moments where the current thing is some unique set of social concerns, whether it be
environmental concerns or it be something related to race and racial justice. The fact that there
are all of these other distractions is important and noteworthy, but it's also the case that they
manage to find these distractions because it is easier to govern by expressing this continuous
concern for these peripheral issues that don't have any
meaningful consequence for most people's lives than it is to actually be held accountable for
trying to address the tangible concerns that these communities face, whether it be homelessness
or the persistent threat of wildfires, as the folks of LA are finding out right now.
I think the- Can I follow up on that?
The following guys is- Megan- Let me just jump in for one second. James Woods has been on the program multiple L.A. are finding out right now. Can I follow up on that?
Let me just jump in for one second.
James Woods has been on the program multiple times.
He's a friend of the show and of mine personally.
He's been posting on X prolifically about this as the fire came right up to his home.
Here he is speaking about it.
This just aired on CNN.
Like an inferno.
Every house was on fire around us.
And, you know, he got him out
and the house burned down about an hour later.
He would have been in there alone.
It was just...
And then Robert called us and told us
that that house had gone and the house below that
and the house on the other side.
And then at 11.49 last night,
all the smoke alarms in our house
alerted our phones that our
house
that we had just renovated for
three years and had just
finally moved into about three months
ago.
All the smoke alarms are going off.
So I'm
not clear. I think James may have lost his house.
He may have lost his house.
He just tweeted,
We renovated a home after COVID and just finished last month.
To all the lovely people offering care and love, I'll say this.
There is no possession as priceless as friends and good neighbors during a tragedy.
I can't believe the blessings we enjoy.
And I am humbly grateful.
Oh,
God bless him. God bless him. Um, that he, there, he was talking about his 94 year old neighbor,
barely escaping being burned alive. Here is video that was posted publicly.
This is my friend's neighborhood. The one who lost everything, the two young daughters. Look at this, you guys.
Oof.
For the listening audience, it is burned trees.
It is home after home of just a shell.
You can see just like a shell of a home.
It reminds me, guys, of, look at that.
Foundations.
It reminds me of what you see after a tornado goes through and the tornado,
you know, that is something you cannot do anything about. You know, there are certain
parts of the country where the tornadoes hit and people have been raised, look at this,
for blocks and blocks and blocks. I cannot believe my eyes. This was lost to fire. You can see how dense,
densely populated the area was. The picket white fence in front of a dystopian nightmare again,
burned trees, nothing left of homes. This is just a person tooling around, seeing it firsthand,
and it happens to be my friend's neighborhood where she lost everything. We have Mayor Karen Bass with the following tweet just out.
She's giving the number for power outages. This woman's utterly useless. My friend and others
are sitting there with absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, trying to find somebody
to take them in
so they can be under a roof. Um, and they don't need a number for a power outage. That's,
that's not what they need right now. I don't know what else she's doing, but I have zero
hope that this woman will run hurt on this. Just like, I don't think Gavin Newsom,
Newsom did either. He just, um, he just canceled his trip to Washington DC for the Jimmy Carter funeral
to deal with the fires. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for your service, governor.
I don't know. I, I don't, you know, on the political question, you guys,
I don't know. I think there's a policy. They're so left wing. They're so left wing for the most
part, but so are the Canadians. And Justin Trudeau was just
forced to step down and they are looking at this Pierre Polyev very seriously. And he's the favorite,
even according to the New York times to win now that the Canadians, the Canadians are going to
elect Aikens conservative. You know, we, what, what, watching what's happening in Germany,
watching the rebellion in the UK, like what we did here, electing a two time impeached,
convicted, whatever, you know how the left says about Trump. People have had it. They've had it
with these left wing policies that are, yes, deadly, deadly.
Megan, I think that I mean, and you're right about canada i mean the conservatives have about 44 45
percent in the last opinion polls and that's just marching towards the next prime ministership
but i think you're right about this and i think it's a kind of global thing because i think people
are very tired of the politics of symbolism because the politics of symbolism oftentimes
have very destructive consequences.
So, for instance, Camille says, you know, rightfully so, said, you know, what?
Why not just tell us what the plan is?
Lay out the plan for dealing with these fires.
Go on.
Tell.
Well, there's no.
What is the incentive for that?
There's no incentive for that. for people like the fire chief in LA County is to come out and you will get on TV because of the people who are controlling these news networks and newspapers, et cetera, will put you on the
front cover. If you tell them how many one-legged transgender Albanians are going to be fighting
fires, like this is symbolism that is tough constituency. But they do have one by the way but no that is the
same thing about immigration is that you know we talk about immigration in these kind of
philosophical ways and accuse the people who are opposed to sort of unmitigated uh illegal
immigration and say well you know if you with that, this is kind of a racist
kind of Trumpian thing. And then people in New York City and L.A. and less so in L.A., but New
York City especially, you know, are dealing with this crisis and saying, oh, yeah, that's just not
a talking point. It's not like, you know, you know, something that we argue about in the opinion
sections of newspapers. It actually has practical consequences. But the incentives are totally wrong. I mean, there is no incentive to go out there and say,
this is our plan for fires. But there is an incentive to go out and say, look at how great
I am. Pat me on the back for what I'm doing for some political issue inside the fire department
that no one cares about and affects no one, but affects them negatively. But it's about that person. It's about that fire chief. Look at how great I am and look at how I'm
following the sort of precepts of modern politics. No one cares. You see it in Hollywood too.
Think about the interview. Like, you know, this could be solved if you would just put the things
out loud that you're actually saying in your head and you're dressing up with fancy letters.
You know, think about it. You know, Camille, I come in to interview with you as I want to be the fire chief and you're the mayor.
And, and you say to me, let's just go over some basics. Do you have a vagina?
Excellent. Okay. You've already moved up. And what color is it? Who has access to it?
Who has access to it? Exactly. I don't see vagina color.
I don't see vagina color. What color is the vagina?
A couple words too long there, Matt.
Seriously, right?
Like the absurdity.
It's bad enough that they're like, she's a woman.
But they were supposed to celebrate the fact that she's a lesbian.
Who gives a shit?
Better firefighters, I think.
According to all the data.
I don't know.
What?
I don't know.
I wanted to make one quick point about electricity and power outages.
There is a reason why that's interesting.
Get the business out of that.
That's interesting.
I had to.
Is that if you're going to do, as Camille was saying, a mandate that everyone must have an electric guitar.
I like a guitar.
That'd be the Jimi Hendrix mandate.
No, that everyone must have electric cars.
You better have an electrical grid that works.
And they don't.
And also, who's the biggest contributor to wildfires in California over the last 20 years?
Hmm.
Let's guess.
It's the people who have
electrical lines. That is what sparks so many of the wildfires because they spark literally
and then they go poof. So people need to think this stuff through a little bit more.
Oh my God. Our hearts and prayers and thoughts go out to the people suffering right now,
praying for lives to be saved at this point. We'll be right back. More with the guys from
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ancient nutrition. My friend just sent me a picture of what's left of her house in the Palisades? Would you look at this? Oh, God. Oh, God.
Dear God.
Only the chimney.
Oh, wow.
Only the chimney remains.
That's it.
This is, I mean, my poor friend.
She's like, I don't know what they're going to do.
You know, like, she's just in the same position as all of her neighbors from that video that we played you
where the person was just going down the street. They're, they're all homeless now, all of them.
I mean, there's not enough taxpayer money in the state of California to, to take care of all this
damage. And I don't know about the insurance situation. Um, maybe we can get Greenland to
pay for it once they become the 51st state. I'll get to Greenland in a second.
I'll get to Greenland. Um, but talk about the perfect segue segue.
A couple of years ago, John Stossel, friend of all of ours and, um, you know, former Fox host,
he's been doing great on YouTube. He has a very, very interesting show that he does there. And he
posts the best clips. He does these in-depth like eight to 11 minute pieces that get up and down on
a story very clearly in the way only Stossel can. And he did one on California wildfires
and the ridiculous environmental concerns that help contribute to them. And guess what happened to his very well
researched and presented and produced video? It got censored by Facebook, which is one of the
other big stories in the news today, as Mark Zuckerberg is now saying he's going to finally
stop doing that. But before we get to the resolution and Mark Zuckerberg's come to
Jesus moment, we cut, my team knows that I have basically a rule that we don't do sound bites
over 60 seconds just because it drones on for the audience. But this one's two minutes and
there's a reason, like watch this. It's very compelling. We condensed Stossel's report that Facebook found so objectionable, it had to be censored.
What?
Looking at Facebook, I was shocked to see this big notice on my page, missing context.
It's posted on my video that calls California's fires government-fueled.
Because Facebook says this information could mislead people.
What's worse is that now Facebook says it will show my content to fewer people.
Yikes! My news model is based on social media companies showing you videos.
Why did Facebook penalize me?
I clicked the button that says, see why.
It goes to a page from a group called Climate Feedback that writes about climate change
and claims to sort fact from fiction.
Facebook gives this little group power to cut me off?
Yeah, Climate Feedback posted this statement in quotes, as if it's something I said, and calls
that statement misleading, saying it misrepresents a complex reality.
Well, it does.
But I never said that.
I actually said,
Climate change has made things worse.
California's warmed three degrees over 50 years.
Facebook's letting activists restrict my views based on things I never said.
I tried.
I emailed the editor.
She didn't respond.
But two of three scientists listed as reviewers did agree to interviews.
You're smearing me based on something I didn't say.
Yeah, I mean, I've never commented on your article.
That was a shock.
He hadn't even seen my video.
If this is implying
that we have reviewed the video, then this is clearly wrong. There's something wrong with the
system. He said my video was probably flagged because I interviewed environmentalist Michael
Schellenberger. And you're not allowed to do that. You can't talk to Michael Schellenberger
and have your video live on Facebook. And if I, memory serves, it's been a couple of years
since I saw the original piece, but they admitted that they made a mistake and then they still
wouldn't back down on the censorship. They, like he caught them in fake censorship, you know,
based on nothing, mistakes of theirs. And then they still refused to let the video have the full circulation
and not be censored. So it was an absurdity. It's things like that, that in part got us into this
mess in California. It's yet another thing that the left has said over the past 10 plus years,
we're not allowed to discuss. You can't listen to Michael Schellenberger, former Greenpeace activist, former Obama administration partner on the Solyndra
Green window deal, which he learned firsthand was a disaster, which is what turned him more
into, I don't want to call him a man of the right, but just a man of reason saying,
these policies suck. What are we doing? We're ruining the earth him a man of the right, but just a man of reason saying these policies suck.
Like, what are we doing? We're ruining the earth in the name of green energy.
And it's having the opposite effect. So he gets banned. Stossel gets banned. We can't have honest discussions about wildfires. And now my friend's home is burned to the ground.
So, you know, great, Mark Zuckerberg. Cool, Mark Zuckerberg, welcome to our free speech party.
But you're a day late and a dollar short.
Well, I mean, let's be honest that he has also been as browbeaten as any executive in the country for the last basically since November or whatever the day was after the election in 2016, because the left absolutely freaked out
and blamed Russia and Cambridge Analytica and Vladimir Putin and the cookie monster living
under their bed for Donald Trump winning, which is a very huge and horrible shock to him.
And by that point, Facebook was large enough that it did what large companies tend to do,
which is don't kick me too much
and don't do anything that gets rid of
my dominant position in the market.
And oh, do you want some regulations?
I'll help you write them.
That's what big incumbents tend to do.
And so he played ball
because he was pressured to play ball,
but also that it was sort of expedient for him.
I'm happy that he turned.
Everyone should go watch that video if you haven't.
And I'm sure you played some of it yesterday
or we'll play some of it soon. No, I'll show some of it in a minute.
His hair, if nothing else, is just fantastic, and I applaud him for it. And he's been describing
himself more as libertarian over the years, which is very good. And this is a moment where it's
kind of crystallizing a certain cultural vibe shift, if nothing else. But I would caution people,
and that cultural vibe shift to me is that the culture of free speech is reasserting itself,
whether the institutions of free speech are doing that, whether the incoming administration is going
to be good for free speech. There's many reasons to think that it won't be good for free speech,
just in the way that the FCC incoming chairman or going to be
chairman has talked about a couple of things, but table that for a second. That's an important thing.
The culture of free speech is crucial to what all of us do. And to have social media companies
now coming around to where Elon Musk has already been, and he's a weird person too on some of these
issues, but broadly speaking, he has thrown open rather than restricted the amount of speech on
his platform.
And Zuckerberg even said that he's going to adopt the same kind of community notes system
that Musk has on Twitter, which is probably the greatest innovation in the Musk era.
It's just a real-time fact-checking what Wikipedia was supposed to be back in the day on some
level.
But it's so funny that you should say he's playing, but he's playing ball in the free speech pond the same way Steve Martin's son, Kevin Buckman, was playing ball in the movie Parenthood when Steve Martin made him.
Remember, play third base or whatever it was.
And like, it was a disaster.
Poor Kevin Buckman was humiliated, but he had to do it because his dad made him.
There was a happy ending ultimately.
But I feel like you're right. He was brought to heel, which is great. We'll take him however we
can get him. I feel like it's more genuine. It's looking at the video. It feels kind of more
genuine. I don't actually want him to be responding to like government pressure in any direction,
whether it's in a way that's positive or negative. I would commend the pressure.
I don't think so either. But I'm just saying I wouldn't want that to happen. That's what the
left is now describing this, that he's capitulating and he's being brought to heel. I don't necessarily
think that that is the case. I don't know. He's being brought to heel by us, not Trump.
I absolutely hope so. And I would commend people briefly to go and read Matt Taibbi on this,
who's been obviously one of the best chroniclers of the
way that governments, especially in the Biden era, has put unholy amounts of pressure on social media
companies to ban things. I mean, Rand Paul couldn't go on YouTube to say that, hey, you know,
masking studies are not really all that. They would ban it for six months after that. It's crazy
what takes place. We're still like unraveling that but what taibi argues is that perhaps
zuckerberg in the way that he's talking about this wants to partner with donald trump in a way that
is actually good and not bad and that is there's a lot of uh western european and other country uh
efforts to make a sort of transnational uh anti-speech or sort of anti-misinformation regime.
And so if Zuckerberg is leading or being part of the solution to fight against that and to encourage Trump,
because now Trump has a lot of Silicon Valley people have his ear in ways that they didn't five years ago at all.
If they can encourage him to resist any American cooperation, in fact, active American resistance to any attempts to be as horribly anti free speech as the UK has become, then that can be a really good thing, I think.
Which Zuckerberg actually mentions, too.
Yes.
So let me play a little bit of the Zuckerberg mea culpa admission announcement of the end of his censorship regime.
The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing
speech. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more
trust than they've created. We're gonna simplify our content policies
and get rid of a bunch of restrictions
on topics like immigration and gender
that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
Right on.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive
has increasingly been used to shut down opinions
and shut out people with different ideas,
and it's gone too far.
YouTube, your move.
Your move.
C-3PO is on the right side of speech.
I want to do the things.
It's like, what?
He's a robot.
This is, by the way, there's a lot of people trying to read Mark Zuckerberg here,
and it's like now he's bowing down to Trump.
If it's any indication of the people I think that Matt and Camille and I have talked to,
Megan, I'm sure this is true of you, too, that after the kind of Me Too movement, after
the so-called racial reckoning, all of these things that companies were doing after the
2016 election of Donald Trump and when they kind of unwound those things, the number I'm
thinking of very specific people in my mind right now, too, who have come to me and said,
yeah, no, we never believed that.
It was just like we kind of had to do that in the moment.
And they're admitting to their own cowardice.
And it's not a great position to be in.
But it could be very well be true.
And I can't look into his brain and figure out why he's doing this.
But it could very well be true that Mark Zuckerberg never believed the stuff that he was implementing on Facebook.
And then we had something like COVID.
And COVID
is a really key component here because when it comes to trust in the media, it's been low for
a long time. Its lowest ebb has been after COVID. Incredibly low trust in media because people were
actually paying attention. You have to wear masks. You have to stay inside. Your kids can't go to
school. So you're actually checking this stuff rather than it only being left to a very narrow band of people who care about this stuff and whether the fact checkers and whether the experts are right about this stuff. So that kind of buckled people's impression of what these experts are. And so when experts, quote unquote, are coming onto Facebook and saying, no, the expert says this isn't true. We don't have that trust anymore. But to the Stossel thing, one final point is that look at the way they did this. It omits context. Has anyone here ever written an
editorial? I know all of us have. What do you do when you write an editorial? Why is the newspaper
not this big, but this big? Because you have to, by nature, omit context in everything that you do.
So therefore, it is a weapon to wield in everything that you do. So therefore,
it is a weapon to wield against anyone at any time. Of course, it's not going to have context
for everything. You have to leave certain things out and say, hey, the general narrative is this.
I'm going to inform you about some other opinions. And then the fact checker comes in and says,
well, why didn't you include the initial narrative? That is unbalanced, as it were. And this is the kind
of nonsense game that these people were playing. And people were wising up to it. And that's the
other reason that they backed away from it. Yeah, I think there's plenty of reasons.
I'll never forget the day that Facebook announced they were going to start fact-checking presidential
ads. This was years ago. This isn't this election cycle. And I remember standing there in my kitchen
saying, this is a huge mistake. This will not end well. They are not in a position to do this. Let the candidates slug it out and call each other liars. Let community notes pop up, however. But Facebook cannot do this. And it was the beginning of the end for Facebook's political feed, you know, their news feed, which they don't really do anymore. We've been on Facebook for years and I never used it as a big tool to promote the show.
So I wasn't as hurt by this as some others in this sphere.
But they basically completely, what's the word, like depressed any and all circulation of news like about a year ago.
And it seriously hurt a lot of right wing podcasts, which had been using
Facebook to promote their, their brand. And it was, that was like a culmination too, of just
their fact checking attempts and how poorly they were going. And like, once you step a foot in this
lane, it's just a freaking disaster. You can, in the United States of America, this shit doesn't
work, but Camille, you wouldn't know that from the reactions
to Zuckerberg's announcement. I'll just give you one, which is my favorite. Here's the headline.
Okay. Okay. Fact checker condemns Facebook for cutting ties with first responders of the internet.
What? Describing themselves as the first response yes yes yes the greatest
heroes the greatest champions of internet freedom um are the fact checkers um you know what's funny
i i haven't talked to mark um i haven't talked to like jeff bezos but i have traveled in a lot
of circles with some of the people that they've been friendly with mark andreessen and um uh peter
teal are people who have known Zuckerberg for
years, were early involved in Facebook and were on the board for years. I think there's plenty
of reason to believe that a lot of people have over the course of the recent years done many
things that they didn't really believe that they should be doing, but they did it out of fear
or concern that they simply couldn't get away with pushing
back against certain things. And they feel newly liberated to actually push back and assert a bit
of power and say, yeah, we're not going to do those things anymore. And I think, Megan, you
were correct to flag early on that it was not a good idea for Facebook to begin fact-checking
political ads, not a good idea for them to outsource responsibility for trying to fact-check the videos that Stossel or anyone else is posting, and then flagging them formally, corporately, because there's just way too much opportunity for that to go badly for you. to you who are interested in wielding power towards political ends, not merely in the
interest of fairness and policing misinformation and disinformation, nearly always with a particular
political slant, it's going to result in plenty of bad things for you.
It'll hurt your brand in the long run.
And that is actually what folks have seen in recent years.
So it is nice to see the pendulum swing back.
I do suspect a lot of that happens to be related to culture.
And I hope that we can actually do this a lot of that happens to be related to culture.
And I hope that we can actually do this in a way that's a bit more stable. I think there are plenty of criticisms that one can raise with respect to something like community notes.
But it does seem to me that it is infinitely better than what Facebook chose to do when they,
again, outsource responsibility for this to these ostensibly independent organizations that in many instances have
these political biases. It is far better to have a transparent process that actually gives people
the sensibility about what those underlying concerns are related to the articles and to
make it broadly available and open. And just like in the last election, we saw some of these
betting markets give us some of the best information about where the election was likely to go, community notes processes work something like that.
So there's plenty of reason to think that that could be a very healthy thing.
And I think reasons for optimism with respect to the kind of culture of free speech reasserting itself.
Although I've been assured by some people that that isn't a thing that exists.
But I beg to differ. But it's so great because as I listen to you talk, all I can think is,
we're winning. We're winning. You know, this free speech fight, you know, you guys have been in it
neck deep. We're winning. This is a sign of that. And the second thing I was thinking about was my
friend because her house burned, her car burned. And think about the other thing that is generally,
you know, in your car and in your house, all your birth certificates, you know,
your kid's birth certificates, your car registration, you know, you're like all of
that's like, just think of the number of hours, you know, it's going to take you to try to reproduce those items. How the hell,
like how do you even start to go find your car registration data? I don't like, yeah, DMV,
that's, that may be burned too. I just, whatever. I'm back and forth on these two stories, but
on the, on the happier note, we're winning. Although Brian Stelter is very upset,
which is another sign we are winning. The right side is winning Although Brian Stelter is very upset, which is another sign we are winning.
The right side is winning.
Brian Stelter, quote,
Meta's framing in its PR blog post is more speech and fewer mistakes.
An alternate title could be more lies and more confusion.
That's probably not it.
And then there's the New York times headline that everybody mocked yesterday
on X meta says fact checkers were the problem.
Fact checkers rule that false ruled,
ruled.
That's the great,
great answer.
I wrote,
I think my first long piece about,
uh,
how the fact checking industry,
which deserves scare quotes, uh, scare quotes, was not all that. It was more than a dozen years ago or a dozen years ago or so for reason because of the way that it was being applied so in lopsidedly in the Obama era. Right. You had PolitiFact giving lie of the year about Obamacare. OK, that makes sense. Except it was about Sarah Palin
making a Facebook post
about death panels.
It wasn't about whether
you could keep your doctor.
It wasn't about whether,
you know, you've taken on
the drug lobby and finally won
or many of the other things
that wasn't about like
their lie of the year this year.
Matt.
Yeah, it was not Joe Biden's.
The best.
Yes, exactly.
Or it was cats and dogs. It's the cats and dogs.
I mean, that's like even take out the politics of this, even take out the it's obvious that you're more upset about Republican and MAGA Republican in particular, than you are about Democratic. Take that out. Actually look at the difference between, and this was true 12 years ago, it's true today, they want to fact
check political rhetoric. They don't want to fact check the lies that government are telling you
in the name of making bad policy. How many, I mean, this goes hand in hand. We've had this
crackdown on quote unquote misinformation hand in hand with the government serially lying to us about policies relating especially to COVID
and Michael's right to point to that. Huh? That's an interesting thing. Why are we like actually
using government pressure? I would say in violation of the first amendment, it's being
sort of adjudicated as we speak, but government pressure about this at the same time that the
government is making brand new kind of bold stakes of its own misinformation. I would say that those
two things go hand in hand. And journalism made a really bad departure 10 years ago or so,
where it decided to be the referee of rhetoric as opposed to covering policy. Policy matters much, much more.
And Democratic policy in Democratic places has produced really bad results.
Republican policy sometimes does as well.
But you should actually follow the way that that works.
And they don't.
They are more naturally inclined to be upset with Sarah Palin's rhetoric than what would
actually Barack Obama did when passing and
implementing Obamacare. And this goes on and on and on. The biggest lie of a really long time
was Biden's age. That that is not lie of the year is is fundamentally enraging to at least half of
the country. It is a lie itself. I don't we'll find out what the people of Greenland think. Charles C.W. Cook writes it up as follows, and I love this. This is it.
For more than a decade now, many people within both social media and legacy media, in quotes, have attempted to use their power to end debate on a host of important democratic issues. This has failed and spectacularly so. Even if one regards Zuckerberg's shift as a purely cynical
surrender performed by a malleable and amoral cipher, one ought to be pleased at the impetus
that provoked it. Something is changing out there and changing for the better. Right on.
And I know Matt, you just wrote an article on Charlie Hebdo. It's amazing that we're at the 10-year anniversary of that massacre, which was about free speech.
And whether, as that magazine did, you can depict the so-called Prophet Muhammad or you will be murdered.
And some segment of the population will say, yeah, right, you were offensive, right? I mean, we kind of touched on this
a little bit earlier this week
when I was going off on the movie Conclave
because it makes a total mockery of Catholicism
and the cardinals and the pope by, spoiler alert,
they make the new pope intersex.
Okay, I think the LA Fire Department would be thrilled. But in any event, I was saying they
would never do that. Never do that to Islam or Muslims or even potentially Jewish people,
but the Catholics, Christians, total fair game. In any event, the free speech debate
has been raging for the better part of 10 years. And that Charlie Hebdo moment was
one of the most important parts. And we looked like we were losing, but we're not.
Well, I worry. I think we are winning in the culture and you're right to point that out.
But we are not going to it's we're not going to find a lot of winning within the kind of legacy
cultural institutions. Even yesterday, you know, I was just doing a last quick little Google News search before
I hit publish on a piece about Charlie Hebdo.
And here's the Columbia Journalism Review, right?
Institutional kind of organ of the media industry talking to itself, you know, talking about
the mixed legacy and the free speech.
It's more complicated and nuanced than all of that.
And like we're talking about the murder of 12 people,
beloved cartoonists,
cartoonists who mocked first and mostly actually the Pope and every single
French leader.
I mean,
they're an anti clerical satirical weekly stretching way back,
very anti authoritarian.
There isn't the mixed record here is only the performance of the media,
which made Charlie Hebdo lonely, and it shouldn't have been. And this is something that Michael and
I in particular have talked about and written about many times, not just over the last 10 years,
but over the last 35, since the fatwa was placed on Salman Rushdie for Satanic Verses,
there was a moment there where there was a time for choosing
among Western intellectuals and they chose badly. They chose intersectionally. They said, well,
Rushdie and Jimmy Carter's words in an op-ed that he wrote for the New York Times just
three weeks after the fatwa, Rushdie is guilty of insulting Islam because people from Muslim countries are more oppressed than Catholics or than people from a majority opinion. This was like a new introduction of cowardice on the part of the West, kind of judging. No one cared. And then a bunch of imams in the Middle East started publicizing them months later. And then it led to a bunch of riots.
That was the moment when the West writ large should have reprinted those cartoons. I advocated
for such when I worked for the LA Times very strenuously, and I lost very narrowly in the
opinion section. And I feel ashamed to this day that I didn't win that argument because Charlie Hebdo
was one of the only places that did that. And once you become an outlier, then you become a target.
And they became an outlier because of the cowardice of the West and not just about
reprinting cartoons about in the case of the New York times at one point, writing a file story
about a statue of Muhammad that appeared on top of a New York
courthouse for a half a century that no one cared about. They wrote an article about this in the
wake of one of the Charlie Hebdo controversies and didn't even run a file photo of the statue
that existed. Oh my Lord. The historical photo. But you can make the Pope intersex. The Pope,
the male Pope can have lady
reproductive parts and it wins awards at the Golden Globes and elsewhere. Right. But what
color? That's the real question. You mentioned Matt Taibbi. He's got a sub stack called Racket.
He just posted this in response to Zuckerberg saying in his video yesterday, he cited press
pressure as part of the reason for proposed changes. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how
misinformation was a threat to democracy. Meta tried to address such concerns without becoming
the arbiters of truth. Okay, that's not true. One would think legacy media, writes Taibbi,
outlets covering Zuckerberg's video address might mention this. In
other words, that it was their pressure that led him to implement these bad changes years ago in
the first place. No luck, writes Matt. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times mentioned
the legacy media comments by Zuckerberg. Both papers readers, in other words, were served a
curated version of reality that snipped out uncomfortable details. And God, do they wish the whole world could be like that. Yeah. As as usual. Well said
by Matt. Well said. But yeah. What do you what do you think the people in Greenland are going
to think about it? Are they free speech? I mean, like, I don't know if they're leftist or rightist.
Trump seems to be saying they're pro MAMAGA, but they're Denmark people.
They're kind of owned by Denmark.
I mean, Denmark does own,
and they are as left as you can get.
So I'm not sure, guys.
Do we want this as a 51st state?
Go ahead, Boynihan.
Well, I don't even know where to start with this.
The people of Greenland as a duchy of the day.
Wait, wait, start with this.
Greenland is mostly icy, and Iceland is mostly green. Disgust. That's true. So they're obviously very confused as to
who they are. They might be sort of intersex as a country. They don't know. They're the intersex
of potential territories. Yeah. That's going to be a lot for us to take on. Okay, I am going to give you the floor.
Forgive me, but just to set it up,
Trump is indeed saying,
he had a news conference the other day,
that he would potentially like to buy Greenland.
Greenland is owned by Denmark,
and it's like one of their territories,
and he's saying, well, we want it.
And then he got asked,
well, like it's got a bunch of natural
resources that are amazing and now accessible thanks to some of the global warming. It's not
just completely covered by the Arctic. So we're interested because we don't have as much national
resources as China does. They've got way more than we do. So we're eyeballing, you know, Greenland
is like, well, that could be quite helpful. And Trump proposed this. And then he was asked to
that presser, like, would you, oh, and he also wants to reclaim the Panama Canal, which, okay, it was, we gave it to
Panama under Jimmy Carter. It's no longer ours, but he's saying, well, we're taking it back.
This is bullshit. You're charging us too much to go through it, and we want it. He's also saying
we're going to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He's saber rattling about making Canada a state.
I don't I don't think that one's real, but I think the other ones are real.
So he got asked on the the Panama Canal and Greenland whether he would use military or economic might to make it happen.
Would you rule that out right now, Mr. President?
And he said, no, I won't rule it out. Take a listen.
Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas,
you are not going to use military or economic coercion?
No. We need them for economic security. Well, do we really want Greenland?
I mean, I see the natural resource.
They're NATO country.
I'm not sure we can just go in there and get them.
I mean, do we want Italy?
I mean, you can want a lot of things, but you can't just take Greenland.
You can't buy Greenland. You can't buy Greenland.
You can't take the Panama Canal back from the Panamanians.
I mean, there was a debate.
There was actually a really interesting debate.
And viewers, listeners should go check this out.
In the 1970s, amongst conservatives, actually, about the situation in Panama, and there's
a very famous debate between Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley.
And Ronald Reagan said we should retain control of the canal because we built it. Actually,
the French started building it. We finished building it. And William F. Buckley said it's
not a conservative position. We should give it back to the Panamanians, which we did
under certain conditions when it turned over to full control in 1999. And the Panamanians have
reacted to this recently saying,
no, we're absolutely not.
And look, the thing about Trump is he shoots from the hip
and he says things that sometimes the facts
need to catch up with him.
This idea that he said with the Panama Canal,
he's like, you know, our ships are charged more
to go through.
That's not true.
And it has become more expensive, of course,
because the water levels have been lower and it costs more and it's slower to get ships through. That's not true. And it has become more expensive, of course, because the water
levels have been lower and it's cost more and it's slower to get ships through. So they've
been raising prices. But that kind of thing is just the kind of natural market of these things.
I thought he was kidding about Greenland. And the more that I've watched this, he's like, well,
we need it for national security and we need it for economic security, which I have to say is just
completely bonkers. And I don't think this will go anywhere, but it is totally insane to say that we
want to become like a local imperial power in the next four years. Like what? Seriously?
It's surprising. Like some of the rhetoric at the conference didn't sound exactly isolationist,
you know, like as much as I loved his,
like, you know, you're going to F off Hamas. I better get those hostages back before,
before the inauguration. Loved it. It's a little like, well, what, or, or what? Cause like most MAGA people do not want to get involved in world war three. So there was that. Then there was,
yeah, I kind of do want Greenland. And if I have to potentially involve the military,
I'm not going to rule it out.
And same for Panama. And maybe Canada.
We'll have to see.
I'm joking.
He wasn't quite that bad.
But I do wonder, because he sent Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk and others on Trump Force One to Greenland.
And then Trump called in.
Here's a little soundbite of that visit.
Take a look.
Take a listen.
Tourists seeing it looks like an incredible place.
We've been talking about going for a while.
I'm really excited to be here.
Awesome country.
The scenery coming in was just spectacular.
So just very excited to be here.
Thank you.
He says hello.
We were talking to him yesterday. So he says
hello to everyone in Greenland. Trump tweeted out, make Greenland, Greenland great again.
And he called in when Don Jr. was at a restaurant and he spoke with the people.
And Trump says Greenland, I hear is very MAGA. I don't know if Greenland is MAGA.
Can we start with that? I don't want to be adopting
another California or Oregon. I don't know. I don't know if Greenland is particularly MAGA.
And I don't suspect that statehood is actually in the cards here. But there are some legitimate
forward policy and economic issues here. I mean, China and Russia both have a lot of interest in
the Arctic region. China has a lot of interest in the Arctic region.
China has a lot of cutters and can get into the ice
and can go look for stuff.
And there's been essentially this competition
to see who can get out there
and stake claim to as much space as possible,
or at least kind of clog up the routes
so that it's difficult for the United States to have access.
And the United States is interested in having access
to a bunch of rare earth metals
that you can kind of only get in places like China
and Pakistan or India, Pakistan actually.
And the fact that some of this stuff
happens to be in Iceland as well
is of unique interest to the United States.
So if what Trump is doing here,
and I actually purchased a copy of Art of the Deal
in the last 24 hours and I've been going through it
to try and understand. 10 years through it to try and understand.
Ten years later.
To try and understand.
Listen, I'm a little late, but I mean, there's maybe a little game here.
Better late than never.
Got to understand that ghostwriter.
Trump seems, listen, you could have a ghostwriter and still have particular ideas and he's running the playbook.
I mean, these are grandiose kind of over the top statements.
Oh, we're going to, we're going to annex them. I won't rule those other things out. But if what you really want is a
strategic partnership to to the exclusion of the Chinese and the Russians, and you want to build up
kind of public concern and interest in this issue, you can try to go about this strategically behind
closed doors and be very diplomatic. And it won't even be below the fold
in the New York Times. Right now, everyone is talking about Trump's interest in Iceland or
Greenland. Excuse me. It's easy to confuse the two because of the silly way that they've named them.
Yes. And and the fact the fact that we are talking about it at this point and that it's not just him
insisting, I want to control it. And if I don't get it, I'm going to
start to put tariffs on Norway. He's also saying we're open to other things. And he's sending his
envoys and the envoys are having more strategic, substantive conversations. And the hope here is
clearly to try and get some sort of strategic deal. I mean, Trump has been talking about this
since 2018, 2019. And as soon as he gets back to the White House, or at least within striking distance
of being in the White House again,
he's talking about it again.
This is a serious issue for him.
And similarly with Panama.
The King of Denmark?
Similarly with Panama.
Was it the King of Denmark or the Prime?
Anyway, it was the Prime Minister.
The King of Denmark suddenly added Greenland
to their crest over there
as like a middle finger to Trump.
Meanwhile, I was just in Denmark.
I was there in June.
And let me tell you,
one of the big things they're proud about about their king
is that he rides his little bicycle
with his basket in the front to work.
I'm like, I'm not intimidated.
The fact that there's a king in Denmark and in Sweden
and in Norway is believably hilarious
because they don't do anything and no one cares.
I just want to say that
it was interesting to come on the show
today and find out that my
partner in the fifth column, Camille Foster,
has completely lost his fucking mind.
I'm saying that
there are legitimate issues.
Imperialist Camille.
Let me say this.
As a sort of moderate student of the Cold War,
the way that you do this is not threatening to take people over or buy them.
And they say, no, what is happening in Iceland, not Greenland?
Let me write that down.
This is the art of Moynihan's deal.
Stop threatening to invade people if you want to have a coalition with them.
In Iceland, playing with your name on the side of it, Moynihan. deal. Stop threatening to invade people if you want to have a coalition with them.
No, he's playing with your name on the side of it.
Moynihan, I'm not sure if I'm going to take your pressure.
In fairness, we don't know what that means. Here's John Fetterman.
John Fetterman and Camille could be a joint ticket.
Yes, let's go.
They're sounding an awful lot alike. Take a listen.
A lot of freak outs, you know, and of course, I would never support taking it by force. But I do think it's a responsible conversation if they were open to acquiring it and, you know, whether just buying it outright.
I mean, if anyone think that's bonkers, it's like, well, remember the Louisiana purchase?
I think Alaska was pretty a great deal, too.
$50 million, I think it was.
It was referred to as Seward's Folly, and now that was Alaska now.
So, I mean, open to having all kinds of conversations.
He hasn't even taken office in two weeks.
And we really need to pace ourselves if we're going to freak out over every last tweet or every last conversation or press conference.
But Moynihan's against Alaska. He wishes we didn't have that state either.
I mean, it's a slightly different situation than Louisiana.
We were talking about Greenland, which is not contiguous with America,
but we have a military base in Iceland, in Keflavik, because we kind of talked to the
Icelanders and they were like, OK, what do we get out of this?
And it was just a deal.
We didn't say we're going to invade you unless you give us access to your hot springs.
He hasn't said that exactly.
He hasn't said that exactly.
And again, he's just implied it.
Like China is spending a tremendous amount of money in Africa and South America.
Exactly.
Red China.
And they're trying their very best to have influence there.
They have private, well, not private companies,
but Chinese-owned or linked companies
who have some interest in the Panama Canal
or at least in the surrounding area.
To the extent that the United States
is expressing concerns about this stuff
in formal ways and in grandiose circus-like theatrical ways
is probably not a bad thing on net.
And as strange as it is to have to acknowledge,
if the end result of Trump saying what seemed like completely ridiculous things about acquiring
or annexing some other country is that we do end up with a strategic partnership of some kind
that is to the advantage of the United States and to the disadvantage of our
international adversaries, That's kind of
the first rule they teach you when you take negotiations in law school. The first rule,
you ask for way more than you want to settle for. You know, if you if you need to settle the case
for a million bucks, you do not go in there and say, I want a million bucks or a million to you
go in there and say, I want four million million and then I'll make this case go away. Then negotiate down.
It could be
that international relations
are a little bit different than
a two-sided legal dispute.
Is that true for Trump?
I'm not really meaning that.
Hold on, do we have the exact quote?
I want to read you the exact Trump quote because
he did not say invade.
I think we should be.
He did not.
No.
He said he wouldn't rule it out.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Yeah.
The question was.
OK.
Asked by a reporter if he could assure world leaders that his rhetoric about the Panama Canal and Greenland would not amount to, quote, military or economic coercion.
So, OK, military coercion.
Once he takes office, Trump responded with a simple,
no. He said, we need them for economic security. Quote, I'm not going to commit to that. No,
it might be that you'll have to do something. Look, that Panama Canal is vital to our country.
It's being operated by China. China. And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama.
We didn't give it to China and they've abused it. They've abused that gift. Giving the Panama
Canal to Panama was a very big mistake. So he focused mostly on Panama, but he said he would
not reassure that he is not prepared to use military or economic coercion with respect to Greenland.
That's not a great quote, but we don't know exactly.
I think the right answer there, if you're asked that question, is, yeah, we can maybe turn the
screws economically, but we're not going to invade. I mean, that would maybe be the right
answer for me. But Megan, you raised the point, which I think is a really interesting one,
is that the number of people kind of on the isolationist right and the people who say, you know, the Buchananites of yesteryear who are kind
of in the Trump coalition now, I've seen a lot of them freaking out on Twitter because what Camille
is saying is, you know, the China's Belt and Road policy going across the world, going into Africa
and pushing their influence everywhere, that we need to respond to that. And, you know, that is
something that a lot of these people don't like like this idea of being an imperial power or this idea
of, you know, threatening military action, whether it's dropping, you know, American troops or
whatever it might be, or saying we need to station weapons here. That's exactly the opposite of the
rhetoric that you get from so many of the people that are on the kind of isolationist MAGA right.
And it's really
interesting because I think what happens with Donald Trump is that there's a lot of projection,
that people project what they want him to be. And so I've had conversations with people that
totally forget that he sent, what, 56 Tomahawk missiles into Syria, which in what, the first or
second, first year of his administration. And like that, that was the night he became president.
Is that right? Oh, yeah. That was, first year of his administration. And like that, he's forgotten about it. That was the night he became president.
Is that right?
Oh yeah, that was Van Jones, right?
Who said that the night became- Oh yeah, oh God.
A great Van Jones.
But that kind of thing is there's a lot of projection
and it's really funny to watch the response
from people who say, we're going to look inward,
a kind of Ron Paul vision of the world.
And he's like, who are we going to invade locally?
We're invading Greenland and Panama, maybe Canada,
and also we're annihilating
Hamas. But they already
invaded Panama in 1989, so
this would be a second go. He formally
ruled out Canada. He did say it would be amazing.
It's rhetoric about Canada that we don't
really want them. I mean, let's be honest.
We don't really want them. I think they're going to be
in better hands with Pierre, Polyev.
I hope they do the right thing.
And then our evil top hat to the north becomes less evil under Pierre.
Wait, where is that quote, you guys?
Debbie Murphy, where is that quote from our friends in the Canadian right-wing news?
Okay, it's Ezra Levant.
You guys got to hear this.
You've got to hear this.
We love this guy.
He's been on the show.
He's a more conservative pundit up there in Canada. And he explained why Canadians are reacting favorably,
many Canadians, to the Trump rhetoric about, we'll take them. We're taking Canada too.
Taking it all. Okay. Here is what he said. It was a threat on X. Why are Trump's 51st state
comments resonating so loudly in Canada? Because of Trudeau himself. When Justin Trudeau first
won election in 2015, he told an American newspaper, there is no core identity, no mainstream
in Canada. He said, we're the first post-national state. Such gross left-wing rhetoric, okay?
He goes on.
Since then, he's taken our founding prime minister
off the $10 bill.
He's altered our national anthem.
He's accused Canada of committing genocide
against our indigenous people,
but he won't say that about China and the Uyghurs.
He regularly accuses Canadians of being racist and sexist,
even as he dresses up in blackface.
He's denuded our military to the point
where we can't even participate in NATO war
games because we lack modern equipment, but equipment, but he can't afford tampon dispensers
in male bathrooms and military bases. His veterans affair department now recommends assisted suicide
to vets with PTSD. This is why Trump's statements about becoming the 51st state
sting. That's why they hit home.
Because for a decade, Trudeau and every institution in the country, the regime media, the universities, the courts, the parliament has said Canada means nothing.
Every one of Trudeau's actions say Canada means nothing.
It's really just a hotel.
Well, Trump knows about hotels.
Why wouldn't he try to buy one, especially one that's so dilapidated.
Wow.
A fact check, though. I think it was brownface and not blackface, but
that is true.
It was true blackface. He did
the minstrel show blackface.
Full on. He was like the
Canadian Al Jolson.
He totally was.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've heard.
Yes, you've waded into this debate before, haven't you, Megan?
I love Tropic Thunder, for the record.
I have to take a break.
It's a great movie.
I'll be right back.
Don't go away.
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I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest,
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Listen to this, you guys.
This is just tweeted out by the New York Times.
Things are getting tense in L.A. as fire hydrants and reservoirs in the Palisades begin to run low.
At the crest of Sunset Boulevard, a desperate man dropped to his knees in front of a firefighter who was battling a blaze consuming the home next door, begging him to turn the water on the flames threatening his own home. Another firefighter warned, we're down to 25%. Hold off.
They're having to basically ration what's left of the water in the hydrants, given how low the
supply is. I don't mean they to live on water.
Why is this so hard?
That is mismanagement to me.
It seems pretty clear.
There's a I just retweeted out Joel Pollack from Breitbart, who lives, I believe, in Brentwood, but he is definitely local.
He just had a really good informative thread about a variety of issues, including reservoirs and fire management, brush management specific to the Palisades.
I recommend it, and hopefully people will tune into wherever he's talking.
Guys, thank you.
It's been a pleasure spending the past two hours with you.
Prayers go out to our friends in California for a better result and for better leaders.
I really hope they help themselves.
See you guys soon.
Thanks, Megan.
Debbie Murphy, Canadian Debbie,
lets me know that this is how they changed Canada's anthem
in 2018 under Trudeau.
It used to say,
O Canada, our home and native land,
true patriot love in all thy sons' command.
And he changed it to, in all of us' command,
because you can't have sons
in anything associated with Trudeau. Like in,
you know, America, the beautiful, you can't have thy brotherhood. You'd have to change it to
brotherhood and sisterhood and personhood and they be hood. It's ridiculous. Goodbye. No one
will miss you. Even the left hates you, Justin Trudeau. Uh, before we go, I want to tell you
that tomorrow on the show, we have a different
Californian, Bill Maher. We'll be back on the show and we'll ask him whether he's experiencing
any of this devastation firsthand and what his reaction is to whether California will wake up
and try to find some better leaders to help them with these tragedies among others out West.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.
No BS, no agenda and no fear.