SoCal hellscape: Bad Policy, Bad Politics, Bad Priorities (01-08-2025--Hour1)
The Pete Kaliner ShowJanuary 08, 202500:32:3329.86 MB

SoCal hellscape: Bad Policy, Bad Politics, Bad Priorities (01-08-2025--Hour1)

This episode is presented by Create A Video – Wildfires are raging across Southern California today and firefighters are overwhelmed as thousands of structures are razed by the flames. The weather conditions are impossible to prevent. But the devastation is not.

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[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Last night, I started seeing a lot of the stories coming out of California, Southern California, and the wildfires that are just devastating the areas out there. And as I look, I'm not an expert, unlike, you know, deep water submersibles and Ukrainian Russian history, I'm not an expert on on Southern California geography and

[00:00:57] environmental policy and all of the laws at the state and national and federal levels. But I have been reading people who do know what's going on now, but also what has kind of led up to this. So I put these into buckets of bad policy, bad politics, and bad priorities.

[00:01:22] And they're not, if I were to do sort of Kamala Harris approved then diagram, there would be overlapping portions of these circles, right? Politics will often, you know, influence not often, it always influences the policy, what can you get done? What can't you get done? The priorities is informed by and informs the politics and the policy. So there, there's a lot of overlap sort of in the center of the

[00:01:51] the Venn diagram there, but bad policy, bad politics and bad priorities. So you got a lot of different angles on this story. First off, let's start with sort of an overview as to what's happening now as best I can surmise and following the media reporting.

[00:02:13] One of the co-owners of Trending Politics, a guy by the name of Colin Rugg, R-U-G-G, shared a video from Liz Kreutz from Malibu, where the beachfront homes in Malibu have been completely destroyed all along the coast.

[00:02:34] The city of Malibu is urging all residents, even if they're not under mandatory evacuation orders, Malibu is urging everybody to get ready to leave, if they haven't already.

[00:02:49] They're dealing with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour in the overnight hours, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson, Eric Scott.

[00:03:02] If you've ever been there, there is apparently a popular seafood restaurant called The Real Inn, R-E-E-L, The Real Inn.

[00:03:11] It is gone. It's been completely razed to the ground.

[00:03:16] At least 30,000 residents in Southern California were forced to evacuate due to multiple wildfires that have destroyed thousands of acres in the area.

[00:03:27] The latest numbers that I saw was approaching 3,000 acres, which is about four and a half to five square miles.

[00:03:38] That's in the Palisades Fire.

[00:03:40] Then there are two other fires.

[00:03:43] There are a total of three.

[00:03:44] I'm not sure everybody is aware of that.

[00:03:46] There are actually three wildfires.

[00:03:48] We don't know what caused any of these at this time, but you've got the Palisades, which was the biggest.

[00:03:58] There's also one called the Eton Fire, E-A-T-O-N, the Eton Fire, and the Hurst Fire, H-U-R-S-T.

[00:04:06] So the Eton Fire and the Hurst Fire, they broke out.

[00:04:11] So the Eton Fire was first reported in the early evening, like around 6, 630, near Pasadena, California.

[00:04:20] The Hurst Fire broke out about four hours later near Silmar, California.

[00:04:25] And combined, those two have more than 1,100 acres destroyed between the two of them.

[00:04:35] I think the Hurst Fire is actually bigger than the Eton Fire, but there's zero containment on these things at this point.

[00:04:43] And you're dealing with these super strong winds, as I mentioned, 100 miles an hour.

[00:04:49] They call them the Santa Ana winds.

[00:04:52] And I was not aware of this, but apparently the Santa Ana winds come from east to west, whereas like the normal, the prevailing westerlies, that's, you know, the wind comes from the west and goes across the entire country, moving to the east coast where we are.

[00:05:09] And so apparently the Santa Ana winds are going the opposite direction and creates all of this turbulence.

[00:05:15] The strong winds, they've got low humidity in the areas.

[00:05:20] That has contributed to the rapid spread of these fires.

[00:05:25] And the conditions are expected to get worse as we move into tomorrow.

[00:05:33] So they're not even at the worst part of this yet, as they expect, according to Cal Fire.

[00:05:40] A state of emergency has been declared by the governor.

[00:05:44] Gavin Newsom posted on Twitter, California has deployed 1,400 firefighting personnel and hundreds of prepositioned assets to combat these unprecedented fires in Los Angeles.

[00:05:58] The first fire was the Pacific Palisades fire.

[00:06:04] The Pacific Palisades is apparently a neighborhood and it's got a lot of houses packed in pretty tight around these curvy mountainous roads.

[00:06:15] And that one started yesterday morning at about 1030 a.m.

[00:06:21] The winds and the unfavorable conditions caused that fire to spread very quickly.

[00:06:28] And that's where it ravaged over like 2,900 acres.

[00:06:33] Still burning.

[00:06:34] Still zero containment as of this morning.

[00:06:38] There are reports out of the area that firefighters have been giving up on some areas that cannot be saved.

[00:06:48] And so and I understand like you're in a triage mode.

[00:06:52] Right.

[00:06:52] So you can't you can't get to certain areas or most disturbingly, there's no water in the fire hydrants.

[00:07:01] They've run through all the water.

[00:07:03] So they cannot put them out.

[00:07:05] Even if they can get to the area, they can't put them out.

[00:07:08] So they're relying on some of the aerial, you know, fire suppression dumps that occur with the planes and the helicopters and stuff.

[00:07:19] But on the ground, if they're trying to get to an area, to a neighborhood or street and they want to plug into the hook up into the fire hydrant, they're finding that there's not water coming out of the hydrants.

[00:07:32] They're also dealing with power outages.

[00:07:37] I was not aware, but apparently they shut down.

[00:07:42] They turn off people's power in these types of fire events.

[00:07:48] They they turn them off.

[00:07:49] They turn the power off.

[00:07:52] And I'll get to that.

[00:07:53] The AP reported on that as well because there is a fire hazard associated with that.

[00:07:57] So people are unable to make contact with loved ones, much like we saw in Western North Carolina,

[00:08:05] where due to the Hurricane Helene aftermath and the mudslides, rock slides, flooding and all that, power was taken out.

[00:08:15] Cell phone communications were all taken out.

[00:08:18] And that made it very difficult not just to get in contact with people, but also to get emergency response to the areas where people needed help.

[00:08:30] This is from to do.

[00:08:32] To do this is from KTLA, which, by the way, if you are looking for news sources to see what's going on, go to the local news organizations.

[00:08:44] I'm not saying you should only go there.

[00:08:46] I always say get your news from multiple sources.

[00:08:48] But a lot of the local outlets are doing a lot of great work because they know the area.

[00:08:55] Right.

[00:08:55] They know the people.

[00:08:56] They know the streets.

[00:08:58] They know who to talk to.

[00:08:59] And so they and they have experience with this kind of these kinds of wildfires because this happens.

[00:09:05] Right.

[00:09:06] This happens in California for a number of reasons.

[00:09:10] Some of it is environmental.

[00:09:12] Yes.

[00:09:13] But a lot of it is bad policy.

[00:09:17] Bad policy.

[00:09:19] And I don't know how many more of these types of of catastrophes we have to see before people start waking up to the fact that what they have been doing and what they have been advocating for is actually detrimental, is actually causing more loss of life, more loss of structures, more more environmental damage.

[00:09:43] Right.

[00:09:43] Because burning 4,000, 5,000 acres of buildings and cars and such, that's not good for the environment.

[00:09:53] Right.

[00:09:53] If you're if you care about air quality, this is not a good thing.

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[00:11:13] The mayor of Los Angeles, her name is Karen Bass.

[00:11:19] Or Bass, but Bass.

[00:11:21] She, I believe, was a congresswoman from California.

[00:11:25] And she's now the mayor of Los Angeles.

[00:11:29] And Jim Garrity, writing at National Review, posted up onto Twitter, actually, he says,

[00:11:35] In what must be the most unfortunately timed trip since Texas Senator Ted Cruz took his family on vacation in Aruba,

[00:11:45] Karen Bass was roughly 7,400 miles away from her city as the fires engulfed it.

[00:11:51] She was honoring the inauguration of a man most Angelenos have never heard of,

[00:11:57] in a place most of them could not find on a map.

[00:12:02] Mayor Bass is in Ghana for an inauguration of the president there.

[00:12:09] She is there as part of a presidential delegation of some kind.

[00:12:15] Very politically unfortunate.

[00:12:18] As Will Collier points out, she's probably gonna regret that trip.

[00:12:23] That's probably.

[00:12:25] Well, I mean, look, obviously she could not have known, right, that this was going to happen when she agreed to and then took the trip.

[00:12:34] But she, I'm not sure, she better be on a plane heading back.

[00:12:39] Because she's the mayor of Los Angeles.

[00:12:42] And that's where this is occurring.

[00:12:44] This is L.A. County.

[00:12:47] Evacuations were ordered for the entire Palisades community down to the Pacific Ocean, according to Cal Fire.

[00:12:54] During a Tuesday afternoon press conference, officials said more than 10,000 homes in Pacific Palisades and Malibu were affected by the evacuation order.

[00:13:03] And warnings also extended into areas of Santa Monica and Calabasas.

[00:13:09] If you have seen any of the, you know, I don't know, the 10,000 foot elevation views, like the whole picture, if you will, in your mind, a, you know, you got the Pacific Ocean on the left side there.

[00:13:28] And then you've got the city, you know, Pacific Palisades, Malibu.

[00:13:33] You got all of that up against the water.

[00:13:35] And then you've got this sort of crescent that runs from the top, the northern part, around the city.

[00:13:45] And it runs sort of in this crescent shape from the top left all the way around to, like, the midway through the right side, the eastern side.

[00:13:54] And that's a mountain chain that's right there.

[00:13:57] There's a bunch of mountains there.

[00:13:58] And so this area is in a bit of a valley.

[00:14:01] And then on the other side of the mountain, there's more housing and that sort of stuff.

[00:14:05] And so the big fear now is that this fire is going to get across that mountain chain and across those mountains.

[00:14:14] And once that happens, it's going to spread through that whole area on the northern side as well.

[00:14:20] Pacific Palisades is about 10 miles from Malibu.

[00:14:24] And both areas have been affected.

[00:14:27] The Malibu was where the Franklin Fire burned more than 4,000 acres and several homes when it erupted with windy conditions back in December.

[00:14:41] OK, so again, this is not a new thing for California.

[00:14:46] However, because it is not new and because these conditions are persistent, they've existed before humans ever got there.

[00:14:58] There are things that humans can do to mitigate the devastation when these conditions kind of converge into a wildfire.

[00:15:09] And however it was sparked, we don't know yet.

[00:15:12] It could have been like I saw one video.

[00:15:14] A woman caught another woman lighting fires along just in like some desert scrubland area.

[00:15:22] She had just the woman, I think, is obviously mentally deranged in some manner.

[00:15:27] And she was just piling up a bunch of stuff and setting it on fire, saying that that this was a good thing to do.

[00:15:34] Yeah, there are a lot of crazy people out there that do crazy things.

[00:15:37] And so that may be how this started.

[00:15:40] It could have been, you know, arson.

[00:15:41] It could have been accidental.

[00:15:42] There's also a problem with homeless encampments where people gather around.

[00:15:49] They're in RVs or they're in tents and they set fires to, you know, keep themselves warm at night or to cook over.

[00:15:56] And then those fires get out of control.

[00:15:59] That's another part of this story.

[00:16:02] That's another angle.

[00:16:03] All right.

[00:16:04] I hope you had a happy holiday season, but tell me if something like this happened at your house.

[00:16:09] Your family and friends are gathered around.

[00:16:11] Maybe y'all are in the living room.

[00:16:12] You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing.

[00:16:15] And then somebody says, hey, dad, remember those old VHS tapes?

[00:16:19] Did you ever get them transferred?

[00:16:21] And then the room gets all quiet.

[00:16:23] All eyes are on dad who says, oh, you know, well, I've been meaning to, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

[00:16:29] Look, don't let those priceless memories sit in a box for another year.

[00:16:33] All right.

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[00:17:09] So about 15,000 utility customers in Southern California had their power shut off to reduce the risk of equipment sparking another fire.

[00:17:19] Half a million customers total are at risk of losing power preemptively.

[00:17:25] Okay.

[00:17:25] So they're going to shut people's power off even though they're not, you know, they're not being affected directly yet by the wildfires there.

[00:17:35] Now, I mentioned you've got the politics, you've got the policy, and you've got priorities.

[00:17:42] And, again, they all sort of intersect in certain parts.

[00:17:47] So, for example, there's a writer at redstate.com named Banshee, and he's posted a bunch of stuff regarding some of the policies that are informed by the politics and priorities.

[00:18:03] California, he says, has been throttling or shutting off water to Southern California for decades in a vain attempt to save a three-inch long minnow-like fish.

[00:18:19] It's this tiny little minnow that they're trying to save, which makes sense because, like, but I thought the minnow was only on a three-hour tour, but it doesn't matter.

[00:18:29] Anyway, Trump tried to change that, and he was opposed.

[00:18:36] And he's got a series of headlines here.

[00:18:39] I'll just read them real quick.

[00:18:42] Out of San Francisco, Delta Smelt.

[00:18:44] That's the name of the...

[00:18:45] It's a smelt fish.

[00:18:47] It's not like, you know, Delta Smelt it.

[00:18:50] Anyway, the tiny fish caught in California's war with Trump.

[00:18:54] Harbingers of a diminishing ecosystem, the smelt, are almost extinct.

[00:18:58] Now, forces within the Trump administration could usher them into oblivion.

[00:19:03] Or this one.

[00:19:05] Delta pumps throttled back despite rains, cutting California water deliveries in order to protect fish.

[00:19:15] Delta Smelt shuts down major water supply.

[00:19:19] That's the fish is shutting down the water supply.

[00:19:21] And the report is all it took was a sparse population of minnow-like smelt and two days for state and federal water contractors

[00:19:31] to turn off the drinking and irrigation water spigots for 25 million Californians and almost a million acres of farmland.

[00:19:38] The Department of Water Resources stopped pumping at state water project facilities in the Delta in late May to protect the Delta Smelt.

[00:19:48] A day later, federal officials dramatically cut back the amount of water being pumped to farmers in Southern California cities to the lowest level ever

[00:19:56] in an attempt to save the endangered Delta Smelt.

[00:20:01] That was a story from 2007.

[00:20:08] Why California has not built desalinization plants all over its coastline at this point is beyond me.

[00:20:17] I do not understand.

[00:20:19] Once again, bad priorities.

[00:20:22] Bad politics.

[00:20:25] While California's water management is a big issue, Banshee says it is also true that these fires typically start on federal lands.

[00:20:35] Guess whose administration canceled controlled burns, crucial controlled burns, this past fall?

[00:20:43] Why?

[00:20:44] Banshee says so they wouldn't look bad if something went wrong.

[00:20:47] Well, that would be Joseph Robinette Biden.

[00:20:52] KQED reported Forest Service halts prescribed burns in California.

[00:20:56] Is it worth the risk?

[00:20:58] And there's a quote in there from an official who says,

[00:21:02] I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening with the prescribed burn.

[00:21:06] And they're willing to trade that risk, which they will be blamed for, for increased risks on wildfires.

[00:21:14] In the event of a wildfire, if something bad happens, they're much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.

[00:21:22] Right?

[00:21:23] Always try to look for the incentives that people are responding to.

[00:21:30] And this would have been in October.

[00:21:34] October, October 2024.

[00:21:36] The federal government not wanting to risk things getting out of control with a prescribed burn and negatively impacting Kamala Harris's chances of winning re-election.

[00:21:49] They didn't want that on them.

[00:21:50] And so they just didn't do the burn.

[00:21:52] They delayed the burn.

[00:21:54] And then if something bad happens, if a burn does erupt, a wildfire does erupt, well then they can just blame Gaia Earth.

[00:22:02] And, that's right, climate change.

[00:22:06] Climate change is the reason why, supposedly, this is Bernie Sanders on Twitter.

[00:22:12] He says,

[00:22:23] That's not my best Bernie impression.

[00:22:26] No, that is true.

[00:22:27] But, this is not climate change.

[00:22:30] Okay?

[00:22:31] This is not climate change.

[00:22:33] This is a failure of man.

[00:22:36] This is human failure.

[00:22:37] Bad priorities.

[00:22:39] Did you know that Los Angeles County cut funding to the fire department in this year's budget?

[00:22:44] Like, I think it was almost $20 million they cut out of their budget.

[00:22:49] Right?

[00:22:50] These are priorities.

[00:22:51] These are policy decisions.

[00:22:54] Not building desalinization plants.

[00:22:57] Not doing prescribed burns, the controlled burns, when you should be doing them.

[00:23:01] And why do you do that?

[00:23:02] Why do you do the prescribed burns, these controlled burns?

[00:23:05] Why do you do them?

[00:23:06] It's to clear out the underbrush in a small contained area.

[00:23:11] So, this way you don't have fuel for these wildfires.

[00:23:16] Right?

[00:23:17] It's harder for a wildfire to spread if you don't have all of this underbrush.

[00:23:22] And, you remember, Donald Trump made a comment about this, talking about raking leaves.

[00:23:27] Remember?

[00:23:28] And, oh, it was so hilarious.

[00:23:30] He's so stupid.

[00:23:31] What is he talking about and raking the leaves and all of this?

[00:23:35] This is what he's talking about.

[00:23:38] Maybe if people were to, instead of automatically mocking and rejecting what Trump is saying,

[00:23:47] maybe if people were to listen a little bit to what it is that he's, may I even say the term, inartfully describing, right?

[00:23:56] Because he was correct.

[00:23:57] There are leaves that need to be burned out of there.

[00:24:00] Not raked up, you're not going to rake a forest, but that underbrush, that scrub, that needs to be controlled.

[00:24:07] And that's why you do the controlled burns.

[00:24:10] But you don't, these governments don't do it because the environmentalist wackos refuse to allow them to do it.

[00:24:18] And so now this has become an embedded article of faith inside the left and the Democrat Party that they can't do them.

[00:24:27] And this is what you see.

[00:24:29] This is what we get.

[00:24:30] All right.

[00:24:31] If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events.

[00:24:35] And I know you do too.

[00:24:35] And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources.

[00:24:40] Why?

[00:24:40] Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

[00:24:46] It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place.

[00:24:51] So you can compare coverage and verify information.

[00:24:54] You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:24:59] I put the link in the podcast description too.

[00:25:01] I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.

[00:25:11] The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right.

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[00:25:28] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent.

[00:25:35] Um, Banshee, a writer at redstate.com, going over some of the recent history of California's complete garbage management of fire and forest land.

[00:25:52] During Donald Trump's first term, he tried to increase water diversions on federal land to help California's water supply.

[00:26:01] The state of California and various environmental groups sued him and won.

[00:26:06] Once again, owning the orange man took priority over protecting people.

[00:26:13] Um, Joe Biden, he says, canceled planned controlled burns in October because he didn't want his administration to be blamed if a fire got out of hand.

[00:26:22] California has not built a new reservoir since 1979.

[00:26:28] 79.

[00:26:30] Well, it's a good thing.

[00:26:31] I mean, they're not growing or anything.

[00:26:33] Well, they're actually not anymore.

[00:26:34] But, um, this is part of the problem.

[00:26:39] That they didn't fill the reservoirs.

[00:26:43] And the reason they didn't fill the reservoirs was related to these policies and politics.

[00:26:51] That, say, you've got to protect this, this smelt minnow fish.

[00:26:58] Right?

[00:26:59] This is why so many, like, the environmentalist movement, like, I call them watermelons because they are, you know, green on the outside, red on the inside.

[00:27:08] They're commies.

[00:27:08] They're not actually for progress.

[00:27:10] Despite the fact that they like to call themselves progressives, they're actually not progressive.

[00:27:15] They don't want to progress.

[00:27:17] They want to actually regress.

[00:27:19] They want to go backwards.

[00:27:20] They don't want people on this land.

[00:27:22] I'm sure some of them are going to be perfectly fine with, like, well, I guess we shouldn't build there anymore.

[00:27:26] Let's just leave it all up to let nature take it, uh, take it over.

[00:27:30] You know?

[00:27:31] Um, there is also, uh, a guy named Sam Stein.

[00:27:37] He is an MSNBC guy.

[00:27:39] He also writes at the Bulwark.

[00:27:41] And, uh, he says, the swift devastation of the Palisades fire is horrible.

[00:27:46] And then it dawns on you that Trump, set to take office in 13 days, has threatened publicly to cut wildfire aid to the state.

[00:27:55] And this prompted, um, a response from a fellow on Twitter named Jarvis, uh, who is well worth the follow.

[00:28:03] Jarvis underscore best.

[00:28:06] Jarvis best.

[00:28:07] Um, he says a lot of people are, you know, dunking on Sam Stein for this post that he made.

[00:28:13] He said, but let me explain.

[00:28:16] See, one of the rules of journalism is that whenever something bad happens, you have to blame the bad thing on what's called the bad thing.

[00:28:24] The RICP, the RICP, which stands for Republican in closest proximity.

[00:28:32] The RICP.

[00:28:33] So you find, so if it happens in like a Democrat controlled city, then you got to go to say the Republican governor.

[00:28:40] Oh no.

[00:28:41] In California, they got a Democrat governor.

[00:28:42] Okay.

[00:28:42] So now we got to go to the president.

[00:28:44] Oh no.

[00:28:45] We have a Democrat president.

[00:28:46] So now, like if you are stuck with this Democrat mayor, Democrat governor, Democrat president, then there's nobody to blame.

[00:28:55] There's no Republican in proximity for the bad thing.

[00:28:58] Cause there's, there's no RICP.

[00:29:00] In those cases, then you have to pivot to what's called the H RICP, which is the hypothetical Republican in closest proximity.

[00:29:10] Right.

[00:29:10] And that's when you imagine how bad this would be if there was a Republican around.

[00:29:17] Right.

[00:29:17] Because you can't blame a Democrat mayor for the decisions about filling the reservoirs.

[00:29:24] You, you, you can't, or cutting the funding for the firefighters and such.

[00:29:28] You can't blame them.

[00:29:29] You can't blame the governor for diverting all of the snowfall that came in the mountains and sending it to the Pacific ocean.

[00:29:35] You can't blame them.

[00:29:36] So you got to then go to the president, but you can't blame him for not doing the controlled burns because he's a Democrat.

[00:29:42] So then you got to go to what would have been like, had there been a Republican doing something and that would have been way worse.

[00:29:50] Can you imagine how much worse the hellscape would be if a Republican had any kind of proximity to the levers of power?

[00:30:00] Luckily, we have the Babylon Bee with this headline that Governor Newsom has ordered all trees to wear masks to prevent the spread of the wildfires.

[00:30:12] That's it's a national treasure.

[00:30:15] The Babylon Bee.

[00:30:18] California has a huge population, not just because it's huge geographically, but because for decades, according to Fisher King, it had a reputation for being a clean, fun and well-governed state.

[00:30:35] It was a actually a reliably GOP state in presidential elections all the way through 1992.

[00:30:41] People wanted to live there.

[00:30:42] You got the sun, you got the beaches, you got the mountains, right?

[00:30:46] It was a tier one first world country, but you get the politics wrong and you can do a real number on a place.

[00:30:55] And that's what California is reckoning with.

[00:30:59] Dave Rubin, host of the Rubin Report, former liberal from California, now more of a libertarian, conservatarian type of guy, does a podcast show.

[00:31:12] He said a few weeks ago he appeared on Piers Morgan's show and he got into this fight with Cenk Uygur, one of the founders of the Young Turks, right?

[00:31:21] And they were arguing over diversity, equity and inclusion, which, by the way, good news.

[00:31:26] The chief of the fire department in Los Angeles is LGBTQ and has a focus on diversity and inclusion.

[00:31:33] So thank God that's going to help us fight the fires there.

[00:31:36] He points out that DEI isn't just wrong because it's repackaged racism.

[00:31:41] He says it's also wrong because once it enters the system, it takes attention and resources away from the actual mandate of the institution.

[00:31:51] There is finite time and manpower and funding.

[00:31:55] And if you choose to waste your time and your manpower and your funding on DEI, your core competency will diminish.

[00:32:03] It is as simple as that.

[00:32:05] All right, that'll do it for this episode.

[00:32:07] Thank you so much for listening.

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[00:32:13] So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here.

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[00:32:22] Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.