The Megyn Kelly Show
Mismanagement Leading to Devastating LA Wildfires, and Trump's Serious About Buying Greenland, with The Fifth Column | Ep. 978
Wed, 8 Jan 2025
Megyn 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
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, all right? There's your dog. You're gonna be okay.
Oh, shit. Don't worry about that, dude. Look at that. Holy shit.
The plastic is gone, dude.
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, um, the person who shared the clip is it goes by Kevin Dalton. That's his name on, on X. He, uh, 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.
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
that firefighters have been radioing their stations with reports that the hydrants were dry in the Pacific Palisades. Fire... Fighters 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, you've got to have water. And my understanding is the reservoir was not refilled in time and in a timely manner 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 L.A. 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, L.A. '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 am 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 number are you looking for? 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 6'3 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. For those of us holding our breath for the past several months, we can finally exhale. Work can at last be done on the major issues this country's facing, one of the most significant being our national debt. The fact is our nation's broke, and that debt is a house of cards that cannot be quickly dismantled, no matter who's the president.
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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 homeowners 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 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 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 response. routine failure by every level of government with respect to California.
And I think 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. You know how they give you the packs and it dwindles? So I 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, and I'm doing the job. But this is what I wanted to say. LA Times, excuse me, New York Post reporting that LA 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 in
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 LA 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
So maybe we should reroute some of that money towards the fire department. A couple of other small things is that one, I mean, Matt said, you know, we have friends and, you know, it's, she did tweet about it. So, you know, I feel okay saying it, is that our friend Kennedy has a house in the Palisades.
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? Cause 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, 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, look, they're such great people. But let's move away from her for a second, who seems like a thoroughly ridiculous individual, and 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 policy. 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 angelinos 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, I don't... 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 L.A. And let's remember that L.A. 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. Um, I don't remember the month. It was like with over the past 12 months where we had bad fires from Canada that were blowing smoke. Um, and it was bad. Like it smelled, it must've 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. Um,
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. Oh, really? Once again, unless you have like 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. Let's just go back, okay? Because number one, you raised a very good point about the insurance. And I want to tell the audience, I know it sounds like this is all rich people, but it's not.
You just hear the word Malibu or 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 were 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. 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, FAIR, 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, yeah, 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. 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 not rich. They're not at the bottom. They're just normal. This is a middle-class neighborhood that is gone, gone. And I guarantee you not one of them had insurance and they're elderly too. So how exactly is it that the retired flight attendant is now going to rebuild her life and 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 say I think you're going to have, hopefully this is going to be the last 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. You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it's a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland, and he said, we have a much different, we're a forest nation. He called it a forest nation.
And they spend 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 people just lost everything, not to mention potentially their lives, because we wanted to let that 50 feet worth of trees stand instead of culling the area?
If 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 kind of 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 have no special fealty to a class of social and economic class of people. That's not my concern. But I mentioned our friend Kennedy. And on Twitter, someone responded to her talking about her house potentially burning down. And someone responded, sucks to be rich. To which Kennedy responded, go fuck yourself, which is an appropriate tweet, by the way.
Her normal is eat a bag of dicks, so that's clean for her.
I think that's the next one. That's just us. 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, you know, the day that Donald Trump was there after the riots.
burning down swathes of cities in Wisconsin. And people say, 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.
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 continued 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 the same sort of concerns.
We certainly have our fire season every single year. So it's something that is on people's minds regularly. But there is obviously a need for much more than what's being done currently.
And I think 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, 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? It's absolutely beautiful. The thing that I love about it, and I've spent a little time in 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.
There are a couple of the grand estates and so on, but 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 L.A. from the 1950s and how people had these little haciendas. It's so much Americana there, just utter charm around every corner.
And 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 was started as a Methodist
And then 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 higher that we're talking about here. This isn't just any high school that was burning yesterday. You know how many how many movies have been shot at that 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 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 wondering whether they should evacuate, I would say evacuate, dude. Because 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, you know, of course, life, the life of my family and my pets would be my number one priority. thought, but didn't 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 know, you live in Norway where we went in June. You're probably good on the water supply. Yeah. You're probably, 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, Camille, why must the rare plants and species diversity be protected, right? The whole point in clearing a forest is to protect human life, right?
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.
So the fact that there are these 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 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...
Our house that we had just renovated for three years and had just finally moved into about three months ago, you know, 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. 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. 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. 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. And they don't need a number for a power outage. 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 did either.
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... The Californians are 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. The Canadians. The Canadians are going to elect Akins, conservative. 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% 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 until. Well, there's no.
What is the incentive for that? There's no incentive for that. The incentive for people like the fire chief in L.A. 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 to find. But they do have one, by the way. But no, that is the same.
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 illegal immigration and say, well, you know, if you disagree with that, this is kind of a racist kind of Trumpian thing. And then people in New York City and L.A.
and, bless their own 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, 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, okay, 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. Yeah. 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. OK, 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. 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.
I wanted to make one quick, quick point about electricity and power outages. There is a there is a reason why that that's 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'd like a guitar. 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 the fifth column who are here for the whole show. Some therapists say that debt can make people feel desperate and helpless. It can ruin your sleep, creep into your relationships. It can wreck your happiness.
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That's ancientnutrition.com slash Megan for 25% off. Support your body and fill your best with 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... I, I, 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 there. 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. 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. But talk about the perfect segue.
A couple of years ago, John Stossel, friend of all of ours and 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 soundbites over 60 seconds just because...
it drones on for the audience but um 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 click the button that says CY.
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 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.
He caught them in fake censorship 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... a 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. 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 for
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 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 or will show some of it in a minute. His his hair, if nothing else, is just fantastic. And I applaud him for it. And he's been describing himself as more as libertarian over the years, which is. Very good.
And this is a moment where like 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-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.
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. Looking at the video, it feels kind of more genuine. I don't actually want him to be responding to government pressure in any direction, whether it's in a way that's positive or negative.
I don't think it's government 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.
I hope 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 is crazy. What take play? We're still like unraveling that. But what Taibbi 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 Western European and other country advocates.
efforts to make a sort of transnational 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
to resist any american cooperation and in fact uh 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 which zuckerberg actually mentions too yes so let me play a little bit of the zuckerberg um 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 going to 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. 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 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 it.
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.
Mm hmm.
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 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... You know, 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, 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 and in all circulation of news, uh, like about a year ago. And it's 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. The greatest heroes, the greatest champions of internet freedom are the fact checkers. You know what's funny? I haven't talked to Mark. 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 Peter Thiel 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.
But when you're guided by people internal 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 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
that 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 today. we're winning. This free speech fight, 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 in your car and in your house, all your birth certificates, 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 again?
Like, yeah, DMV, that may be burned too. I just, whatever, I'm back and forth on these two stories. But 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. 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. Yeah.
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 answer. I wrote, I think, my first... Long piece about how the fact checking industry, which deserves 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.
Did you see their lie of the year this year, Matt?
Yeah.
It was not Joe Biden's, the best Joe Biden ever. 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 rhetoric than you are about Democratic. Take that out. Actually look at the difference between and this was true 12 years ago is true today that 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 doing 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 fundamentally enraging to at least half of the country.
It is a lie itself. 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
OK, I think the L.A. 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 look 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, And the free speech is 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. 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, you know, Russia is guilty of insulting Islam, you know, 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 it in this way. And when the Danish cartoon crisis happened in 2006, which Danish newspapers published cartoons of Muhammad, 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. 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? 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. OK, 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 usual. Well said by Matt. Very well said, but yeah.
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-MAGA, but like... No, they're not. 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, Moynihan.
Well, I don't even know where to start with this. The people of Greenland as a duchy of the... 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 natural 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 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. Yes, that we do want. You can't just take 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 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. 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.
As a little like, well, what or what? Because like most MAGA people do not know. want to get involved in World War III. 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. Yeah, that'll work. to Greenland. And then Trump called in. Here's a little soundbite of that visit. Take a look. Take a listen.
Seeing it looks like an incredible place. We've been talking about going for a while. 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 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 maggot. 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 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 a and going 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 annex them. I won't rule those other things out. But if what you really want is a strategic partnership
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 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.
Was it the King of Denmark? Anyway, it was the Prime Minister. The King of Denmark suddenly added Greenland to their crest over there as 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...
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. But 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. They talk about military pressure.
In fairness, we don't know what that means. Here's John Fetterman. John Fetterman and Camille could be a joint ticket running on the independent side. I don't know, but they're sounding an awful lot alike. Take a listen.
A lot of freakouts, 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 a pretty 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.
Oh, 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 at the same time. 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, okay, what do we get out of this? And it was just a deal. We didn't say we're going to invade you or enlist 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 a good thing.
It's 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 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 two. You go in there and say, I want $4 million. And then I'll make this case go away.
Or I'll kill you. And then negotiate down. Or I'll shoot you in the back.
It could be that international relations are a little bit different than a two-sided legal dispute.
Well, 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 careful.
He said he wouldn't rule it out.
Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. The question was, Okay. 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, okay, 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 saying,
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, 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 Van Van Jones, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. 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 he did rule out annihilating Hamas.
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. We're 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 he can't afford tampon dispensers in male bathrooms and military bases. His Veterans Affairs 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 brown face and not black face, but yeah, there was one that was very black face.
He did the minstrel show black face.
He was like the Canadian Al Jolson. It was like, 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. I'll be right back. Don't go away.
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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 mean, they too live on water. Why is this so hard? That is mismanagement to me. It seems pretty clear.
I just retweeted out Joel Pollack from Breitbart, who lives, I believe, in Brentwood, but he's 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, Oh, Canada, our home and native land, true patriot love in all thy son's command. And he changed it to, in all of us command because you can't have sons in anything associated with Trudeau. Like in 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. Before we go, I want to tell you that tomorrow on the show, we have
A different Californian, Bill Maher, will 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 Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.