Transcript - America This Week, Jan 10, 2025: "California Fires and America's Competency Crisis"

Los Angeles is in flames, and California's leaders seem helpless, unmasking a generation of public investment in non-essential services. Also, "On Guard," by Evelyn Waugh

Matt Taibbi: Hi, welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: All right, Walter, well, part of the world is ending. I guess this is just part of our news reality. Los Angeles is on fire and the situation is 0% contained as of this morning. This is Thursday. Let’s just take a look at some of the pictures because this is what I guess our future looks like. That’s from inside a house. You can sort of see...

Matt Taibbi: Whoever that person is, they might need to move. Let’s try the next one. So you can see the embers there. That’s the problem. We’ve got Santa Ana winds, which is blowing hot embers all over the place, and these are landing on the roofs of houses. They’re landing on dried trees, and it’s just blowing right in the direction of setting the entire city of Los Angeles on fire.

Let’s check one more. This is a view from an airplane. You can see not looking so hot. Things on fire. And we’ll get to the celebrity stuff later, but should we start maybe with the Joe Rogan prediction? Because I think that’s an interesting thing. This is a story that people in California obviously have known was a possibility for quite a long time. And the crux of this thing is that it was not planned for terribly well, possibly they couldn’t plan for it, but this is what Joe Rogan said earlier this past summer.

Joe Rogan: I talked to a fireman once, this is one of the reasons it freaked me out, and he was telling me, he goes, “Dude, one day,” he goes, “It’s just going to be the right wind and fire’s going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean, and there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it.” I go, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, we just get lucky.” He goes, “We get lucky with the wind.”

Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.

Joe Rogan: He goes, “But if the wind hits the wrong way, it’s just going to burn straight through LA and there’s not going to be a thing we could do about it.” Because these fires are so big, dude. You’re talking about thousands of acres that are burning simultaneously with 40 mile an hour winds, and the wind’s just blowing embers through the air and those embers are landing on roofs and those houses are going up and they’re landing on bushes, and those bushes are going up and everything’s dry. And once it happens, it happens in a way where it’s so spread out that there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing they can do.

Speaker 2: Yeah, you just have to evacuate, right?

Joe Rogan: Nothing. Nothing they can do.

Matt Taibbi: So, okay. Walter, do you have initial impressions, or what’s the story here? Apart from the fact that this is horrible and this is a natural disaster, is this a climate change story? Is it an incompetence story? Is it a political story? What’s your angle on this?

Walter Kirn: Well, I have a child who lives in one of the evacuation areas. I have a friend who lost his house in the Pacific Palisades. I used to live on the beach in Malibu in a little apartment, didn’t have a mansion, but it was my Midwestern dream to have an apartment on the beach. That whole area is gone. All along the Pacific Coast Highway on the ocean side, everything’s burned. So my first impression is not that of someone with an angle, but really great sadness.

Matt Taibbi: Just sadness.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, and I will say though, that this isn’t the first fire or set of fires in Malibu. Just a few years ago, there were big fires. There always are. They’re inevitable. Anybody who knows the area knows that it is in some ways meant to burn, in the sense that nature has a cycle of recovering from fire and then fire comes again. That’s how the vegetation grows. That’s how it’s been for thousands of years, forever. But having built this giant city in this place with this vulnerability, there are measures that can be taken to contain and to fend off the worst. Just as they know there are going to be earthquakes in Los Angeles, which can’t be fobbed off on climate change, there are going to be fires. It’s unclear whether-

Matt Taibbi: There could be earthquakes and fires, by the way.

Walter Kirn: They could come at the same time. The compact that people make when they settle a place like this with government and with one another, is that they will do their best to mitigate, minimize, prevent, and be able to handle when the worst happens, these kind of disasters. To fob it off on climate change, as I say, is a wonderful thing to tell yourself, but none of this started yesterday. So the question of whether all those things have been done, whether they’ve been done well, whether there was adequate water in fire hydrants, whether they were working at all, things like that, and whether the fire department was properly trained or properly staffed, all those questions are going to arise, because to me, the basis of civil government, everything else aside, is mutual protection. That’s why people get together in the Midwest to make crop insurance and things like that. It’s why when I was a kid in Midwestern cities, if the city didn’t plow the snow after a blizzard, it could face dismissal and often did.