In this episode, we talk to Acting ICE Director PJ Lechleitner about his frustrations with the current administration's handling of the immigration crisis. We also discuss the devastating fires in California and the lack of resources to fight them.
00:03:51.700And that operative word there, or, I guess, suggests that they're mutually exclusive.
00:03:55.400But I think you're seeing on full display right now in California that it's intentional incompetence.
00:04:00.400Just like it was on the southern border, just like it has been in Ukraine, just like it has been in the Middle East, just like it has been with the trade deals and the endless forever wars that have plagued this country for decades.
00:04:33.100There's never any shortage of resources.
00:04:35.680And I know you probably thought I was going to say to send overseas to Ukraine or Israel or Taiwan or whatever country.
00:04:40.400That's not the United States of America.
00:04:42.440But there's never any shortage of resources to, what, fill your children and grandchildren's classrooms full of creepy, grooming, pedophilic, transgender-promoting books like Genderqueer, right?
00:04:52.480There always seems to be enough money in the budget to do that.
00:04:55.000Sure, there's enough money in the budget to, what, give illegal aliens transgender surgeries, including the ones in prison?
00:05:44.000Speaking of water, I want to play two clips from MSNBC admitting that basically none of the fire hydrants are working.
00:05:50.600And this lovely, shall we say, DEI hire who gets paid, I think, $750,000 a year to make sure that water is indeed running and working in the Los Angeles area.
00:06:24.660And it was at that point that really the whole crew stopped, looked up at this apartment building, and they realized there was nothing they could do.
00:06:32.160We ran out of water in the first tank at about 4.45 p.m. yesterday.
00:06:36.860We ran out of water in the second tank about 8.30 p.m. and the third tank about 3 a.m. this morning.
00:06:50.140Personally, that's about the amount of confidence that I have in Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass in the slate of true intellectuals outrunning this whole operation so wonderfully in California.
00:06:59.660Little to none, I guess, is also the amount of confidence or belief that I have that Joe Biden actually won the 2020 election.
00:07:08.500I think they've now declared a state of emergency.
00:07:11.160Funnily enough, the FEMA director, the one who did a really good job, or the fill-in, sorry, I was confusing the Secret Service there because they've also done such a wonderful job of keeping this country safe.
00:07:20.400The FEMA director, the one who oversaw the botched North Carolina flood response, by the way, I think they're already getting ready to kick out some North Carolinians from hotels there.
00:07:30.880Don't think Ukraine's getting the same treatment, but she is, I think, arriving into Los Angeles today.
00:08:00.620Democracy dies in darkness, according to the Washington Post.
00:08:02.880Yeah, when they were inaugurated in darkness, the Biden regime has been a four-year, unconditional, continued state of emergency, not just here at home, but abroad, in every corner of this earth, from Ukraine to the Middle East, to Afghanistan, now to California, to East Palestine, to the southern border, to the northern border, to every border.
00:08:24.240And, yes, newly donned, what Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient George Soros, borders matter.
00:08:33.200We're going to make sure you know that come January 20th.
00:08:36.100You guys want to talk about domestic extremism?
00:08:42.440You guys are literally burning down Los Angeles in the name of climate change.
00:08:47.040So I'd start with investigating those people for domestic extremism before coming after MAGA.
00:08:58.300By the way, Karen Bass, I say she's L.A.'s equivalent of Lori Lightfoot, and I don't know if she's better or worse, which shows you how far things have fallen.
00:09:10.500But just last month, L.A.'s fire chief actually warned Karen Bass that the 17-plus million dollars that were cut from her department's budget, quote, severely limited, and we have the picture, we can put it up on screen, the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.
00:09:31.800And let me be very clear, for those of you who know I actually, born and raised in Santa Monica, my house is, I believe, still under mandatory evacuation order.
00:09:43.560I know victimhood culture isn't something that we embrace here in the war room, but for once, I get to criticize and politicize.
00:09:51.540I know what, you're not allowed to politicize this issue.
00:09:53.480Well, guess what, you guys politicized it when you made it so the fire hydrants didn't have water so you could pat yourselves on the back and say that you guys were climate change defenders.
00:10:01.800When you elect Marxists who have no respect and only complete and utter disdain for humanity and human life, and you see that epitomized in the ideology that undergirds the climate change cult, this is what you get.
00:11:38.500But I just want to give us a little background on Karen Bass, because I use that word Marxist very intentionally, right?
00:11:44.700You can tell a lot about someone by who they choose to eulogize so publicly.
00:11:48.960And in the case of Karen Bass, well, she very infamously and notoriously delivered a eulogy for one of the top members of the Communist Party of the United States for decades, not too long ago.
00:12:03.360O'Neill Cannon was this person's name, and Karen Bass actually described them as her personal mentor in 2017, right?
00:12:11.340Usually these people, the Jamie Raskins of the world, they get to say, oh, well, I was a red diaper baby.
00:12:18.960And she really liked this self-avowed communist because of the longstanding commitment to serving and uplifting others and for a century of fighting to make the world a better place.
00:12:29.220Well, I guess in the communist version of, quote, better place, I guess the hellish fire escape that is Los Angeles is probably fitting.
00:12:36.140I guess you're sticking it to the rich, right?
00:12:40.220Don't think you can collect property taxes like that, right?
00:12:42.960And in a statement in 2016, after you guessed it, Fidel Castro's death, Bass suggested that, quote, it was a great loss to the people of Cuba.
00:12:50.540She actually went to go see Fidel Castro speak in Cuba, quote, several times and even said he was, quote, charismatic.
00:12:56.080But remember, MSNBC tells you that we're the rapists and the insurrectionists, but Fidel Castro is charismatic.
00:13:05.740I mean, honestly, that makes more sense than the fire response we've seen going on in Los Angeles.
00:13:09.960I guess it also makes sense that Karen Bass has admitted that communists are, quote, a huge influence on her.
00:13:17.240She actually would travel to Cuba as part of the Vinceremos Brigade, a Marxist group that started the started by the Castro regime to subvert American interests, weaken democracies and spread communism around the world.
00:13:28.320She was described as the leader of that group by a communist newspaper.
00:13:31.480And a U.S. sheriff who infiltrated the group testified that to be part of it, you had to be confirmed as a Marxist-Leninist.
00:13:38.500And they were trained in, quote, terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare.
00:13:43.160And by the way, Karen, quite a fitting name.
00:13:47.120You can't even say that this was decades ago because you apparently still have an addiction to hanging out with communists and Marxists, because just in 2023, you were caught canoodling and meeting secretly with one of the leaders of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship and Foreign Contact, one of the foremost Chinese Communist Party foreign influence groups that tries to target Western politicians to advance the policies that are preferred by Beijing.
00:14:11.020Maybe you and Hunter Biden could get into business together.
00:14:15.540So you know what, Karen Bass, and we'll lump Gavin Newsom in here, too.
00:14:20.300I think I have a New Year's resolution for you.
00:15:19.660The intellectual geniuses, the logistical geniuses, the complex systems, whatever HR term, euphemism they want to use.
00:15:27.380The geniuses that are now telling us that we don't have the capacity or the intellectual capability to come up with the formation of mass deportations.
00:15:35.980You guys don't even know how to get damn water in your fire hydrants.
00:15:39.660So spare us the lectures on telling us that we won't be able to carry out mass deportations.
00:15:44.760Or better yet, shut up when you tell us that we aren't allowed to hire what, quote, loyalists.
00:16:45.180And we're going to get to our first guest momentarily.
00:16:47.240You cannot defeat fires with DEI, with wokeness, with progressivism.
00:16:55.660You can't build cities off of wokeness and DEI and progressivism.
00:17:04.880It's not just about the fires itself and the burn, the immense, innumerable, unquantifiable amount of acres and homes and structures and families that have been displaced.
00:17:19.160It's also about what this symbolically represents that is being burned down.
00:17:24.020A complete and utter failure of a Democratic supermajority, both politically, culturally, spiritually, in the beautiful state of California in Los Angeles.
00:17:38.900All so those people could pat themselves on the back and say, look, we're a multicultural society.
00:17:58.120I truly hope it was worth being able to make your pronouns on your driver's license, Z-Zim and Zer, whatever it may be, that day of the week.
00:18:10.320So when you had to flee the fires that were started and appeasing, trying to appease the climate change cult, at least your driver's license has Z-Zer on it.
00:18:17.800You might have to abandon your car and it's going to get engulfed in massive apocalyptic flames.
00:18:24.180But hey, at least you can be non-binary and you can get an abortion post-birth and your kid can become trans at six months.
00:18:35.460I won't call you homeless because I guess I have to call you unhoused, right?
00:18:38.520That's the appropriate term, as I was taught growing up in Los Angeles.
00:18:43.220Wild times, absolutely wild times and almost sinister times, too.
00:18:50.660I'm honored to bring back Jeremy Kaufman.
00:18:53.220I think one of War Room's favorite guests, you, of course, are of fame.
00:18:59.920You need to go do that to a LAFD or Karen Bass.
00:19:03.880But there's something really interesting going on with the insurance claims, especially in the Palisades.
00:19:09.380The numbers in terms of houses that they recently canceled, the premiums.
00:19:13.240I wanted to bring you on to sort of walk the audience through what exactly is going on in terms of the financial insurance aspect of this whole story that's at least not getting a lot of coverage right now.
00:19:27.820Yeah, well, so there's a common theme of everything you're talking about, which is the left likes to deny reality and then get mad when reality occurs.
00:19:38.040There's a lot of focus on the DEI stuff.
00:19:39.800And yes, if you pretend everyone is the same in their firefighting ability and don't optimize for who's the best firefighter and who knows the most about fires, you're going to get bad outcomes.
00:19:49.220But there's also been a denial of reality on the market side of this, on how insurance is priced and who can buy it.
00:19:56.520And so California has a law that says you can only use historical data to price your insurance.
00:20:07.320So what the insurance companies did is they, of course, are monitoring the situation.
00:20:10.620They're the ones who have to pay out all this money.
00:20:12.420Unfortunately, they saw the Palisades as a very risky area, and it was too expensive or they were not legally allowed to charge the price for the danger.
00:20:21.920And so what they did is they just dropped a bunch of their customers, right, because insurance isn't charity.
00:20:29.100And so if they can't charge the price that they need to charge for the risk of that area, they're going to drop you.
00:20:34.180So there were thousands of homeowners in the Palisades who were simply dropped by their insurers because California made it illegal to even charge the market price for that insurance.
00:20:59.500We say there's no conspiracies, no coincidences here in the war room.
00:21:03.400But what do you think sort of led to those decisions?
00:21:07.240Well, I mean, what I think is whoever at Allstate predicted that these fires are going to happen is who should be put in charge of the California Fire Department, right?
00:21:15.060Like these insurers saw that this was going to happen and they like, you know, I can get the sort of feeling that, hey, if they knew this was going to happen, like they should have done something about it.
00:21:27.500You know, there's something there's something sort of like wrong that they're doing as well.
00:21:30.420But you can't expect these places to be charities, right?
00:21:34.440And if they're not allowed to charge the market clearing price, then like what else can they do then drop you?
00:21:39.220I do think, you know, I haven't gone through everything that they were saying.
00:21:43.080Like it would be nice if the insurance companies had been shouting more about this and agitating against the environmental agencies and the leftists who prevented good forest management.
00:21:53.300But it is pretty clear that the insurance companies correctly predicted that there was an increased risk of risk of fire in these areas.
00:22:17.540But just from from your sort of perspective, the sort of impetus for all of this, do you think that we're right to be?
00:22:24.260I know we're not allowed to politicize it, but do you think that the DEI incompetence, the environmentalism, I sort of said it's this convergence of everything that is wrong with modern day progressivism on full display and full ablaze right now.
00:22:38.620But from from your perspective, what do you think is sort of the the push, the the compounding factors that have produced this truly, I mean, fire of epic proportions?
00:22:48.480Yeah, the the it's impressive how many different areas the left can deny reality in simultaneously.
00:22:59.040And this this this is just another area, right?
00:23:02.540They they want to believe in terms of forest management, you know, that you that you can you can just keep everything alive and that we should now have no fires at all whatsoever.
00:23:13.160And of course, this produces, you know, build up of of brush and and and, you know, essentially all of this stored risk.
00:23:21.400And then what happens is the market correctly perceives that risk.
00:23:24.720And so, again, the left tries to sort of legislate reality away and they say, well, you're not allowed to charge that much money, you know, for for the you know, for the insurance.
00:23:32.400And so they deny reality on who should be a firefighter.
00:23:35.180If they deny reality along the on forest management, they deny reality on how we how we manage the insurance market itself.
00:23:43.160And then what you're going to see happen next is the politicians, the leftist politicians in California are going to attack.
00:23:50.240They're going to attack the insurance companies and the media is not going to tell them the truth.
00:23:53.840Right. And so they're going to say the people are going to have to pay.
00:23:56.940They're going to call for bailouts and they're going to call for more regulations and more rules.
00:24:02.440And there will be no admittance of of any kind of failure here on any axis that they denied reality.
00:24:09.320They will just deny reality further and attempt to regulate reality further.
00:24:13.160Jeremy, if people want to follow you, as always, thank you for coming on the show.
00:24:19.260Where can they go to do that and stay up to date with all your analysis?
00:24:24.100Yeah, I'm about to hit 200000 followers on X and I give you takes there that you might not see in other places.
00:24:30.780So you follow me at X dot com slash Jeremy Kaufman.
00:24:35.800Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on.
00:24:56.920Might I humbly add sacred human health dot com.
00:25:01.560And I just want to lay down a marker now, because what was the word of the day when everything that we saw transpire in North Carolina with the floods and just the absolutely atrocious, horrific response there?
00:25:50.160We here in the war room, unlike Facebook, are still in the business of fact checking because the facts have always been on our side.
00:26:00.420Just on that topic, the State Department is launching a new counter disinformation agency.
00:26:07.100It's called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation Interference Hub.
00:26:10.480It's a mission center energizing a network of U.S. interagency, international and private sector partners that decisively exposes and counters disinformation and propaganda.
00:26:20.160Their mission is to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the federal government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.
00:26:37.580So that's going to be a Trojan horse for some more censorship.
00:26:41.300I think I just found a new agency that needs to be shut down.
00:26:44.660But humble suggestion to Joe Biden, the deep state.
00:26:47.700If you want to focus on the threats that are plaguing this country, maybe start with getting water in the fire hydrants.
00:28:11.820Are you tired of progressive corporations that continue to further alienate conservative Americans, all the while eroding the future of the American dream?
00:28:21.460Companies like Starbucks, Strong Army Customers to support abortion, or PayPal canceling accounts over political views?
00:28:29.540Maybelline making a mockery of women by supporting transgender models?
00:28:33.460And Bud Light forcing gender ideology on you when all you want is to enjoy a cold beer?
00:28:39.340But thanks to Public Square, you don't have to fund companies like this any longer.
00:28:44.700Public Square connects you to tens of thousands of businesses that share your value for life, family, freedom.
00:28:50.900Whether you're looking to buy coffee, find a new athletic brand that knows what a woman is, shop for clean skin care, or just find a restaurant in your community that won't lecture you about your political views,
00:31:38.940But they need to be addressed and fixed to the best of everybody's ability.
00:31:44.280Yeah, I'm sure when what, trenchial fires are pouring down on the city of Los Angeles, did you try telling them, oh, well, we're not sexist or racist?
00:32:01.360But thank you for rooting out, what, systemic racism from Los Angeles Fire Department.
00:32:07.560It really has gotten us so far, so far, so far that I get to sit here and host a show while my house is under a mandatory evacuation order.
00:32:15.480But hey, at least my fire department's not racist.
00:33:24.480In California, you can really pick and choose, right?
00:33:26.420You want to focus on the homeless crisis, the drug addiction crisis, now these historically destructive wildfires.
00:33:32.480Now, when I was in San Diego, actually, I had a local who took me to a homeless encampment because the fire chief over there said it was a hot spot for fires and that we should go investigate it.
00:33:42.620As soon as we got there, we saw the beginnings of an unattended fire.
00:33:46.520We ended up having to call the fire department, Natalie.
00:33:48.520So there is absolutely a lot of truth to the homeless being able to set fires, obviously, throughout the entire state of California, and these oftentimes turning into these very huge and destructive fires.
00:34:01.740So that's what was happening in San Diego.
00:34:03.740And then we made our way up to Alcadena, Pasadena area to take a peek at the fire there.
00:34:09.820Let's not forget that that was one of three yesterday.
00:34:13.860Now, you know, we're at like four or five separate fires that popped up.
00:34:18.140We've had tens of thousands of acres burned.
00:34:21.840But in the Alcadena area, I was speaking to residents, one of which who was actually, you know, in his home as the Eaton fire was surrounding it.
00:34:31.360He stated that his electricity was turned off yesterday afternoon, and then the fire really started and made its way to them in the evening.
00:34:40.780He was wondering, how did this start if all of our electricity was down?
00:34:44.240Many of the residents stating, yeah, we've been getting information from outside sources because we don't even know what's going on due to the fact that we don't have electricity.
00:35:27.900Fast forward to yesterday morning around 7 a.m., I'm speaking to another resident who said that the firemen had barely gotten there that morning at 5 a.m.
00:35:35.220She had left to go buy her own fire hoses because, at this point, the residents of California have resorted to turning on sprinklers and essentially trying to save their own homes with their own water because this is the situation that they've been left in with basically zero help.
00:35:50.880She went to go get her own fire hoses.
00:35:53.200The police had cut off the road and would not let her through to go and bring those fire hoses to her home so that she could continue, you know, hosing down the area around her home to try to make sure that the fires didn't come back.
00:36:05.700Because keep in mind, a lot of these other areas that are affected, still smoldering.
00:36:09.780The strong winds come in, reignite things.
00:36:12.180So the entire situation is so poorly mismanaged.
00:36:19.080I spoke to a firefighter yesterday who, of course, stated, yeah, basically all these blue hydrants that you're seeing, we have not been able to pull water out of them.
00:36:27.080We don't have the ability or the manpower, quite frankly, to put out these fires.
00:36:33.140As of now, we still have zero percent containment on the Pacific Palisades fire, the Eaton fire.
00:36:49.080It's obviously still so raw, but in your interviews with people, did you get a sense that there was sort of an anger or a frustration or at the very least confusion with California, Los Angeles leadership?
00:37:02.220Like, what is sort of the vibe on the ground there in terms of who people feel is responsible for this utter tragedy?
00:37:12.640I mean, it's really half and half, right, because we are in California, so a lot of the liberals are like, oh, it's just the natural wildfires.
00:37:44.640Meanwhile, her entire city is undergoing evacuation orders and receiving these historic fires.
00:37:50.220So there are Californians that see the issue that are definitely asking, again, those questions.
00:37:55.760If we knew strong winds were coming in, if we know that this happens every single year, why was nothing done to prevent this from happening?
00:38:03.240And again, too, you know, the fire insurance aspect.
00:38:06.280Many residents talking to me as well about how their insurance was canceled.
00:38:10.260And this one resident, her mom lived in a Zone 6 area or Code 6, it might have been called.
00:38:16.320So they canceled her fire insurance because they basically articulated, yeah, the insurance companies know that California leadership is not going to do anything to prevent fires.
00:38:24.760So the insurance companies then don't want to insure them because they know that based on the location that they're at, that basically everything's going to burn.
00:38:31.220And just another word that you used, I think, that certainly piqued my interest, and I'm sure the audience agrees, the sort of intentional, right, the arson, right?
00:38:42.400I saw a video last night, I believe it was Dr. Andrew Huberman, who posted it just to fire people intentionally setting a fire on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica.
00:40:29.000It's either Karen Bass's pockets or connected lobbyists and friends, or the case of Joe Biden, we learned it's probably the family members.
00:40:35.040I do think Hunter Biden's Malibu mansion did actually burn down.
00:42:51.820And then last night we saw the Sunset fire pop up.
00:42:54.540And residents on the ground very much saying, we don't believe there are electrical wires up there.
00:43:01.040This very much seems like this fire was potentially set.
00:43:04.400And then on the ground level in the city, you're already seeing the homeless lighting these fires all over the place.
00:43:10.160So truly, Natalie, it does seem like the California government will try to protect the environment for everything but human beings from the homeless crisis and the homeless being allowed to light these fires to, again, the lack of fire prevention with forests or even forest management.
00:43:26.960The fact that the water reservoirs have not been built since a new one since the 1980s, that fire hydrants have run out of water.
00:43:34.460I mean, this is just a perfect, I guess, equation to have the worst fires that we're seeing and what we're currently experiencing.
00:43:43.300But again, regarding the arson, I very much think that was in play.
00:43:47.780And the most sinister part about these fires, too, is that we never get answers, right?
00:43:52.900We never get answers on how they started.
00:43:55.380And it always kind of seems like that gets brushed under the rug and then comes in climate change.
00:44:10.980I think we'll only know if this fire or who started this fire, if it is probably a straight white Trump voting, you know, January 6th participating male.
00:44:19.620Otherwise, there'll be there'll be no interest.
00:44:21.540I'm just curious if you have been able to do any reporting or see or talk to people in terms of the shelters or temporary housing being set up for people who have been displaced.
00:44:32.960I know there were some reports that a lot of these areas are already overcrowded because of illegal aliens.
00:44:38.400But what is sort of the movement, the logistical operation side of the sheltering look like out there?
00:44:45.680That isn't something I've been able to investigate, but it's absolutely at the forefront because, like you said,
00:44:50.760we are hearing those reports and we've even seen it.
00:44:53.120I was just in San Diego outside of an entire hotel that has been utilized for illegal immigrants over the last year.
00:44:59.660And you're seeing pallets of water there.
00:45:02.700You're seeing, again, individual hotel rooms allocated and, of course, millions and even billions of dollars allocated to sheltering these illegal immigrants.
00:45:10.780So regarding this shelter right now, that's something I'm going to go investigate.
00:45:15.000But these hotels already have been spilled by illegals.
00:45:18.700So this kind of reminds me of New York, right, where if you're a tourist and you want to even rent a hotel for the night,
00:45:24.120it's going to be either extremely expensive because they're all filled up or you're not going to be able to because illegal immigrants have taken precedent.
00:45:30.940So that is still an issue here in California.
00:45:33.280And I guarantee that is also, you know, playing a part in this.
00:45:39.360Savannah, if people want to follow you, stay up to date with everything you're working on,
00:45:43.340maybe you can tease a little bit of the work you're going to be doing down in San Diego.
00:45:46.900Where can people go to do that and stay up to date with everything you're doing?