The Palisades area of Los Angeles is burning. House after house after house is on fire, and residents have been under a mandatory evacuation order, including folks who are my dear friends. Nearly 100,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders, and at least 13,000 structures are under threat.
00:18:51.580But L.A. Times, excuse me, New York Post reporting that L.A. Fire Department had its budget cut by a staggering $17.6 million this financial year.
00:19:02.260Drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second largest cut to come out of this mayor's fiscal year budget.
00:19:10.720She had initially wanted to cut it even more to $23 million.
00:19:14.480I 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.
00:19:28.980Former L.A. Times employee, and Camille actually lives in California.
00:19:32.660But I see things like this, and I see something, you know, like a $17 million budget cut.
00:19:37.560And, 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 and 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.
00:20:00.900I mean, you look at how much money that they're gathering in taxes, and where is it going?
00:20:05.600I mean, that's what I would love to see of, like, where in L.A. County is that money going otherwise.
00:20:11.620I 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.
00:20:20.680So maybe we should reroute some of that money towards the fire department.
00:20:25.040A couple of other small things is that, one, I mean, Matt said, you know, we have friends, and, you know, she did tweet about it.
00:20:32.980So, you know, I feel okay saying it, is that our friend Kennedy has a house in the Palisades.
00:20:38.440And 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?
00:20:44.460And, you know, so we have friends that are just on the front lines of this.
00:20:47.200And the second thing is, is because of the unbelievable silliness of the fire chief that you showed clips of, it's like, I don't, why are you telling me about staffing?
00:20:59.020Nobody cares about the staffing of the post office in California.
00:21:02.560What are you telling me about your staffing policies?
00:21:20.120Look at that photograph from the plane.
00:21:22.140That looks like CGI from an apocalyptic Hollywood movie.
00:21:27.240And I looked this morning in terror, and I say, I don't, this must have killed X number of people.
00:21:35.080Well, 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.
00:21:42.760They should have never gotten that big.
00:21:46.340We know that this is what happens in Southern California.
00:21:48.680But 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.
00:21:58.980They're doing quite a job that they should be praised for.
00:22:55.960All over the world right now, we are seeing people push back on these leftist politicians and the messes they've created.
00:23:03.160Is this going to happen even in California after something as disastrous as this?
00:23:08.520California has had ample opportunity to push back against leftist politicians over the past X number of years, including the aforementioned Rick Caruso.
00:23:16.640I think back to a guy who was a friend of mine who was an actual Republican mayor of California, Richard Reardon.
00:23:23.120He, unlike Karen Bass, responded to the many tragedies that unfolded in Southern California in the early 1990s.
00:23:32.460And I'm not just talking about the OJ trial, but especially to the Northridge earthquake.
00:23:37.220That's where he found his footing as mayor.
00:23:39.800And, you know, that damage is way beyond the city limits of L.A.
00:23:43.380And let's remember that L.A. County is a much more important, like, entity, government entity than the city council and the mayorship.
00:23:52.400And they handled twice as much of the fire action, for example.
00:23:55.460But 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.
00:24:04.260Karen Bass being out of the country is inexcusable.
00:24:06.740As soon as you know it's a red flag day with 80 to 100 mile per hour winds, you turn the plane around.
00:24:40.940I 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.
00:24:50.600October is when these fires usually happen.
00:26:40.160The same thing happened up in Montana.
00:26:42.620It'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.
00:26:58.580There's a federal policy associated with this.
00:27:01.440That's why it happens in Montana as well, which has different governance in general than the California does.
00:27:06.740And it's a classic unintended consequences story.
00:27:11.000The FAIR requirement, FAIR, Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, came as a result of the riots of 1968.
00:27:18.660It 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.
00:27:28.720So 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.
00:27:39.080The 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.
00:27:55.760So this federal requirement is at the heart of some of this.
00:27:59.380Then if you have some price controls on top of it, then it's a disaster.
00:28:02.720But 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.
00:28:10.640And already I've seen some people come at me and other people about that.
00:28:14.360But if you really want to go that way, which you shouldn't, because that's not American at all.
00:29:17.760My friend who just found out that her house is gone is a divorced single mom.
00:29:24.540She's got two young daughters and a dog.
00:29:27.080She just told me I asked I asked her what describe your neighbors, mainly elderly, retired flight attendant, a retired family practice doctor, a real estate agent, a retired social worker, retired college professor.
00:30:25.780But 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.
00:30:35.260And there's a clip that's going viral on X right now from 2018 when Trump was president.
00:30:39.100He was standing in a forest with Newsom.
00:31:23.680And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problems.
00:31:29.940I 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 culling of the trees and the forest that needs to be done to keep people safe.
00:31:45.840And left-wingers like Gavin Newsom, pretending that they're just such tree huggers, they don't want to do it.
00:31:53.900But meanwhile, how many trees just burned?
00:31:57.100How many people just lost everything, not to mention potentially their lives, because we wanted to let those little, that 50 feet worth of trees stand instead of culling the area?
00:32:08.180If I can go backwards on one small thing, which is, I think, a really important thing.
00:32:16.440Matt 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.
00:32:24.600And 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.
00:32:34.560But my response to that is, yes, that's clearly true.
00:33:29.300Well, that's what I heard when I was in Wisconsin, you know, the day that Donald Trump was there after the riots, burning down swaths of cities in Wisconsin.
00:33:40.660And people say, well, you know, they have insurance.
00:33:42.300It turned out a lot of them didn't have insurance.
00:33:43.840But even if that were the case, there are memories there.
00:33:52.120And for someone to say, well, you're in a high tax bracket, so it doesn't matter as much.
00:33:57.720I agree with Kennedy that these people should go fuck themselves.
00:34:02.420So, you know, I keep thinking about the fact that California is a place where they plan to do things like outlaw cars that run on gasoline, like these really sweeping, ambitious prohibitions that are aimed at transforming the nature of the state itself and trying to capture the future.
00:34:19.300It would be wonderful if they adopted that sort of approach to fire mitigation, like something audacious and aggressive that they continue to talk about year over year.
00:34:30.400I mean, California is, I mean, we, I live in Mill Valley, California now.
00:34:34.500Mill 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.
00:34:43.620We certainly have our fire season every single year, so it's something that is on people's minds regularly.
00:34:49.260But there is obviously a need for much more than what's being done currently.
00:34:53.900And I think a lot of people hear talk of sort of climate change in the context of these conversations about wildfires and imagine that 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.
00:35:11.360And you actually do need more of a serious focus on this.
00:35:14.100The other thing that I think a lot about now is at what point, if they don't do something dramatic and audacious, they have to just stop rebuilding in certain places.
00:35:23.540Because 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.
00:35:46.780The thing that I love about it, and I've spent a little time in like Malibu, which is a lot fancier and on the ocean.
00:35:53.040But the thing I love about the Palisades is it's all these really cute, charming little homes.
00:35:58.620You know, there are a couple of the grand estates and so on.
00:36:01.420But like, for the most part, my experience there is it's these really pretty homes.
00:36:07.140Some of them have the Mediterranean roofs.
00:36:09.880It's the stuff you read about when you think about L.A. from like the 1950s and how people had these little haciendas.
00:36:16.020And they were just it's so much Americana there, just utter charm around every corner and not just the just burned to the ground like some dystopian horror film seems impossible.
00:36:33.320Palisades also has a historical role in the 1930s, especially.
00:36:39.280It was home to a bunch of Jewish refugees of Central Europe and Adolf Hitler in particular.
00:36:45.980So 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.
00:36:57.780But also is just sort of a beautiful gesture because it wasn't, you know, started it was started as a Methodist refuge.
00:37:03.940And 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.
00:37:14.820And that's Pali higher that we're talking about here.
00:37:16.780This isn't just any high school that was burning yesterday.
00:37:19.060You know, how many how many movies have been shot at that at that place?
00:37:43.380There are so many huge, tall, steep mountains around the Southland and PCH is one of them.
00:37:51.560And when the fire starts jumping these things, people can get hemmed in pretty darn quick.
00:37:56.680I'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.
00:38:06.140It's pretty easy for people to get boxed in in a hurry.
00:38:09.180So if anyone's out there still, like, wondering whether they should evacuate, I would say evacuate, dude.
00:38:16.960Because it goes really, really, really fast and the fire will jump.
00:38:19.540I think about this because you were saying, you know, Moynihan, you're not rich.
00:38:25.600I was not raised rich, but now I'm pretty rich.
00:38:29.120And 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 thought.
00:38:39.020But then just think about it, rich or poor, what would you grab if you had a moment?
00:38:43.780You know, it would not be your fancy clothes or your, you know, designer car.
00:38:51.360It 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.
00:39:22.420Not 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.
00:39:35.940It seems almost impossible that they could have let this happen.
00:39:40.800I mean, I realize, yes, Mother Nature, too, but there were too many hands involved in this that let this happen, from the refusal to cull appropriately to protect these folks in the first place, to the focus on DEI at a fire department that had other needs.
00:39:59.080You know, you live in Norway, where we went in June.
00:40:05.040You're probably good on the water supply.
00:40:07.320Like, you're probably – everything is surrounded by water.
00:40:09.700There's a fjord out everybody's window.
00:40:33.400California's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan in 2022 emphasized that, quote,
00:40:40.260rare plants and species diversity must be protected when clearing forest floors.
00:40:47.320Now, why, why, Camille, why must the rare plants and species diversity be protected, right?
00:40:55.140The whole point in clearing a forest is to protect human life.
00:41:00.440Yeah, I mean, it's obviously not an illegitimate concern to be worried about the diversity of the forest, obviously.
00:41:10.320But it is a matter of having some sort of qualified concern for those things and actually attacking the issue in a very serious way.
00:41:19.000And unfortunately, this is a decades-old problem, as Matt already alluded to.
00:41:23.760And it's not something that has only become an issue since 2014.
00:41:28.900So 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,
00:41:42.040the 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
00:41:59.760than 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.
00:57:33.060It's things like that that, in part, got us into this mess in California.
00:57:38.020It's yet another thing that the left has said over the past 10-plus years we're not allowed to discuss.
00:57:43.200You can't listen to Michael Schellenberger, former Greenpeace activist, former Obama administration partner on the Solyndra Green Window deal,
00:57:56.080which 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,
00:58:03.040but just a man of reason saying, these policies suck.
00:59:27.920His hair, if nothing else, is just fantastic, and I applaud him for it.
00:59:34.740And he's been describing himself more as a libertarian over the years, which is very good.
00:59:38.820And this is a moment where it's kind of crystallizing a certain cultural vibe shift, if nothing else.
00:59:46.080But I would caution people, and that cultural vibe shift to me is that the culture of free speech is reasserting itself,
00:59:53.240whether the institutions of free speech are doing that, whether the incoming administration is going to be good for free speech.
01:00:00.400There'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.
01:00:11.840The cultural free speech is crucial to what all of us do.
01:00:14.240And 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.
01:00:20.660But broadly speaking, he has thrown open rather than restricted the amount of speech on his platform.
01:00:26.780And 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.
01:00:36.160It's just a, like, real-time fact-checking what Wikipedia was supposed to be back in the day on some level.
01:00:42.600It's so funny that you should say he's playing ball.
01:00:44.220He's playing ball in the free speech, you know, pond, the same way Steve Martin's son, Kevin Buckman, was playing ball in the movie Parenthood when Steve Martin made him.
01:01:13.800Looking at the video, it feels kind of more genuine.
01:01:16.480I don't actually want him to be responding to, like, government pressure in any direction, whether it's in a way that's positive or negative.
01:01:23.180I don't think it's government pressure.
01:01:40.480And 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.
01:01:54.020I mean, Rand Paul couldn't go on YouTube to say that, hey, you know, masking studies are not really all that.
01:01:59.700They would ban it for six months after that.
01:02:04.760But 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.
01:02:13.360And that is there's a lot of Western European and other country efforts to make a sort of transnational anti-speech or sort of anti-misinformation regime.
01:02:27.360And 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.
01:02:41.660If they can encourage him to resist any American cooperation and, in fact, active American resistance to any attempts to be as horribly anti-free speech as the U.K. has become, then that can be a really good thing, I think.
01:03:56.420This is, by the way, there's a lot of people trying to read Mark Zuckerberg here, and it's like, now he's bowing down to Trump.
01:04:03.720If it's any indication of the people I think that Matt and Camille and I have talked to, and 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.
01:04:27.620It 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.
01:04:43.760And 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.
01:05:03.520So you're actually checking this stuff, rather than it only being left to a very narrow band of people who care about this stuff, and whether the fact checkers and whether the experts are right about this stuff.
01:05:13.700So that kind of buckled people's impression of what these experts are.
01:05:17.540And so when experts, quote unquote, are coming onto Facebook and saying, no, the expert says this isn't true.
01:06:35.200And it was the beginning of the end for Facebook's political feed, you know, the news feed, which they don't really do anymore.
01:06:40.280Like, 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.
01:06:53.520But they basically completely, what's the word, like, depressed any and all circulation of news, like, about a year ago.
01:07:03.100And it seriously hurt a lot of right-wing podcasts, which had been using Facebook to promote their brand.
01:07:10.760And that was, like, a culmination, too, of just their fact-checking attempts and how poorly they were going.
01:07:15.940And, like, once you step a foot in this lane, it's just a freaking disaster.
01:07:20.200In the United States of America, this shit doesn't work.
01:07:23.060But, Camille, you wouldn't know that from the reactions to Zuckerberg's announcement.
01:07:28.740I'll just give you one, which is my favorite.
01:07:56.420I haven't talked to, like, Jeff Bezos.
01:07:57.800But I have traveled in a lot of circles with some of the people that they've been friendly with.
01:08:02.580Mark Andreessen and, um, uh, Peter Thiel are people who have known, um, Zuckerberg for years.
01:08:08.120Been early, were early involved in Facebook and were on the board for years.
01:08:11.460I think there's plenty of reasons 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.
01:08:22.080But they did it out of fear or concern that they simply couldn't get away with pushing back against certain things.
01:08:27.740And they feel newly liberated to actually push back and assert a bit of, a bit of power, um, and say, yeah, we're not going to do those things anymore.
01:08:36.700Um, and I think, Megan, you were correct to flag early on that there was not a, it was not a good idea for Facebook to begin fact-checking political ads.
01:08:45.280Um, not a good idea for them to outsource responsibility for trying to fact-check the videos that Stossel or anyone else is posting, um, and then flagging them formally, corporately.
01:08:54.620Um, because there's just way too much opportunity for that to go badly for you.
01:08:58.880But 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, um, it's going to result in plenty of bad things for you.
01:09:15.840It'll hurt your brand in the long run.
01:09:17.400And that is actually what folks have seen in recent years.
01:09:20.300Um, so it is, it is nice to see the pendulum swing back.
01:09:22.960I do suspect a lot of that happens, happens to be related to culture.
01:09:26.060And I hope that we can actually do this in a way that's a bit more stable.
01:09:30.320I think there are plenty of criticisms that one can raise with respect to something like community notes.
01:09:35.120Um, but it does seem to me that it is infinitely better, um, 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.
01:09:48.440It 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, to make it broadly available and open.
01:09:59.880And just like in the last election, if we saw some of these betting markets give us some of the best, um, information about where the election was likely to go, community notes processes work something like that.
01:10:11.740Um, so there's plenty of reason to think that that could be a very healthy thing.
01:10:15.700Um, and I think reasons for optimism with respect to the kind of culture of free speech reasserting itself.
01:10:21.020Um, although I've been assured by some people that that, that isn't a thing that exists, but I beg to definitely.
01:10:25.920But it's so great because as I listen to you talk, all I can think is we're winning, we're winning, you know, this free speech fight, you know, you guys have been in it neck deep.
01:10:39.160And the second thing I was thinking about was my friend because her house burned, her car burned and think about the other thing that, that is generally, you know, in your car and in your house, all your birth certificates, you know, your kid's birth certificates, your car registration, you know, you're like all of that.
01:10:58.400That's like, just think of the number of hours, you know, it's going to take you to try to reproduce those items.
01:11:07.000How the hell, like, how do you even start to go find your car registration data?
01:12:23.960Except it was about Sarah Palin making a Facebook post, um, about death panels.
01:12:29.840It wasn't about whether you could keep your doctor.
01:12:32.100It wasn't about whether, uh, you know, you've taken on the drug lobby and finally won or many of the other things that, but it wasn't about like.
01:12:39.400Did you see their lie of the year this year, Matt?
01:12:41.860Uh, it was not Joe Biden's, the best Joe Biden or it was, uh, cats and dogs, it's the, it's the cats and dogs, the dogs.
01:12:52.420I 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.
01:13:06.840Actually look at the difference between, uh, and this is, was true 12 years ago is true today.
01:13:11.620Um, they want to fact check political rhetoric.
01:13:14.740They don't want to fact check the lies that government are telling you in the name of making bad policy.
01:13:20.960How many, I mean, this goes hand in hand.
01:13:23.160We've had this crackdown on quote unquote misinformation hand in hand with the government serially lying to us about policies relating, especially to COVID.
01:13:35.500Why are we like actually using government pressure?
01:13:38.220I would say in violation of the first amendment, it's being a sort of adjudicated as we speak, but, uh, government pressure about this at the same time that the government is doing is making brand new kind of bold, uh, uh, stakes of its own misinformation.
01:13:54.100I would say that those two things go hand in hand and journalism made a really bad departure, uh, 10 years ago or so where it decided to be the referee of rhetoric, as opposed to covering policy.
01:14:05.180Policy matters much, much more, uh, and democratic policy, uh, in democratic places has, has produced really bad results.
01:14:12.680Republican policy sometimes does as well.
01:14:14.540Um, but, uh, 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, uh, Barack Obama did when passing and implementing Obamacare.
01:14:28.360And this goes on and on and on the biggest lie of a really long time was Biden's age.
01:14:33.700Um, that, that is not lie of the year is, is fundamentally enraging to at least half of the country.
01:14:53.400Now, 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.
01:15:03.780So 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.
01:15:14.720Something is changing out there and changing for the better right on.
01:15:19.980And I know Matt, um, you just wrote an article on Charlie Hebdo.
01:15:24.380So 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.
01:15:41.180And some segment of the population will say, yeah, right.
01:15:45.880I mean, we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier this week when I was going off on the movie, um, conclave because it makes a total mockery of Catholicism and the Cardinals and the Pope by spoiler alert.
01:16:32.920I think we are winning in the culture and you're right to, to point that out.
01:16:36.440Um, but we are not going to, uh, it's, we're not going to find a lot of winning within the kind of legacy cultural institutions.
01:16:44.480Even yesterday, you know, I was just doing a last quick little Google news search before I hit publish on, uh, piece about Charlie Hebdo.
01:16:51.120And here's the Columbia journalism review, right?
01:16:53.660Uh, 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.
01:17:03.740And like, we're talking about the murder of 12 people, beloved cartoonists, cartoonists who mocked, uh, first and mostly, uh, actually the Pope.
01:17:14.480And every single French leader, I mean, they're an anti-clerical, uh, satirical weekly stretching way back, very anti-authoritarian.
01:17:23.720Um, there isn't the mixed, uh, record here is only the performance of the media, which made Charlie Hebdo lonely.
01:17:31.700And 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, was placed on, uh, Salman Rushdie for satanic verses.
01:17:43.600There was a moment there where there was a time for choosing among Western intellectuals and they chose badly.
01:17:50.500They said, well, you know, Rushdie and Jimmy Carter's, uh, words in an op-ed that he wrote for the New York times, just three weeks after the fatwa, uh, you know, Rushdie is guilty of insulting Islam, you know, because, uh, people from Muslim countries.
01:18:04.500Uh, are, uh, more oppressed than, uh, Catholics or than, uh, people from, uh, a majority opinion.
01:18:10.960Uh, this was like a new introduction of cowardice on the part of the West kind of judging it in this way.
01:18:17.200And when the Danish cartoon crisis happened in 2006, which Danish newspapers published cartoons of Mohammed, no one cared.
01:18:23.460And then a bunch of imams in the middle East started publicizing them months later.
01:18:27.540Um, and then it led to a bunch of riots.
01:18:29.620That was the moment when, uh, the West writ large should have print reprinted those cartoons.
01:18:35.760I advocated for such when I worked for the LA times very strenuously.
01:18:39.040And I lost very narrowly in the opinion section.
01:18:41.840And I feel a shame to this day that I didn't win that argument, um, because Charlie Hebdo was one of the only places that did that.
01:18:48.580And once you become, uh, an outlier, then you become a target and they became an outlier because of the cowardice of the West and not just, uh, about reprinting cartoons about in the case of the New York times.
01:19:01.440At one point, writing a file story about a statue of Mohammed that appeared on top of a New York courthouse for a half a century that no one cared about.
01:19:11.660They wrote an article about this in the wake of, uh, one of the Charlie Hebdo controversies and didn't even run a file photo of the statue that existed.
01:19:38.400He just posted this in response to Zuckerberg saying in his video yesterday, he cited press pressure as part of the reason for proposed changes.
01:19:47.500After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
01:19:54.920Meta tried to address such concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
01:37:46.640Because for a decade, Trudeau and every institution in the country, the regime media, the universities, the courts, the parliament, has said Canada means nothing.
01:37:53.920Every one of Trudeau's actions say Canada means nothing.
01:39:50.220I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.
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01:41:32.020There's a – I just retweeted out Joel Pollack from Breitbart who lives, I believe, in Brentwood, but he's definitely local.
01:41:41.420He just had a really good informative thread about a variety of issues, including reservoirs and fire management and brush management specific to the Palisades.
01:41:50.400I recommend it, and hopefully people will tune in to wherever he's talking.
01:42:40.320Even the left hates you, Justin Trudeau.
01:42:42.060So before we go, I want to tell you that tomorrow on the show, we have a different Californian, Bill Maher.
01:42:48.800We'll be back on the show and we'll ask him whether he's experiencing any of this devastation firsthand
01:42:54.340and 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.
01:43:06.440Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.