February 3, 2025 • 31 mins
The John Kobylt Show Hour 2 (02/03) - Former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva comes on the show to talk about the ICE protests on the freeway that took place yesterday in Downtown LA. More on the ICE protests. Comparing the reactions of LA County vs. LA City during the fires. More on the Eaton Fire victims.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
Every day we do this from one until four o'clock
and after four o'clock John Cobelt's show on demand on
the iHeart app, and you can hear what you missed.
We spent much of the first hour on the incredible,
absolute failure the City of Los Angeles, including management, LA
(00:24):
Fire Department, LA Police, the emergency services. Just a total
lack of planning, a total lack of preparation, and everybody
was left on their own and that's why things were
so difficult when it came to evacuation out of the Palisades.
And you know, we haven't even touched all the usual stories.
(00:44):
But by the way, nobody in the fire department, nobody
at City Hall, nobody at Department of Order and Power.
To this day it's been three weeks, has commented three weeks,
four weeks now has said one word about all the failures.
Nobody has even acknowledged the failures. Nobody is talking about
the reservoir. Yet every time I go through these various
(01:08):
news stories, it's LA City Fire refuses to comment. LA
County Fire refuses to comment. The emergency management refuses to comment.
Everybody's refusing to comment. Karen Bass hasn't said one word
about the massive failures. Instead, she put a cherry on
the cake over the weekend by deciding they were going
to open up the palisades, no more checkpoints. And you
(01:31):
heard David Howard, or CAFI sales manager who lost his home.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
He said that everybody went berserk.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everybody went crazy because the looters are out there by
the hundreds, maybe a thousands. You cannot believe how many
looters are out on the West Side, especially during this fire.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
I don't know what is wrong with Karen Bass.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
And he said nobody, nobody in that area has any
confidence at all in her, the city council or anybody
at city Hall. Zero confidence. Nobody's even pretending. I don't
see one supporting quote from anyone, because everybody knows that
she's a disaster here. Really, for the good of everyone's lives,
(02:21):
she really ought to go. I don't know if there's
an emergency way to appoint a new mayor from the outside,
because it can't be any of the city council people
except for Tracy Park. Everybody else is just as bad
or worse. We'll get back to that, but let's talk
(02:42):
now about another absurdity. Yesterday and today, the city of
Los Angeles is allowing protesters by the thousands to shut
down major freeways because they're protesting ilegal immigration and deportations
by Trump. Let's get the former sheriff of La County,
(03:04):
Alex Vhanaweva on Alex, how are.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
You not too bad? John? How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm good?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Let me before we get into the immigration thing, let
me let me ask you something. I'm I was just
absolutely appalled by the response of La City and La
County with these fires, just the incredible lack of preparation
and lack of organization. What was your reaction watching all
this chaos the fire, Given that.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
The fire started the conditions, it was going to have
its way. Nature was going to take its course until
it ran out of fuel. And that's pretty much what happened. Regardless.
Set that aside, the absolute incompetence of pre planning to
get people out in a timely fashion costs people their lives,
and those are deliberate and incompetence from both city and
(03:55):
county leaders hands down.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I mean, what happened and now out to Dina where
people did not get notifications for nine hours after the
start of the fire.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yes, I mean, and coming out there was nobody in charge.
Remember when I was unceremoniously fired as a director of
emergency management during the pandemic, they appointed the CEO as
a director of emergency management. How did that work out?
Literally nobody searched. No one was saying, hey, this is
(04:29):
a big problem. Let's get everybody lined up. Let's start
doing our evacuations in an orderly fashion. None of that happened.
It was kind of like, well, let's put our finger
in the wind and see what we do once we
see the fire.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And they were sitting out, Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
They did not have the personnel on the ground because
the Sheriff's Department is responsible for the evacuations fire to
fight the fire. But when you have a skeleton crew
as your starting point to do evacuation, they had nobody
to go out there. So deputies on their own. They
were on the ground in al Sadena. God bless them.
(05:07):
They started doing the heroic thingle that I think, we
got to start evacuating these people because we're not getting
any word. And there was just not enough deputies to
do it, courtesy of the incompetence of the board and
the sheriff.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
What about this deportation rally they were having in downtown
LA yesterday. I mean, thousands of illegal immigrants showed up,
or at the very least legal alien supporters, and they
shut down the one on one and the police, the
Sheriff's department. Nobody does anything about it. And then they
(05:41):
did it again today, yep.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And guess what, They're going to keep doing it all
through the summer. Mark my word on this. That's going
to be the topic of the and all these little
activist circles, the Antifa circles, they're going to get more
and more attention because they clamor for attention and they
realize that the people in charge are blinking and don't
have any resolve to, you know, have a coesive plan
and execute it.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Why won't.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Why won't the city and the county step in here
and shut these things down? Why let them go on
for hours and hours and ruin everybody's day. I don't understand,
because they're fighting, they're fighting for illegal actions here, yep.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
They're terrified of being accused of not being woke, So
they have to tolerate people breaking the law in the
name of supporting and supporting immigrants, and they lump all
the immigrants together, if they you could lump them all
together into oppose Trump. I mean, it's it's asinine.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Who are they afraid of exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
They're afraid of Democratic Party, yep, Democratic Socialists of America.
Everyone who's going to be rallying to get more of
these wackos into La City Council is that they don't
have enough already and they don't want to give them
any ammunition to oppose them.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Is there that much support out there among voters for
the Democratic Socialists of America. I mean, it's already destroying
the city. I don't understand where is where Where is
the ground swallow support for the destruction of La.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
You know what, until they see their house burned down.
I think that is changing in the palisade. That's changing
in Alcidena, for sure, But other people haven't experienced that yet.
So it's gonna be an evolutionary process. It'll take a while.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
So you think that these protest groups are going to
keep going on and on all year, Oh.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
They are, and they're fed by inaction of your leaders,
because with that they realize, wow, no one's in charge.
We can continue doing more. And there's a number one
rule I think I've figured out for all these type
of protests, you're going to live to regret. Will you
fail to do at the onset of any protests.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, I mean we've seen that over and over again
with all these issues. By never addressing homelessness at the beginning,
we ended up with seventy thousand, but not addressing illegal immigration,
we ended up with millions.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yep, there you go, and you can repeat yourself over
and over again. Because people are unwilling to make decisions
based on values, based on principles. It's all about let
me put my finger in the political wins and see
which way they're blowing. How's this going to make me look?
And you know that's not going to come up with
a good decision.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
All right, Thanks for coming on, Alex.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
You got to do on anything?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, Former La County Sheriff Alex Vanueva. We'll continue with
more just to I'm going to describe what was going
on yesterday because he's right, I cannot believe how everybody
in city and county government gives in to all the lunatics.
They know that the police are compromised right now because
(09:05):
they're they're overtaxed on the west side with the fire,
So this is the perfect time to go storming and
shutting down the one oh one or shutting down downtown streets.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
More coming up.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
We continue covering the just the complete destruction of lawlessness.
We have no government, We've got nobody in charge. We've
got the police and the Sheriff's department not even bothering
to take on these protesters that shut down yesterday the
one on one freeway, and today thousands were downtown.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Now the organizers know that lapd.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Is and and the National Guard and CHP is tied
up on the west side trying to keep the palisades
from what's left of it being destroyed by the looters.
So they know there's a great shortage of cop So
what do they do. They pick yesterday to start rallying
on the one on one freeway, shutting down traffic by
(10:09):
the way, wearing Mexican and Salvadoran flags. So some of
you silly fools who flinch when Trump talks about an invasion.
They're They're not They're not trying to They're not trying
to hide it anymore. This is about taking land from America.
This is about controlling a big piece of Los Angeles.
(10:30):
This is not about coming here to work. No, it's
not if if if if you. If you want to
be sympathetic to try to get a break from the
American government, you don't drape yourself in the salvadorn or
the Mexican flag. That's not a that's not a way
to make nice with your hosts. Let's play a clip
(10:51):
from what it sounded like during the protest yesterday. The
stupid drums again, All these dumb ass protests used drums.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Boom boom, boom, boom boom. Very good. That's sophisticated music there.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So they're dressed in their Mexican and Salvadoran flags. They
blocked traffic at the Spring and Temple streets, honking horns,
blasting music, dancing in the road. Finally, uh, the police
went downtown in riot gear and helmets, batons. They shut
(11:43):
down a section of the one O one What what?
Why did they Why did they let them do it
all day. Why don't shut it down immediately? A tear
gas the hell out of them, Shut it down, get
out of bulldozer.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Chase them out till ten o'clock.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Well, actually it was past ten o'clock. As of ten o'clock,
there were no reports of arrests. So this became an
all day festival. With our blessing. This is what you're
paying tax money for. Palisades is burning and nobody came
to rescue those poor people. Meantime, I don't understand why
(12:27):
is anybody paying a dollar in tax money. There was
no plan to deal with the fire and to rescue
people in the Palisades.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Zero plan.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Meantime, we sent half the police force to watch illegal
aliens scream at us when they should have been arrested
and deported. Yeah, they got a lot of cute signs.
One of them says, Maga Mexicans always get across. I
(12:58):
drink my horse Shota warm. Because f Ice spelled it out.
And let me see that that was yesterday's that today's
hundreds of demonstrators in downtown La same thing. They were
going to be at the Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana
as well. They started on the steps of City Hall
(13:22):
and started marching along West First and North Spring Streets
made their way to the Crypto Arena.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's just it's just shocking.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I mean, you know what, I I wish to God,
I would would swoop in there with about ten thousand
officers and just part everybody up, take them right to
Lax on a plane, take them back to their homeland.
This is just an unlivable, ungovernable time in Los Angeles.
(13:57):
And you notice no response at all from the empty
suit mayor nothing. She's got nothing to say. Yeah, yeah,
she wants to clear out the Palisades. She wants to
get rid of the Palisades security checks so the looters
can clear the place out. Meantime, on the east side,
(14:18):
the illegal immigrants have complete control and block traffic in
all directions. Great on behalf of the citizens who paid
taxes in your salary, Karen Bass, What a winner.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
That was a good decision.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
You're listening to John Cobel's on Demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
We're on every day from one until four and then
after four o'clock. John Cobelt's show on demand on the
iHeart app. After at three o'clock we're going to talk
with Todd Benzman. He writes for the Center for Immigration
Studies and the New York Post and many other publications.
He's been a journalist at the Border, and he has
come on our show and talked about many times how
(15:07):
the uh, the federal government has spent billions of dollars
with the United Nations to fund illegal alien migration into
this country. Our tax money was being used to finance
the chain of illegal alien migration. And now uh, they're
(15:32):
they're they're they're turning off the spigot. They're cutting the
funding just like that. Christy Gnome is the new the
new head of the Department of Homeland Security, and uh,
it's it's simply going to zero real fast. And Todd's
going to explain it right now. You can't imagine what
your tax money has been wasted on.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
And what it what it's done is is.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Created this terrible, terrible mess we have in the city
of Los Angeles with over a million illegal aliens.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
And you can see what's happening now.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
They're revolting because Trump is enforcing the law and now
they're tying up our lives by blocking traffic on the
freeways and in the downtown streets because we have a
president who's enforcing the law and this is so shocking.
It's making them very angry, and we paid for the
(16:22):
whole mess. I'll tell you all about that coming up
after three o'clock. The La Times I told you is
on the I cannot remember when the last time they
were on a roll like this.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
It's got to be over ten years.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
They are doing credible pieces investigating the massive non response,
the lack of planning, the lack of readiness for the
fires in La City and County. They got a story
today by Rebecca Ellis and Grace Towhey, and it compares
the reaction of La County up to a point with
(16:57):
La City, La County fire chief Anthony Moron. Is it
Marona Maroney, Deborah?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When I get it right, it's Maroni.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Mrony okay as in Rise with Boloney Right, Yes, Anthony
Mroney woke up. He lives in the valley and his
swimming pool was filled with leaves and roof shingles, and
his chief deputy, who lives in Sierra Madre, said his
house felt like I was going to get blown off
the foundation. So they looked up a weather forecast app
(17:30):
and decided on the spot at six thirty in the
morning that the nine hundred firefighters on duty would not
be going home.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Those nine hundred would.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Be staying for the next shift, so they'd have double
the firefighters.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
At eight am, when the.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Next shift showed up, they had eighteen hundred firefighters.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
When the first fire started in.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
The Palisades, that was double what the city had because
the city, as we know now, Kristin Crowley, she got
up in the morning. I guess she didn't have leaves
in her swimming pool. Maybe her house wasn't being shaken
by the wind. She sent.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
The overnight shift home. She sent them home.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
A thousand firefighters should have been kept for a second shift.
They go home, the county keeps theirs. Now you're probably thinking, well,
this didn't help in Alta Dina. I'll explain, But Maroney says,
I think we viewed the risk differently than La City. Boy,
is that a polite way of saying that Kristin Crowley
(18:37):
really effed up. And here's how it affected Alta Dina.
Maroney's county firefighters poured into the Palisades that morning to
help out La City, which, according to the Times had
been caught flat footed after staffing a fraction of its
(19:00):
available engines. Remember, the forecast was for extreme fire danger,
extreme winds.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
We've never had wins like that, right, I mean, I
don't even remember, ever, ever, ever experiencing in southern California
wins like that, And they were in the forecast.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
It was in the forecast. In fact, there is an
app called Windy. Surfers and sailors use it, and Maroney
and his deputy, John O'Brien woke up in the morning,
heard the wind outside, saw the leaves and the roof
shingles on the ground, and they looked on the Windy
app and said, Wow, it's going to be a really
windy day and there's extreme fire danger. So what did
(19:43):
Maroney do? Doubled the number of firefighters? What did Kristin
Crowley do at La City? Set half of them home? True,
she won't say a word about it now, neither will
Karen Bass. But that's what happened. He doubled his firefighting force.
(20:03):
Kristin Crowley cut hers in half. Good judgment, uh so,
But the problem is as the fire spread in the
Palisades and into Malibu, I mean, I mean Mrony had
every available piece of equipment out there. We had one
(20:26):
hundred engines in the shop because La City has no
money to hire new mechanics, all right, So why it
out to Dina Burn?
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Partly because you had so many county firefighters in the Palisades,
because Kristin Crowley hadn't staffed the Palisades with city firefighters,
because nobody was prepositioned.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
In the hills of the Palisades as well.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
As the other hills on both sides of the Santa
Monica Mountains. If you had strike teams, if you had engines,
if you had hundreds of firefighters populating these towns, you
could get to the start of that fire perhaps. And
I hear everybody saying, well, you know, unprecedented wins, and
(21:20):
it's like, yeah, except what if you had the strike
teams in the hills to go after that fire spot
in a matter of minutes instead of an hour or
an hour and a half. That's the whole point of this.
If you're prepared, if you're having the worst wins that
they've seen in decades, because it wasn't blowing at one
(21:41):
hundred miles an hour in the morning, that happened later.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
See people kind of glide.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Over all the details to suit their their bias, their
self interest.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
It winds like nobody's ever seen, not in the morning
when it started.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
But we also knew that we had low humidity. Right,
everything is so dry, So everything was a recipe for
a wind disaster, I mean for a fire disaster.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yes, everything, the humidity was in the single digits. The
wind was already blown.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
I'm standing in the Palisades an hour before, an hour
before the fire started. We left from our hike in
pe Terra Canyon at nine ten thirty the fire started.
I felt the winds. They were starting to get strong,
but they were manageable. In fact, they sent up some
aircraft at the very beginning. It's just that there were
(22:37):
no firefighters prepositioned. Newsom had said there were. He lied
they weren't, and Crowley sent everybody home, and Maroney tries
to back up Crowley, and then he gets caught shortened
out to Dana, this is just a badly, badly run.
The whole area is badly run. We paid for these people,
(22:59):
We trust them. We're told that our safety is their
highest priority.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
No it's not.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
It says here at seven twenty am on January seventh,
eight hundred La County firefighters got an email saying you
got to stay, and all their engines were staffed, as
well as smaller utility vehicles known as patrols forty.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Two reserve apparatus.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
These are the backups when the frontline engines are out
of service. There was other strike teams in Agora Hills,
Loch Honyatta, front Ridge, Pacuima strike teams in Santa Clarita.
The county fire officials apparently read the forecasts. What's Kristin
Crowley reading? What was La City Fire Management reading?
Speaker 1 (23:55):
That morning? All you had to do is look up
the windy app.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Crowley calls Morony and says, hey, I need help. I
got a bad fire. Hey, I need help. I got
a bad fire.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
You have help. You had a thousand firefighters, you said.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Home, that was your help. I need help. I got
a bad fire. You knew you were going to have
a bad fire. The Weather Service told you that for
five days.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Is it me? Am I crazy?
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Well you are, but not in this case.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM sixty.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Just to finish up on the Altadena situation, because I
do feel badly that Altadena is not getting as much
attention as the more glamorous Palisades. But you can't get
around the fact that the western part of Altadena, which
is where the black neighborhoods are and have been forever,
(25:00):
did not get evacuation warnings for nine hours. There's just
no way to spin this, no way, no way, no
way at all.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
It's impossible.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
And everybody in that region has every right to think
whatever they want to think because they have An Altadena
Town council member named John Carmody says, why didn't anyone
help us? He's on the west side of Altadena. He's
had many residents watch their homes burn, no fire engines
in sight. And this is what the county doesn't want
(25:33):
to address the way the city doesn't want to address
the lack of response in the Palisades early on. Nobody
wants to explain why western out toa dina where a
majority of the deaths occurred, why they were abandoned. It's
a historically black area, and the reason people live there
(25:56):
is they weren't.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Allowed to live east.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
They weren't allowed to live east of Lake Avenue decades ago.
That's where redlining came in. The insurance companies wouldn't even
bother to ensure black families that lived on the east
side of Lake Avenue, so they went to the west side.
(26:18):
And Carmody said, the area has definitely fell undervalued and
overlooked in many ways. The fire made it more obvious.
It doesn't have its own city government. It relies on
the county for fire protection. It's unincorporated, so everybody, like
(26:40):
I said, was on their own. Maroney, the LA Fire Chief,
called up the state's Office of Emergency Services for fifty
strike teams that could be distributed throughout LA County, and
he said, I thought to myself, if I've over ordered,
I'm going to seem foolish, right like, look at morony
over reacting. It is terrible that you have leaders who
(27:04):
fear they're overreacting and fear they're going to be criticized
for calling out extra help if you didn't need the help,
So what nothing lost? I don't understand that attitude, say
over ordered strike teams. They're constantly telling us there's no
way to predict these fires. They've never seen anything like
(27:26):
this before, so why are worried about. To his credit,
he did, he did call for all the strike teams anyway,
But just you know, why have that, Why do you
have to have that in your head? Why do we
have a culture where the fire chief has got to
be worried that he's going to get into some kind
of some kind of critical there's going to be a
critical frenzy because he needs more help to put out
(27:50):
a fire. But from twelve fifty one am to three
twenty five am, the warning and evacuation system for all
of altladenfell silent. The LA Times reviewed all the alerts
that went out. Noticeably absent were warnings or orders for
(28:14):
areas west of North Lake Avenue. There were plenty of
interviews and plenty of radio calls that the Times heard,
and it was clear that they were burning on the
west side, and it was clear that nobody was showing up.
They never issued evacuation warnings west of Lake, including on
(28:39):
the blocks where the homes were actively burning, and they
wouldn't come till three twenty five And one of the
officials could not explain the gap. He just said his
agency wasn't responsible. Yeah, nobody comments, and nobody's responsible. But
(29:02):
you know, I'm just I'm just letting everybody know we're
gonna stay on top of this. We're gonna find out
the names. The La Times is going to find out
the names. They're gonna find out who's responsible. So if
you think you're gonna slink slink back into this foggy,
bureaucratic haze that you're accustomed to living in, not gonna
happen this time. Not gonna happen for Karen Bass and
the rest of the clowns on the City Council. Not
(29:24):
going to happen. Management of La Fire, La County Fire. Oh,
those god awful supervisors on La County Board of Supervises,
all these people, some of them are just impossibly dreadful,
awful people. But you know what you keep you keep
carrying on with your DEI debates. Don't bother putting plans
(29:48):
together to save people in the midst of terrible wildfires.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
We wouldn't want you to do that.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Don't bother filling up reservoirs, don't bother checking to see
if hydrants work. Just make sure you had the latest
DEI plan in place so everything's equitable. But it looks
like you know, you ruined Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Congratulations,
a lot of equity there. We come back an to
talk to Todd Bensman. Christy Noam, the Homeland Security Secretary
(30:19):
is officially cutting off money to the UN plus US
tax money. No more for all these agencies and non
governmental organizations that were financing the illegal alien caravan that
was running all the way from Columbia to the US.
(30:41):
They were financing the entire southern border invasion. You work,
if you work for a living. If you don't work
for a living, it was our buddy that went in.
If you work, it was your money. That's next. Debor
Mark live in the CAFI twenty four our newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
(31:01):
can always hear the show live on KFI AM six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
Every day we do this from one until four o'clock
and after four o'clock John Cobelt's show on demand on
the iHeart app, and you can hear what you missed.
We spent much of the first hour on the incredible,
absolute failure the City of Los Angeles, including management, LA
(00:24):
Fire Department, LA Police, the emergency services. Just a total
lack of planning, a total lack of preparation, and everybody
was left on their own and that's why things were
so difficult when it came to evacuation out of the Palisades.
And you know, we haven't even touched all the usual stories.
(00:44):
But by the way, nobody in the fire department, nobody
at City Hall, nobody at Department of Order and Power.
To this day it's been three weeks, has commented three weeks,
four weeks now has said one word about all the failures.
Nobody has even acknowledged the failures. Nobody is talking about
the reservoir. Yet every time I go through these various
(01:08):
news stories, it's LA City Fire refuses to comment. LA
County Fire refuses to comment. The emergency management refuses to comment.
Everybody's refusing to comment. Karen Bass hasn't said one word
about the massive failures. Instead, she put a cherry on
the cake over the weekend by deciding they were going
to open up the palisades, no more checkpoints. And you
(01:31):
heard David Howard, or CAFI sales manager who lost his home.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
He said that everybody went berserk.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everybody went crazy because the looters are out there by
the hundreds, maybe a thousands. You cannot believe how many
looters are out on the West Side, especially during this fire.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
I don't know what is wrong with Karen Bass.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
And he said nobody, nobody in that area has any
confidence at all in her, the city council or anybody
at city Hall. Zero confidence. Nobody's even pretending. I don't
see one supporting quote from anyone, because everybody knows that
she's a disaster here. Really, for the good of everyone's lives,
(02:21):
she really ought to go. I don't know if there's
an emergency way to appoint a new mayor from the outside,
because it can't be any of the city council people
except for Tracy Park. Everybody else is just as bad
or worse. We'll get back to that, but let's talk
(02:42):
now about another absurdity. Yesterday and today, the city of
Los Angeles is allowing protesters by the thousands to shut
down major freeways because they're protesting ilegal immigration and deportations
by Trump. Let's get the former sheriff of La County,
(03:04):
Alex Vhanaweva on Alex, how are.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
You not too bad? John? How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm good?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Let me before we get into the immigration thing, let
me let me ask you something. I'm I was just
absolutely appalled by the response of La City and La
County with these fires, just the incredible lack of preparation
and lack of organization. What was your reaction watching all
this chaos the fire, Given that.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
The fire started the conditions, it was going to have
its way. Nature was going to take its course until
it ran out of fuel. And that's pretty much what happened. Regardless.
Set that aside, the absolute incompetence of pre planning to
get people out in a timely fashion costs people their lives,
and those are deliberate and incompetence from both city and
(03:55):
county leaders hands down.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I mean, what happened and now out to Dina where
people did not get notifications for nine hours after the
start of the fire.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yes, I mean, and coming out there was nobody in charge.
Remember when I was unceremoniously fired as a director of
emergency management during the pandemic, they appointed the CEO as
a director of emergency management. How did that work out?
Literally nobody searched. No one was saying, hey, this is
(04:29):
a big problem. Let's get everybody lined up. Let's start
doing our evacuations in an orderly fashion. None of that happened.
It was kind of like, well, let's put our finger
in the wind and see what we do once we
see the fire.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And they were sitting out, Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
They did not have the personnel on the ground because
the Sheriff's Department is responsible for the evacuations fire to
fight the fire. But when you have a skeleton crew
as your starting point to do evacuation, they had nobody
to go out there. So deputies on their own. They
were on the ground in al Sadena. God bless them.
(05:07):
They started doing the heroic thingle that I think, we
got to start evacuating these people because we're not getting
any word. And there was just not enough deputies to
do it, courtesy of the incompetence of the board and
the sheriff.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
What about this deportation rally they were having in downtown
LA yesterday. I mean, thousands of illegal immigrants showed up,
or at the very least legal alien supporters, and they
shut down the one on one and the police, the
Sheriff's department. Nobody does anything about it. And then they
(05:41):
did it again today, yep.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And guess what, They're going to keep doing it all
through the summer. Mark my word on this. That's going
to be the topic of the and all these little
activist circles, the Antifa circles, they're going to get more
and more attention because they clamor for attention and they
realize that the people in charge are blinking and don't
have any resolve to, you know, have a coesive plan
and execute it.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Why won't.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Why won't the city and the county step in here
and shut these things down? Why let them go on
for hours and hours and ruin everybody's day. I don't understand,
because they're fighting, they're fighting for illegal actions here, yep.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
They're terrified of being accused of not being woke, So
they have to tolerate people breaking the law in the
name of supporting and supporting immigrants, and they lump all
the immigrants together, if they you could lump them all
together into oppose Trump. I mean, it's it's asinine.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Who are they afraid of exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
They're afraid of Democratic Party, yep, Democratic Socialists of America.
Everyone who's going to be rallying to get more of
these wackos into La City Council is that they don't
have enough already and they don't want to give them
any ammunition to oppose them.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Is there that much support out there among voters for
the Democratic Socialists of America. I mean, it's already destroying
the city. I don't understand where is where Where is
the ground swallow support for the destruction of La.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
You know what, until they see their house burned down.
I think that is changing in the palisade. That's changing
in Alcidena, for sure, But other people haven't experienced that yet.
So it's gonna be an evolutionary process. It'll take a while.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
So you think that these protest groups are going to
keep going on and on all year, Oh.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
They are, and they're fed by inaction of your leaders,
because with that they realize, wow, no one's in charge.
We can continue doing more. And there's a number one
rule I think I've figured out for all these type
of protests, you're going to live to regret. Will you
fail to do at the onset of any protests.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, I mean we've seen that over and over again
with all these issues. By never addressing homelessness at the beginning,
we ended up with seventy thousand, but not addressing illegal immigration,
we ended up with millions.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yep, there you go, and you can repeat yourself over
and over again. Because people are unwilling to make decisions
based on values, based on principles. It's all about let
me put my finger in the political wins and see
which way they're blowing. How's this going to make me look?
And you know that's not going to come up with
a good decision.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
All right, Thanks for coming on, Alex.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
You got to do on anything?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, Former La County Sheriff Alex Vanueva. We'll continue with
more just to I'm going to describe what was going
on yesterday because he's right, I cannot believe how everybody
in city and county government gives in to all the lunatics.
They know that the police are compromised right now because
(09:05):
they're they're overtaxed on the west side with the fire,
So this is the perfect time to go storming and
shutting down the one oh one or shutting down downtown streets.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
More coming up.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
We continue covering the just the complete destruction of lawlessness.
We have no government, We've got nobody in charge. We've
got the police and the Sheriff's department not even bothering
to take on these protesters that shut down yesterday the
one on one freeway, and today thousands were downtown.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Now the organizers know that lapd.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Is and and the National Guard and CHP is tied
up on the west side trying to keep the palisades
from what's left of it being destroyed by the looters.
So they know there's a great shortage of cop So
what do they do. They pick yesterday to start rallying
on the one on one freeway, shutting down traffic by
(10:09):
the way, wearing Mexican and Salvadoran flags. So some of
you silly fools who flinch when Trump talks about an invasion.
They're They're not They're not trying to They're not trying
to hide it anymore. This is about taking land from America.
This is about controlling a big piece of Los Angeles.
(10:30):
This is not about coming here to work. No, it's
not if if if if you. If you want to
be sympathetic to try to get a break from the
American government, you don't drape yourself in the salvadorn or
the Mexican flag. That's not a that's not a way
to make nice with your hosts. Let's play a clip
(10:51):
from what it sounded like during the protest yesterday. The
stupid drums again, All these dumb ass protests used drums.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Boom boom, boom, boom boom. Very good. That's sophisticated music there.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So they're dressed in their Mexican and Salvadoran flags. They
blocked traffic at the Spring and Temple streets, honking horns,
blasting music, dancing in the road. Finally, uh, the police
went downtown in riot gear and helmets, batons. They shut
(11:43):
down a section of the one O one What what?
Why did they Why did they let them do it
all day. Why don't shut it down immediately? A tear
gas the hell out of them, Shut it down, get
out of bulldozer.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Chase them out till ten o'clock.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Well, actually it was past ten o'clock. As of ten o'clock,
there were no reports of arrests. So this became an
all day festival. With our blessing. This is what you're
paying tax money for. Palisades is burning and nobody came
to rescue those poor people. Meantime, I don't understand why
(12:27):
is anybody paying a dollar in tax money. There was
no plan to deal with the fire and to rescue
people in the Palisades.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Zero plan.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Meantime, we sent half the police force to watch illegal
aliens scream at us when they should have been arrested
and deported. Yeah, they got a lot of cute signs.
One of them says, Maga Mexicans always get across. I
(12:58):
drink my horse Shota warm. Because f Ice spelled it out.
And let me see that that was yesterday's that today's
hundreds of demonstrators in downtown La same thing. They were
going to be at the Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana
as well. They started on the steps of City Hall
(13:22):
and started marching along West First and North Spring Streets
made their way to the Crypto Arena.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's just it's just shocking.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I mean, you know what, I I wish to God,
I would would swoop in there with about ten thousand
officers and just part everybody up, take them right to
Lax on a plane, take them back to their homeland.
This is just an unlivable, ungovernable time in Los Angeles.
(13:57):
And you notice no response at all from the empty
suit mayor nothing. She's got nothing to say. Yeah, yeah,
she wants to clear out the Palisades. She wants to
get rid of the Palisades security checks so the looters
can clear the place out. Meantime, on the east side,
(14:18):
the illegal immigrants have complete control and block traffic in
all directions. Great on behalf of the citizens who paid
taxes in your salary, Karen Bass, What a winner.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
That was a good decision.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
You're listening to John Cobel's on Demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
We're on every day from one until four and then
after four o'clock. John Cobelt's show on demand on the
iHeart app. After at three o'clock we're going to talk
with Todd Benzman. He writes for the Center for Immigration
Studies and the New York Post and many other publications.
He's been a journalist at the Border, and he has
come on our show and talked about many times how
(15:07):
the uh, the federal government has spent billions of dollars
with the United Nations to fund illegal alien migration into
this country. Our tax money was being used to finance
the chain of illegal alien migration. And now uh, they're
(15:32):
they're they're they're turning off the spigot. They're cutting the
funding just like that. Christy Gnome is the new the
new head of the Department of Homeland Security, and uh,
it's it's simply going to zero real fast. And Todd's
going to explain it right now. You can't imagine what
your tax money has been wasted on.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
And what it what it's done is is.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Created this terrible, terrible mess we have in the city
of Los Angeles with over a million illegal aliens.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
And you can see what's happening now.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
They're revolting because Trump is enforcing the law and now
they're tying up our lives by blocking traffic on the
freeways and in the downtown streets because we have a
president who's enforcing the law and this is so shocking.
It's making them very angry, and we paid for the
(16:22):
whole mess. I'll tell you all about that coming up
after three o'clock. The La Times I told you is
on the I cannot remember when the last time they
were on a roll like this.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
It's got to be over ten years.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
They are doing credible pieces investigating the massive non response,
the lack of planning, the lack of readiness for the
fires in La City and County. They got a story
today by Rebecca Ellis and Grace Towhey, and it compares
the reaction of La County up to a point with
(16:57):
La City, La County fire chief Anthony Moron. Is it
Marona Maroney, Deborah?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When I get it right, it's Maroni.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Mrony okay as in Rise with Boloney Right, Yes, Anthony
Mroney woke up. He lives in the valley and his
swimming pool was filled with leaves and roof shingles, and
his chief deputy, who lives in Sierra Madre, said his
house felt like I was going to get blown off
the foundation. So they looked up a weather forecast app
(17:30):
and decided on the spot at six thirty in the
morning that the nine hundred firefighters on duty would not
be going home.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Those nine hundred would.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Be staying for the next shift, so they'd have double
the firefighters.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
At eight am, when the.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Next shift showed up, they had eighteen hundred firefighters.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
When the first fire started in.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
The Palisades, that was double what the city had because
the city, as we know now, Kristin Crowley, she got
up in the morning. I guess she didn't have leaves
in her swimming pool. Maybe her house wasn't being shaken
by the wind. She sent.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
The overnight shift home. She sent them home.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
A thousand firefighters should have been kept for a second shift.
They go home, the county keeps theirs. Now you're probably thinking, well,
this didn't help in Alta Dina. I'll explain, But Maroney says,
I think we viewed the risk differently than La City. Boy,
is that a polite way of saying that Kristin Crowley
(18:37):
really effed up. And here's how it affected Alta Dina.
Maroney's county firefighters poured into the Palisades that morning to
help out La City, which, according to the Times had
been caught flat footed after staffing a fraction of its
(19:00):
available engines. Remember, the forecast was for extreme fire danger,
extreme winds.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
We've never had wins like that, right, I mean, I
don't even remember, ever, ever, ever experiencing in southern California
wins like that, And they were in the forecast.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
It was in the forecast. In fact, there is an
app called Windy. Surfers and sailors use it, and Maroney
and his deputy, John O'Brien woke up in the morning,
heard the wind outside, saw the leaves and the roof
shingles on the ground, and they looked on the Windy
app and said, Wow, it's going to be a really
windy day and there's extreme fire danger. So what did
(19:43):
Maroney do? Doubled the number of firefighters? What did Kristin
Crowley do at La City? Set half of them home? True,
she won't say a word about it now, neither will
Karen Bass. But that's what happened. He doubled his firefighting force.
(20:03):
Kristin Crowley cut hers in half. Good judgment, uh so,
But the problem is as the fire spread in the
Palisades and into Malibu, I mean, I mean Mrony had
every available piece of equipment out there. We had one
(20:26):
hundred engines in the shop because La City has no
money to hire new mechanics, all right, So why it
out to Dina Burn?
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Partly because you had so many county firefighters in the Palisades,
because Kristin Crowley hadn't staffed the Palisades with city firefighters,
because nobody was prepositioned.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
In the hills of the Palisades as well.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
As the other hills on both sides of the Santa
Monica Mountains. If you had strike teams, if you had engines,
if you had hundreds of firefighters populating these towns, you
could get to the start of that fire perhaps. And
I hear everybody saying, well, you know, unprecedented wins, and
(21:20):
it's like, yeah, except what if you had the strike
teams in the hills to go after that fire spot
in a matter of minutes instead of an hour or
an hour and a half. That's the whole point of this.
If you're prepared, if you're having the worst wins that
they've seen in decades, because it wasn't blowing at one
(21:41):
hundred miles an hour in the morning, that happened later.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
See people kind of glide.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Over all the details to suit their their bias, their
self interest.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
It winds like nobody's ever seen, not in the morning
when it started.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
But we also knew that we had low humidity. Right,
everything is so dry, So everything was a recipe for
a wind disaster, I mean for a fire disaster.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yes, everything, the humidity was in the single digits. The
wind was already blown.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
I'm standing in the Palisades an hour before, an hour
before the fire started. We left from our hike in
pe Terra Canyon at nine ten thirty the fire started.
I felt the winds. They were starting to get strong,
but they were manageable. In fact, they sent up some
aircraft at the very beginning. It's just that there were
(22:37):
no firefighters prepositioned. Newsom had said there were. He lied
they weren't, and Crowley sent everybody home, and Maroney tries
to back up Crowley, and then he gets caught shortened
out to Dana, this is just a badly, badly run.
The whole area is badly run. We paid for these people,
(22:59):
We trust them. We're told that our safety is their
highest priority.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
No it's not.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
It says here at seven twenty am on January seventh,
eight hundred La County firefighters got an email saying you
got to stay, and all their engines were staffed, as
well as smaller utility vehicles known as patrols forty.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Two reserve apparatus.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
These are the backups when the frontline engines are out
of service. There was other strike teams in Agora Hills,
Loch Honyatta, front Ridge, Pacuima strike teams in Santa Clarita.
The county fire officials apparently read the forecasts. What's Kristin
Crowley reading? What was La City Fire Management reading?
Speaker 1 (23:55):
That morning? All you had to do is look up
the windy app.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Crowley calls Morony and says, hey, I need help. I
got a bad fire. Hey, I need help. I got
a bad fire.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
You have help. You had a thousand firefighters, you said.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Home, that was your help. I need help. I got
a bad fire. You knew you were going to have
a bad fire. The Weather Service told you that for
five days.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Is it me? Am I crazy?
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Well you are, but not in this case.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM sixty.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Just to finish up on the Altadena situation, because I
do feel badly that Altadena is not getting as much
attention as the more glamorous Palisades. But you can't get
around the fact that the western part of Altadena, which
is where the black neighborhoods are and have been forever,
(25:00):
did not get evacuation warnings for nine hours. There's just
no way to spin this, no way, no way, no
way at all.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
It's impossible.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
And everybody in that region has every right to think
whatever they want to think because they have An Altadena
Town council member named John Carmody says, why didn't anyone
help us? He's on the west side of Altadena. He's
had many residents watch their homes burn, no fire engines
in sight. And this is what the county doesn't want
(25:33):
to address the way the city doesn't want to address
the lack of response in the Palisades early on. Nobody
wants to explain why western out toa dina where a
majority of the deaths occurred, why they were abandoned. It's
a historically black area, and the reason people live there
(25:56):
is they weren't.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Allowed to live east.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
They weren't allowed to live east of Lake Avenue decades ago.
That's where redlining came in. The insurance companies wouldn't even
bother to ensure black families that lived on the east
side of Lake Avenue, so they went to the west side.
(26:18):
And Carmody said, the area has definitely fell undervalued and
overlooked in many ways. The fire made it more obvious.
It doesn't have its own city government. It relies on
the county for fire protection. It's unincorporated, so everybody, like
(26:40):
I said, was on their own. Maroney, the LA Fire Chief,
called up the state's Office of Emergency Services for fifty
strike teams that could be distributed throughout LA County, and
he said, I thought to myself, if I've over ordered,
I'm going to seem foolish, right like, look at morony
over reacting. It is terrible that you have leaders who
(27:04):
fear they're overreacting and fear they're going to be criticized
for calling out extra help if you didn't need the help,
So what nothing lost? I don't understand that attitude, say
over ordered strike teams. They're constantly telling us there's no
way to predict these fires. They've never seen anything like
(27:26):
this before, so why are worried about. To his credit,
he did, he did call for all the strike teams anyway,
But just you know, why have that, Why do you
have to have that in your head? Why do we
have a culture where the fire chief has got to
be worried that he's going to get into some kind
of some kind of critical there's going to be a
critical frenzy because he needs more help to put out
(27:50):
a fire. But from twelve fifty one am to three
twenty five am, the warning and evacuation system for all
of altladenfell silent. The LA Times reviewed all the alerts
that went out. Noticeably absent were warnings or orders for
(28:14):
areas west of North Lake Avenue. There were plenty of
interviews and plenty of radio calls that the Times heard,
and it was clear that they were burning on the
west side, and it was clear that nobody was showing up.
They never issued evacuation warnings west of Lake, including on
(28:39):
the blocks where the homes were actively burning, and they
wouldn't come till three twenty five And one of the
officials could not explain the gap. He just said his
agency wasn't responsible. Yeah, nobody comments, and nobody's responsible. But
(29:02):
you know, I'm just I'm just letting everybody know we're
gonna stay on top of this. We're gonna find out
the names. The La Times is going to find out
the names. They're gonna find out who's responsible. So if
you think you're gonna slink slink back into this foggy,
bureaucratic haze that you're accustomed to living in, not gonna
happen this time. Not gonna happen for Karen Bass and
the rest of the clowns on the City Council. Not
(29:24):
going to happen. Management of La Fire, La County Fire. Oh,
those god awful supervisors on La County Board of Supervises,
all these people, some of them are just impossibly dreadful,
awful people. But you know what you keep you keep
carrying on with your DEI debates. Don't bother putting plans
(29:48):
together to save people in the midst of terrible wildfires.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
We wouldn't want you to do that.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Don't bother filling up reservoirs, don't bother checking to see
if hydrants work. Just make sure you had the latest
DEI plan in place so everything's equitable. But it looks
like you know, you ruined Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Congratulations,
a lot of equity there. We come back an to
talk to Todd Bensman. Christy Noam, the Homeland Security Secretary
(30:19):
is officially cutting off money to the UN plus US
tax money. No more for all these agencies and non
governmental organizations that were financing the illegal alien caravan that
was running all the way from Columbia to the US.
(30:41):
They were financing the entire southern border invasion. You work,
if you work for a living. If you don't work
for a living, it was our buddy that went in.
If you work, it was your money. That's next. Debor
Mark live in the CAFI twenty four our newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
(31:01):
can always hear the show live on KFI AM six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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John Kobylt
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