The Los Angeles Fires
“A change, it had to come.
We knew it all along.
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all.
And the world looks just the same.
And history ain’t changed.
‘Cause the banners they all flown in the last war.
I tip my hat to the new Constitution.
Take a bow for the new revolution.
Smile and grin at the change all around.
Pick up my guitar and play.
Just like yesterday.
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray,
We don’t get fooled again!”
I was born and raised in the City of Los Angeles. I went to college and graduate school there and lived there until I was 23, when I moved south to Orange County. The Captivating Mrs. Campbell and I met in LA and were married in LA. My parents, sister and brother all stayed in LA, as did many of my childhood friends, and so I continued going back for decades. I know LA well. I spent lots of time in the Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Malibu, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood. I was in the state legislature from 2000-2005 working alongside those LA legislators. I am not anti-Los Angeles. Quite the opposite. All my grandparents arrived in LA between 1908 and 1926. That’s a long legacy in a city. I remember well when the Randy Newman song, “I Love LA” came out in 1983. I would drive around the West Side with my convertible top down blaring that song on a beautiful February Santa Ana wind day and thinking there was no place better on earth.
That was then. This is now. There is a reason I left. I could see what was coming.
I’m not going to dwell on what has happened with the fires. You all know that. Pacific Palisades looks like Dresden after the fire bombings in World War II. The woman who was my math tutor in elementary school lost her home in Altadena. She is 92. Where does she go? I will instead concentrate on what is next. Events of this magnitude only come around every 50 years or so. After the happen, things change. I’m old enough to vaguely remember the previous big fire like this in Bel Air in 1961. What happened there was discussed for years afterwards.
So, let’s dig in to what might change as a result of what just happened, as is still happening as I write this.
But first, I would like to give a big thank you to the many of you that prayed for me before my recent surgery. God listens. Prayer works and I could feel it. The surgery was long and the recovery unpleasant, but it was successful and I hope to no longer have sinus infections plaguing me much of every year. The Mayo Clinic is an amazing place of healing. Thank you all.
Let’s look at several dimensions of what impacts this devastation in LA might have on the future:
Political: I’m going to start with this because I am, after all, a recovering politician. LA Mayor Karen Bass was toying around with running for governor in 2026. That won’t happen. She won’t be reelected as mayor either. She is done. Gavin Newsom is running away from this as fast as his swept back hair will carry him. He is blaming “the locals.” He has called for an investigation by the state of why the reservoir in the Pacific Palisades was empty and not even connected to fire hydrants. Gavin wants to be president in 2028. He needs to cast the blame of this somewhere else. Might as well be Mayor Bass and others in LA. And they will cast blame anywhere they can find. This is what woke, incompetent corrupt politicians do. Take responsibility for nothing and blame everything on someone else. All that said, Gavin has problems. This reinforces the view of many in other states that California may not be the model the country should follow. He has time to recover before 2028, although I hope he does not do so. Karen Bass does not.
Billionaire Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Bass and lost in 2022 after spending a reported $100 million of his own money. He is rumored as a 2026 gubernatorial candidate. I now suspect he can walk into the Mayor’s office in June, 2026. He might rather do that than a difficult campaign for governor. I will admit I am not a fan of Mr. Caruso. He has been a Republican, Independent and now a Democrat. If you change your registration because your views have changed or your party left you, I get that. He appears to change entirely to serve his ambitions. He also did a lot to turn one of my alma maters, USC, into the miserable leftist woke institution it has become.
Climate Change: One of our local TV News broadcasters here in Phoenix, John Hook, posted this on X this week: “To blame every natural disaster on ‘Climate Change” gives politicians and policy makers blanket immunity for ineptitude. Most journalists fail to see through this.” AMEN! This has nothing to do with climate change. There have been fires like this that the early explorers talked about in what is now Los Angeles in the 1500s, not to mention I have seen plenty in my lifetime. Climate Change is like a magician’s trick. It’s a red herring. It’s gaslighting.
DEI: The Fire Chief in Los Angeles is a lesbian. That would not be a problem if she didn’t get the job because she is a lesbian. But she did. And three others of the top people in LAFD are also lesbians. And they make up to $400,000 a year. And they have a major program to hire more gay and lesbian firefighters because…I guess they are better at it?
Of course not. LAFD’s policies on DEI don’t even have the word “competence” in there. There is a video circulating you may have seen where an overweight lesbian fire official is asked by a heterosexual woman if she could “carry her husband out of a burning building.” The fire person responds that your husband shouldn’t be lying on the floor if the building is burning. Really? She is admitting that she can’t do that. The husband might be handicapped or have smoke inhalation. I guess it’s OK that that husband dies. All in the cause of DEI.
When I was in the California legislature I had the lowest rating of all 80 Assembly Members with the Fire Unions. They spent lots of money trying to defeat me and failed. So, I can say this. There are many wonderful and brave fire fighters. But this DEI hiring has been going on for decades. Adam Carolla has told the story of how he applied to be in LA firefighter and was told it would be at least an 8-year wait because they don’t hire white heterosexual males. And the unions have bribed Sacramento to get pay packages like no other fire fighters anywhere. LAFD is badly run and the people are overpaid. They are part of the problem. ALL government employee unions in California are part of the problem. Their grip on the legislature needs to be broken. No easy task.
Rebuilding: Try building something in Los Angeles. The bureaucratic BS is enormous. It will take you much longer to get approvals than to build the building. Many of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu homes are in the “coastal commission” zone. I won’t bore those of you not in California with the details of that, but suffice it to say that this is another layer of approvals from a completely unaccountable state agency that is corrupt and basically does whatever it wants. Will Mark Hamill, whose house burned down, get quick approvals because he is an outspoken leftist but everyone else will have to wait years? I suspect so. Mayor Bass has already said that she is going make permitting quick. Nice press conference sound bite. Cities have “deep states” of their own. I doubt she means what she says but even if she does, LA is so broken it will not happen.
Furthermore, the Sierra Club and other Neo-Marxist groups are salivating right now. Look at all those former home lots and businesses and churches that could be turned into nature preserves and homeless shelters and illegal alien welcoming stations and gay and lesbian centers of love.
Case in point. The big fire in Lahaina on Maui was 18 months ago. That beautiful town was essentially destroyed including many historic businesses and homes. The fire spread because of government incompetence. 18 months later, almost nothing is even starting to be rebuilt. In many cases, they can’t decide on what to “allow” to be built there. How about letting the property owner build what they want? Oh, sorry. What was I thinking. If there is a state that is even more Neo-Marxist, leftist , corrupt and woke than California, it is Hawaii.
Prevention: There have always been Santa Ana winds and there will always be Santa Ana winds. As Albert Hammond sang in 1972 “It Never Rains in California,” so there is always dry brush to burn. And, in a metropolis of 12 million people, there will always be sicko arsonists and plain stupid people throwing their smoldering joint into a pile of weeds. God also starts some fires with lightening and there are sometimes sparks from a construction site.
In other words, there are going to be fires. Just like there are going to be tornados in Kansas and hurricanes in Florida. Prevention is about preparing for them and minimizing the damage. I am no expert, and I have only given this some cursory thought, but how about this:
The first thing is to make sure there is water. Lots of it. Gavin Newsom brags that he tore down five dams in the last four years. They should build 30 new ones. Second, use technology to identify when a fire starts and to have fast response crews, particularly on windy days, to get it out quickly. Third is to clear brush and do control burns, all of which the government currently bans. I owned a house in Irvine up against open space brush and was told that was “habitat” and I couldn’t trim it. I did anyway. But it shouldn’t have been an issue. Fourth is building houses in fire prone areas with materials to better withstand the fires. Fifth is to fix the broken insurance system in the state. That system has been broken for a long time. My house in Irvine, California was uninsured for a while in the 90s after all the insurance companies pulled out due to bad regulation back then. And finally, the death penalty for someone intentionally setting a fire that causes loss of life or major loss of property. I’d say they should be burned at the stake, but perhaps that’s a bit harsh.
Political Change: I left California over 9 years ago, first for Kansas, then settling in Arizona. If I thought the state had gotten bad but would stop getting worse, I probably would have stayed. But I could only see it getting worse and worse. Unfortunately, I was right. People ask me all the time, “John, can California ever be fixed?” For nine years I have given the same answer that I see two ways that could happen. The first is that an unusual and committed personality shows up to lead the state out of the darkness. Think of a California Donald Trump. The second is that the state finally fails so badly that people start to vote differently. At rock bottom, people look around for something else.
I think there can be some optimism that the second of these is about to happen and maybe the first as well. There was a noticeable rightward tilt in the 2024 election. Elections in California are totally rigged and corrupt and it is legal to cheat, but the shift is noticeable. A lot of kitchen table stuff is going wrong there. Neo-Marxist DAs in LA and San Francisco were both defeated in the last year and replaced with new DAs who…wait for it…believe convicted felons should go to jail and stay there. Radical stuff, I know. Your house burning down is about as kitchen table as it gets. Maybe people will finally get fed up. Maybe they want competence rather than feel good woke corruption and a narrative repeated without critical review by a compliant media? The song I picked this week is, IMHO, one of the great rock classics of all time by The Who. Are voters in California ready to not “get fooled again?”
Trump is making noises about the 2026 governor’s race in California being winnable by a Republican. With the right Republican, he may be correct. The leading candidates on the Dem sides are Kamala Harris and a bunch of others whose competency may be as low as Karen Bass’. I don’t know him from Adam but maybe somebody like Peter Thiel? There are more and more conservative Tech leaders who could exude competence when people may be ready for something different.
Sorry for the rant, but it pains me to see how far Los Angeles has fallen and how many people are paying the price for bad leadership. Los Angeles and California have so many natural advantages. They are hard to screw up. But our woke, incompetent, corrupt, leftist politicians have done it! As Dennis Prager (keep praying for him) has long said, the left destroys everything it touches.
I really want to drive in LA again someday, without fear of being carjacked or robbed or shot. I want to put the top down on the convertible and sing out loud “Roll down the windows. Put down the top. Crank up the Beach Boys and don’t let the music stop. We’re gonna ride ’til we just can’t ride it no more. I love LA!”
News! The nationally syndicated Hugh Hewitt Show is moving to a new time slot, Noon until 3PM Pacific time. I will return as a regular guest on Wednesdays at 1:20 Pacific time. Tune in!
Until next week,
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
“Looks like another perfect day. I Love LA!”