Show Notes
This week, a 29-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of sparking what soon became the Palisades Fire, according to acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. That initial fire, stoked by strong Santa Ana winds, became an inferno that killed 12 people, destroyed nearly 7,000 homes, and scorched more than 23,000 acres of Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu before it was contained weeks later.
It was the third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive ever in the history of the city of Los Angeles. Yet, the maliciousness of the arrested man from Florida and the high winds had help in their terrible task – the stupidity and incompetence of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose neglect of the area’s water reservoirs, fire trucks, and necessary brush-clearing fed the fire that destroyed so many lives.
Susan Crabtree, an award-winning Investigative reporter and native Californian, has broken many stories about California’s crooked politicians including their neglect of basic fire safety. In her most recent book, Fool’s Gold, she and co-author Jedd McFatter devoted an entire chapter to the failures of Newsom, Bass, and others in state government who could have prevented Palisades and other wildfires that have ravaged their state but didn’t.
On the first episode of the “On Background Podcast,” Crabtree and Eric Eggers, the Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute, get into the arrest, the political incompetence that turned a flicked cigarette into a raging inferno, and which breed of dog it was that voted in the last election.
“We’re calling the show “On Background” because when an investigative reporter agrees to go on background with a source, it’s a confidentiality agreement so they can obtain real information and there’s a trust relationship there. That’s how reporters get the real scoop of what’s truly going on,” Crabtree says. “So, we want to fill you in on the real story behind the headlines and how investigative journalists go about getting to it.”
Investigative journalists ask the more uncomfortable questions that politicians try to avoid. In the case of the Palisades fire, Crabtree says, “what happened to the fact that 33 percent of the city’s fire trucks were not operational that day? Why were the reservoirs empty?”
Instead, Newsom just announced the state would not be granting a pay increase for its short-staffed firefighters because of a budget shortfall yet, as Crabtree tells Eggers, “he is spending $300 million taxpayer dollars to stage a state referendum to violate the state’s constitution and redraw the state’s congressional districts to carve out additional seats for Democrats.”
“They don’t even mention what the proposition would actually do. It just says it will ‘stop Trump,’” she says. Newsom named this unprecedented move — in a state with only 9 Republican seats and 43 Democratic seats – the “Empower Voters to Stop Trump’s Power Grab.”
Worth note is that Trump won 38 percent of the state’s popular vote in 2024, while just 17 percent of the state’s congressional delegation is Republican.
California, she says, is a barometer of governmental failure. “Every cost in California is the highest in the nation — insurance, energy, gas prices, inflation, food prices, home prices — everything’s the worst,” she says.
While Newsom is completing the last year of his term as governor, the arrogance of his possible successor was on full display this week. Former Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter, the current frontrunner in the race to succeed Newsom, became heated and confrontational during a recorded interview with a reporter. “She freaked out for no reason, and it’s just indicative of the state of things here in California,” Crabtree says.
California’s voting processes themselves could do with some reform, as Crabtree illustrates: “A woman was prosecuted because her dog had a voter registration. The only reason they found out her dog was registered to vote is that she put a photo of her dog on Instagram with an ‘I Voted’ sticker on him. That’s how she got prosecuted. This is the state of play in California’s elections today.”
Crabtree tells Eggers there is an initiative going on to establish voter ID, which will help clean up the voter rolls and establish voter integrity in California, but the state’s Democratic super-majority in the legislature, and Newsom himself, are strenuously opposed. There are also new efforts by Turning Point USA, the group started by Charlie Kirk, who was just assassinated a month ago, to boost voter registration in the state among Republican-leaning citizens.
And, in case you were wondering, the dog with the “I Voted” sticker was a Boxer, by the way. Probably no relation to the state’s former Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer.
