Firehose #194: The Fire Last Time

Also: See you mothers on Second Sunday!

Happy Mother’s Day to Fifdom’s finest! We will be celebrating the best way we know how – by holding our monthly Second Sunday Zoom call for paying subscribers at 8 p.m. ET, so enough time for the mimosa buzz to have either faded or been escalated…. It’ll be Ladies Night, so come ready to spill tea about your day, your spouse, your hellspawn….

In Episode #556, for reasons known only to my neurologist, I blanked on the (unincorporated) city name of Altadena, despite having a half-dozen friends who live in that charming, working-class, musician-filled foothill community, including two ex-bandmates who had their houses destroyed in the January 2025 Eaton fire. To compensate for my brainfartery, and also tee up the bulk of this Firehose, let’s go early to the Comment of the Week, from Altadener Jason Swihart.

-ALTADENA- motherfuckers!

If there’s one thing we in Altadena and the Palisades would like the rest of the nation to know, it’s this:

Both fires were avoidable, man-made disasters, caused by negligence and mismanagement. It should be an ENORMOUS story with people getting impeached but instead, we’re getting distracting stories about crazy arsonists, climate change, and property tax deferrals. It took 15 months of begging for the AG to launch an investigation.

One upside: LATimes has done some great investigative reporting.

A few facts:

- The Eaton fire was started by Southern California Edison. SCE has acknowledged that power transmission lines decommissioned in the 1970s were the likely cause of the fire. I’ve seen the evidence--it shows that SCE systematically shirked legally-mandated maintenance for decades which directly caused the Eaton fire. 9,000 structure (7,000 homes) were destroyed, 13 people were killed.

- The State and the County systematically fail to oversee SCE which ought to be part of the deal if you’re going to grant a monopoly and force millions of citizens to use a service.

- The LACo Office of Emergency Management had its budget gutted in recent years, and appears to have been utterly unprepared. As a result:

- The west side of Altadena (where the majority of the destruction occurred) did not receive any evacuation alerts. 13 people died.

- The LATimes has reported that there was NO fire fighting equipment present in West Altadena. That same report indicates there were scores of fire trucks in East Altadena (LATimes got access to GPS equipment tracking data).

- The Palisades fire started when a PREVIOUS fire (the Jan 1 Lachman fire -- the probable arson) reignited. Recently, LAFD personnel who were on the scene of Lachman have testified that they found areas where embers were still ignited, and that the chain of command was informed. Recovered text messages corroborate this.

- Palisades ran out of water because one of its main reservoirs was empty--it had been empty for 18 months for “maintenance.”

- LAFD stopped fighting the Palisades fire before it was out. Recovered texts messages from Mayor Bass indicates that she has suppressed evidence of mismanagement for fear of liability.

So when CA officials claim “there’s nothing we could have done--there was too much wind” or whatever, it’s bullshit. A nearby, 60-yo neighbor saved three houses BY HIMSELF with a garden hose and buckets of pool water.

Thank you, Jason.

* This stuff came up a lot this past week, due to the dueling debates for California governor and Los Angeles mayor. In the latter clash, reality TV star-turned podcast darling Spencer Pratt went right the hell at L.A. Mayor Karen Bass: “I blame this person for burning my house, and my parents’ house, and my town -- all my neighbors down. As mayor, I will never drain the reservoirs that we need for wildfire protection.” (I interviewed Bass back in November.) As the dial-a-quote California political analyst Dan Schnur told The New York Times, “This has been a campaign about fire and ICE — and so far, the fire is winning.”

Pratt’s official campaign ads have hammered this theme, contrasting his competitors’ luxe housing to his trailer; responding to Bass’s accusation of “exploiting the grief” of fire victims by showing his mother crying. But it was this unofficial A.I. campaign video, which Pratt happily tweeted out, that had necks snapping. (“Maybe the best political ad of the year,” tweeted Jeb Bush.)

Not my cup of tea, as I said on the podcast. But as I also said in a January 2025 column, “Fires Incinerated the Facade of California Governing Competence.” People, including not a small number of Fifth Column listeners, are pissed.

* Friend of the pod Gustavo Arellano (#306, #377) declared DSA candidate Nithya Raman the real loser of the mayoral debate, and also graded the gubernatorial. More importantly, Gustavo was named a Pulitzer Prize opinion-writing finalist for the second consecutive year!

* So what’s lame-duck Governor and 2028 Dem-prez wannabe Gavin Newsom doing amidst all the fuss? Handing out free diapers, of course! Which totally won’t be a corrupt, cost-ineffective boondoggle!

* Apropos of all that, the latest and quite good column from Jonah Goldberg (#182) is headlined, “One-Party Rule in California Has Made One Big Mess.” Which is our cue for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap, ad swap…)

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* Time is running out to get tickets to our May 19 show in Washington, D.C.!

* Paying subscribers got to watch and listen to Anthony Scaramucci on Members Only #319. Now everyone else can see this Mooch clip on Steve Bannon: “He’s the fuckin’ worst person you could meet on planet earth.”

* Which sets up Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Is there such a thing as too much Anthony Scaramucci? Probably, but in advance of his visit to our SoHo studio this week, I threw on Andrew Muscato’s 2018 feature length documentary Mooch, andwe were all pretty riveted. Shot over the course of four years, the film follows a pre-White House Scaramucci as he bounces from hedge funds to opening restaurants to fundraising for Trump to making himself a bona fide guy you’ve seen on TV. Along the way you get to meet Mooch’s family on Long Island, his stressed out business partners, while receiving color commentary from the likes of Felix Salmon and Oliver Stone. It’s a fascinating study of the power of the media and the tendency to self-sabotage. Buy or rent on YouTube; here’s the trailer:

* Kmele and the Tanglers this week talked about Donald Trump’s tighter grip on a weaker Republican Party:

* Speaking of our please-idolize prez….

… when you feel the necessity, as a pastor, to write the words, “Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” it may be time to hike the Pacific Crest Trail…. Meanwhile, I hope you’re all enjoying your “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP” banners!

* You may recall Kmele in the last episode lamenting the way that edited social media clips from longer conversations can then elicit unhinged reactions that set back the cause of thoughtful exchange. Well, turns out that was precisely the topic of a good piece this week by our sportsballing pal Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), who has been on a roll lately.

* Look who interviewed Fifdom’s fave Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch! Why none other than Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551)!

* When I asked you beautiful people last year, “Who Do You Trust in a Post-Journalism World?”, one of the surprises to me was how often Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire came up. Well, it appears after the last eight months of conservative media/podcast/influencer circular firing squads that fewer numbers are holding onto that trust. Per the Washington Post:

Its YouTube channel’s subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the 16 months since the start of 2025, according to data from the analytics firm Social Blade. And in an analysis of 20 conservative news sites, the Daily Wire has consistently ranked among the biggest year-over-year traffic losers since last summer, according to estimates from the market intelligence firm Similarweb that were compiled by the media newsletter TheRighting. In March, the website’s traffic was half of what it was the year before. […]

Brad Bishop, a Daily Wire spokesman, said the company had cut 13 percent of its staff since the beginning of this year and currently has more than 200 employees. Most of the job cuts are centered at the Daily Wire’s headquarters in Nashville, but the company retains staff in D.C., Florida and the Northeast, and will continue to invest in “an ambitious slate of new entertainment projects set to release this year,” a company statement said. […]

“While much of the rest of the ‘conservative movement’ decided it was a good idea to clickwhore by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill, extolling the wonders of Russian supermarkets, and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk … we decided not to do those things,” Shapiro said, referring to critics such as Owens and the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “If that’s a strategic business failure, then I guess we can live with that.”

* In this house we respect Michael Tracey’s Epstein-related reporting. His latest billion-word piece is a case of truth in headlining: “Meet the ‘Jane Doe’ Caught Fabricating Evidence, in One of the Craziest Epstein Scams You’ll Ever See.”

* Has Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392 and M.O. #180) written two long posts about why the president in The American President was not a good president? Yes, Ben Dreyfuss has.

* Cranky Bill Maher on Gen Z assassins is pretty good:

* Sendoff: Before Gorillaz there was The Gorillas, and before The Gorillas there was The Hammersmith Gorillas (and before The Hammersmith Gorillas there was The Clique, Crushed Butler, Tiger, and Helter Skelter, but let’s focus here, people!). Everything above not spelled with a “z” was the brainchild/showcase for the crazy sideburns-wearing guitar-howler Jesse Hector, who died Wednesday at age 78. Hector, who lived in that cracked-asphalt space between garage rock, pub rock, and punk, was one of those always-try, never-make-it type of guys, famous for his live intensity. (By most accounts he stole the show at the legendary Mont de Marsan Punk Festival in August 1976.) He/they were best known for their snarling 1974 cover of “You Really Got Me,” but I prefer this original, which deserves to be the beginning of a sleazy, low-budget road movie: