Darrell Castle shares his take on the wildfires that have and continue to devastate much of Los Angeles California.



Transcription / Notes



L.A. APOCALYPSE



Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 17th day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. I will be talking about the wildfires that have devastated much of Los Angeles, California killing many, leaving many homeless without shelter, and ruining the lives of 10’s of thousands and also rendering the once beautiful entertainment capitol of the world a burned-out wasteland.



I want to begin this report with a quote from one of the few remaining real journalists in America, Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times.



“Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and other Democrat leaders bend over backwards to focus on left wing social justice issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the role of government. Yet when it comes to the most basic functions of government, such as keeping buildings from burning down, they have failed completely.”







“Los Angeles is being governed and the state of California is being governed by people who have lost sight of the basics of governing. They have lost sight of the idea that we pay you a tax so that you take care of basics for us. And nothing could be more basic than preventing the burning down of, as you just said in your introduction, an area twice the size of Manhattan, right? It’s hard to conceive of how big this is.”



Yes, the once beautiful Golden State with its sunshine and surfing lifestyle has been turned into a veritable living hell. The fires rage on with over 25,000 acres still ablaze as I record this with a couple still out of control. So far, more than 250,000 people have been evacuated and have no shelter, and the last count I have is 25 deaths but that will obviously climb because no one knows what lies in the rubble of the thousands of burned to the ground homes and businesses.



This was and is a total collapse of the new green-woke style of government whereby the posture of those we elect, the color of their skin, their gender, and their sexuality are all more important than whether they have the background and skills necessary to perform the basics of government. So, who’s to blame for this disaster, the politicians of course but also the people of California who elected them. In the case of California, there is no one else to blame, not Donald Trump, not Republicans, and certainly not climate change. Those are all just excuses for the complete failure and arrogant incompetence and total disdain for the people the politicians are elected to serve.



California is a state in which Republicans have zero political power. The days of Ronald Reagan are over and even Pat Brown and his son Jerry didn’t let the state burn down around them. Not just the politicians, but all the state media, the newspapers, the online news sites all the high-tech monopolies like Apple, Google, and Facebook just echo the same mindset. Anything left from the old California that still works predates the year 2000 so the destruction has been ongoing for at least 25 years. Right now, the state has a congressional delegation of 52 seats and only 17 Are Republicans. The Los Angeles city council has 15 members and not a single one is Republican so blame is fairly easy to assess.



The city’s new mayor, Karen Bass, boasts of the city’s $50 billion budget along with adding 451 positions especially in the department of youth development. Justice, Care, and Operations Departments have been added for which the mayor seems quite proud. I would wager that she is less than proud that she recently cut more than $17 million from the fire department budget. She campaigned on a pledge to not travel internationally while in office but she was in the African nation of Ghana when the fire started. True, she went before the fires started and returned when she learned that her city was on fire, but she had been repeatedly warned that the dry hillsides of chaparral were a tinderbox when the annual Santa Ana winds returned. Instead of addressing the danger she went to Ghana to attend the inauguration of that nation’s new president. The scenes of her drinking champagne at the party were not a good look for her.



The mayor of Los Angeles is now a very toxic individual. The fire chief, and she is another story, has repeatedly blamed the mayor for the failure of the LAFD to control the fires before they burned whole cities like they have Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Well then, how toxic is she? So, toxic that even the owner of the LA Times said that he endorsed her and now he is sorry that he did. When the LA Times runs from a Democrat mayor she is indeed in trouble. He went on to say, “perhaps we need to look better at those running for office regarding competence and if they’ve ever run things.”



Wow, what a revolutionary concept to actually look at whether or not those running for office have competence or whether they can successfully run anything. You get this type of approach where competence is not even considered when you have one party rule. It’s a very similar system the soviets used to have, i.e. these are the candidates choose which Democrat socialist you prefer. Except this time the people did have a choice and they chose Karen Bass anyway. Afterall she was the only black Democrat in the race because her opponent, Rick Caruso, was a white businessman with extensive experience running things and building things.



What if Mayor Bass resigned, surely her replacement would be better and surely he was able to cover for her until she returned from Ghana. No, I’m afraid that the man she appointed deputy mayor for the city’s safety, Brian Williams, is under FBI investigation for suspicion of calling in a bomb threat to Los Angeles City Hall. What about the Mayor’s hire of Janisse Quinones, the new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or LADWP. Fortunately for LA she is the first Latina woman to head the department and she received a salary double that of her predecessor or $750,000 per year. That’s pretty good work if you can get it, but at least she got right to work fixing things, right.



No, folks, I’m afraid not because you see it takes a while to fix things that have deteriorated as far as Los Angeles. The water quickly ran out and the hydrants didn’t work. The 117-million-gallon reservoir atop Pacific Palisades built for the purpose of quenching fires was dry and had been for over a year. The reservoir, it seems, had been taken off-line and emptied over a year ago so that its cover could be repaired. Now, remember that California is not some third world backward economy, not at all. In fact, if California were a separate country, it would be the 4th largest economy in the world and yet it could not repair the cover of a reservoir in over a year.



The people of California, not just LA, are suddenly outraged by the performance of the politicians they elected. The fire chief of LA and her two top assistants are all Lesbians named Kristine. Before you label me homophobic, I’m not afraid of homosexuals nor do I hate them. It’s just that I would like the people who head the fire department of a great city to know how to put out fires and not be hired for gender or sexuality reasons. There are currently, recall petitions against Mayor Bass and Governor Gavin Newsome but it has all happened before and the Governor is confident the media will cover for him.



Maybe not this time, however, because many of those multi-millionaire movie stars and celebrities are pondering the end of their utopian dream just as they ponder the ashes of their once beautiful mansions. For example, here is a quote from actor Michael Rapaport about the Governor of California.



“Gavin with the good hair Newsome, get the F** out of here. You don’t get any more mistakes. There’s no more mistakes for you! You’re done, you’re done, you’re done. There’s no more mistakes for you. You’re fired. Grease your hair back, slick it back and get the F** outta here. You wanna Trump proof California? How about fireproofing California.”



Yes indeed, there might be nothing like losing a multi-million-dollar mansion and all its surrounding infrastructure to generate outrage. The quip about Trump proofing California was in reference to members of the California Democrat legislature and the Governor asking for $50 million to resist Trump’s deportation efforts etc. Well, at least the Governor was able to proudly announce earlier this month that the state has finally begun laying track for the high-speed rail system between LA and San Francisco, a distance of about 200 miles. The plan to build this railway is years overdue and it is millions, no billions over budget.



It was proposed in 2008 at a projected cost of 9 billion but now 16 years later the cost has skyrocketed to 100 billion. The weird thing about it is that California already has a high-speed transportation system called air travel. It is much faster than high-speed rail or so logic tells me. The point is that the governor is into wasting the money paid into the state by taxpayers instead of keeping those taxpayers safe. The governor committed over 24 billion to fight homelessness but homelessness got worse and nobody seems to know what happened to all that money. Before LA was negligently burned, California had an estimated 71% of all the homeless in the nation.



The Governor and the Mayor failed the people of California at the time of their greatest need. They failed this disaster spectacularly and the result of their failure is catastrophic. It is now estimated to cost $300 billion to rebuild but that is today’s money not 10 years from now money. LA cannot be rebuilt like it was or even close to what it was like. I have many fond memories of LA and especially the beaches, restaurants and bars of Malibu.

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