Kmele Foster
speaker
485 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Kmele Foster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So they've been leaving the state, broadly speaking, because they can't make insurance pay because we're not allowed in a price control situation to let insurance markets tell us how dangerous it is to leave in places. And so there's a lot of people who are going to have their homes burned down, who are not going to be able to rebuild at all, or maybe don't have insurance to begin with.
All that is a state managed problem. It shows that people don't have a basic sense of economics of how to deal with a predictable risk. And again, this risk has been predictable since the time of the Tongva and the Chumash sitting on the hills. We have a fire ecology in Southern California where I'm from, and we all have dear friends who we're worried right now and crossing our fingers.
that their homes haven't been destroyed in the Palisades and also in the foothills. And it breaks my heart. And we need to do a better job. California needs to do a much better job of mitigating and planning for these very, very predictable catastrophes that happen.
California has had ample opportunity to push back against leftist politicians over the past X number of years, including the aforementioned Rick Caruso. I think back to a guy who was a friend of mine who was an actual Republican mayor of California, Richard Reardon. He, unlike Karen Bass, responded to the many tragedies that unfolded in Southern California in the early 1990s.
And I'm not just talking about the OJ trial. But especially to the Northridge earthquake, that's where he found his footing as mayor. And, you know, that damage is way beyond the city limits of L.A. And let's remember that L.A. County is a much more important like entity, government entity than the city council and the mayorship. And they handled twice as much of the fire action, for example.
But Richard Reardon went out and he helped and he led and he stood in the rubble and he did stuff to help rebuild the area. Karen Bass being out of the country is inexcusable. As soon as you know it's a Red flag day with 80 to 100 mile per hour winds. You turn the plane around. You just do.
There are things for you to do if nothing else than to show your face and to be with your people who are actually fighting these fires. She was in Ghana at the request of President Joe Biden to honor an inauguration ceremony of some sort. Why? Does a mayor of any city need to go to a federal inauguration at the behest of the federal government?
Don't we have like a federal government to do that kind of stuff and some ceremonial people? You've got business to do. I mean, for generations, we've known that you don't leave If you're a mayor or a governor of Southern California area or California, you don't leave in October. October is when these fires usually happen. It's when the Santa Ana season comes.
She should have turned that thing around. It's infuriating. The mask, I understand. This is not a COVID situation. If I was in California today, I would wear a mask.
There's a federal policy associated with this That's why it happens in Montana as well, which has different governance in general than the California does. And it's a classic unintended consequences story. The fair requirement, FAIR, Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, came as a result of the riots of 1968.
It was basically a response post Martin Luther King assassination when there's inner city riots that you could see the scars from space in Washington, D.C. along K Street and 14th. So they said we need to pass this. So government will be the lender of last resorts in inner cities that the insurance companies are too scared of. That was the initial purpose of it.
The practical effect of it is that it ended up subsidizing because of bad management. Hurricane beachside residences in Florida, foothills residences in California and people who live in floodplains in Texas and in Central Valley of California. So this federal requirement is at the heart of some of this. Then if you have some price controls on top of it, then it's a disaster.
But I really want to, in case that there's anybody out there listening or watching this and doing the, oh, it's rich people in Pacific Palisades, boo hoo. And already I've seen some people come at me and other people about that. If you really want to go that way, which you shouldn't, because that's not American at all. So knock it off. I wouldn't do that to anybody in this country.
But the other there's four fires currently going on, at least that have names. But there's a couple of others. But one of the biggest ones is the Eastern Fire, which is happening around the Altadena, Pasadena area. La Cunada, Flintridge, Altadena. Pasadena, this is where my friends go to buy houses because they can't afford it anywhere else in Los Angeles.
This is the place where people who are schoolteachers buy houses and they are all in evacuation zones too. It's a really ugly tendency. We saw it during COVID from blue states towards Florida. of saying, oh, you know, yeah, it serves you right. You're going to die because you don't take the stupid measures that we're doing in blue states. Don't do it in the reverse way.
There are people who are really, really suffering. There are difficult public policy questions that California and L.A. need to do a hell of a lot better job. But be empathetic towards your fellow Americans for crying out loud.
Palisades also has a historical role in the 1930s, especially. It was home to a bunch of Jewish refugees of Central Europe and Adolf Hitler in particular.
So it became a great and grand and important refuge, as did Southern California and the film industry and a couple of other industries as well, which greatly enriched the culture of America, but also is just sort of a beautiful gesture because it was started as a Methodist
And then and then it just became in this grand American style, a melting pot style, a place where people could flee bad situations and then create something new and beautiful and small. And that's Pali higher that we're talking about here. This isn't just any high school that was burning yesterday. You know how many how many movies have been shot at that at that place?
It's a really lovely, lovely area. And also, let's remember that the fire jumped PCH. So PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, which we all mostly know from Nick Nolte mugshots, is the artery that goes through Malibu. Look on a map. Look on a topographical map of Southern California. What are you going to see? There's only six ways in and out of that place, right?
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