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--:-- John Bickley: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
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--:-- John Bickley: California is escalating its resistance against the Trump administration on everything from ICE operations to women's sports, all while facing growing crises in the areas of security and affordability. In this episode, we take a deep dive on the problems plaguing the deep blue golden state and how its ongoing battle with the federal government is impacting Californians.
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--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, July 19th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. A portion of this interview aired earlier this week.
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--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now to discuss is board-certified MD and California political commentator Human Hamati.
--:-- Human Hamati: Thanks so much for having me on.
--:-- John Bickley: Look, your state has effectively declared war on the Trump administration on a number of issues, all while facing what I think it's fair to call crises in L.A. and other cities. What are the most pressing issues right now in California?
--:-- Human Hamati: If I had to think of the very highest ones, we have the public safety issues and then we also have the affordability issues. And on the public safety front, we still have exceedingly high crime and homelessness.
--:-- John Bickley: And on top of that, on the affordability front, we have energy prices, electricity, gasoline that are sky high, highest in the nation going through the roof. And with no end in sight, water rates that are very high, insurance rates that are sky high.
--:-- Human Hamati: If you can even afford to get home insurance or car insurance, it's getting really crazy at this point. People cannot survive in this state. And every one of these crises is something that's either preventable, predictable, or manufactured by the administration.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, we've seen most recently the battle with the Trump administration over ICE raids. This has definitely taken the sort of lion's share of the media coverage. We have Trump actually giving ICE a green light to respond to. He calls them the thugs attacking agents using whatever means is necessary.
--:-- Human Hamati: That's from Trump. How are city and state officials responding to this escalation of violence against ICE?
--:-- Human Hamati: Look, when you look at Los Angeles City, L.A. County, much of the state overall, you have city leaders like, you know, Mayor Karen Bass. You've even got Gavin Newsom. You've got vice mayor of a tiny town called Cudahy who are openly calling for people to resist ICE.
--:-- John Bickley: And they're using vilifying terms, fighting terms. The vice mayor of Cudahy actually asked for gang members to come out and fight them in the streets in no uncertain terms.
--:-- Human Hamati: Now that your hood being invaded by the biggest gang there is there ain't a peep out of you. So they declared open war on federal officers who are really there enforcing federal law and doing their jobs.
--:-- John Bickley: Is it aggressive? Absolutely. Is it in their face? Absolutely. Is that avoidable? Yeah, it would have been had the state and local officials simply cooperated with federal officials and done what they used to do back in the day, not so long as 15, 20 years ago, which is to allow federal officers to come into the prisons and jails and actually take people who are criminal illegal immigrants and detain them and ultimately deport them.
--:-- Human Hamati: They stopped cooperating a while back. And as a result, the federal officers have to do their jobs nonetheless and go into the field and identify and apprehend these individuals.
--:-- John Bickley: This obviously makes it a lot more messy, but all of that is avoidable had they just done what they used to do in the past.
--:-- Human Hamati: Now, front and center in this conflict is L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. She is tweeting nonstop about this, even on the 4th of July, saying we would be, you know, celebrating the 4th of July if not for these tyrannical ICE raids, effectively.
--:-- John Bickley: We've had new reports that she's maybe providing cash cards for illegal immigrants. And she says openly that she is directing government resources to illegal immigrant families in the face of the ICE raids.
--:-- Human Hamati: Yeah, it's very clear. First, in terms of the cash cards, you know, she made it very clear in plain English that she is going to be distributing hundreds of dollars in cash to illegal aliens who are impacted by ICE.
--:-- John Bickley: And what she means by impacted are people who won't leave their homes, won't go to work because of fear of apprehension, arrest and deportation. And so that means basically everyone qualifies and she's going to be issuing credit cards that have cash on them. So debit cards, basically loaded with cash, hundreds of dollars a piece, if not more over time.
--:-- Human Hamati: I think she's partnering with that organization called Churla, which is an NGO, but it's government funded that happened to have actually helped organize the riots against the ICE officers, supply them, organize them, funded them, etc. And they're going to be the ones apparently administering this cash card process.
--:-- John Bickley: What's it doing? It's, again, incentivizing, you know, undocumented immigration. It's keeping them from leaving their homes. It's providing aid and comfort to them while their own citizens who are legally here aren't able to afford food, rent, electricity, gasoline, insurance, et cetera.
--:-- Human Hamati: So it's really backwards. And it shows you where her priorities are rather than focusing on the people who she has sworn to protect, the citizens, the people who voted her in. She's very clearly drawing a line and saying, these are not my people. My people are the folks who are here illegally.
--:-- John Bickley: And it's really disturbing because, you know, she's a person who had a chance to do something right this time around after really botching her fire response, not being in town, going off to a junket in Africa, coming back, showing zero leadership and allowing her city and a neighboring city of Malibu to burn to the ground for the most part.
--:-- Human Hamati: She had an opportunity here to say, you know what? We're gonna do the uncomfortable thing of cooperating with federal officers, allowing them to do their job, but to do so in a peaceful, organized manner. And instead of that, she basically said to her people, let's go after these guys and I'm gonna protect you.
--:-- John Bickley: And this is what's led to these problems. Again, this is preventable, but they choosing to escalate it to a point where it almost physical and that what's wrong.
--:-- Human Hamati: Now you mentioned the LA fires I actually wanted to talk to you about that next. We heavily covered that when it happened of course and there were a lot of concerns in the immediate aftermath about the rebuild effort and how that would be handled by officials.
--:-- John Bickley: What is the latest on that front?
--:-- Human Hamati: Yeah, so this is a very interesting point. We're now just past the six-month anniversary of the January 7th and 8th fires. We would have expected in any other place on Earth by now, you would have had a flurry of construction activity, most permits issued, etc.
--:-- John Bickley: What's happened?
--:-- Human Hamati: I live literally blocks from the fire zone. It approached my home to the point where we had to leave in the middle of the night. So I and we actually have a piece of empty land in Malibu that would have burned had there been a house on it.
--:-- John Bickley: Everything else around us is completely gone. And when you go there six months later, there are maybe two, maybe three homes being framed. Everything else remains empty.
--:-- Human Hamati: Some lots have not even been cleared out yet six months later. In one place, the old frozen yogurt shop that my kids would go to once or twice a week after school, that place is not just not cleared up. The debris is still covering the sidewalk.
--:-- John Bickley: And they haven't even bothered pushing it back to clear a major sidewalk in a place that everybody walks in that area. Absolute disaster.
--:-- Human Hamati: When you look at the number of permits issued, the number of permits that they say the city says is deceptive because many individual addresses have numerous permits issued.
--:-- John Bickley: So when they say we've issued a few hundred permits, when you actually look at the individual addresses, it's only in a matter of like the 20s or 50s, some exceedingly low amount.
--:-- Human Hamati: You see hundreds of lots for sale at very low prices compared to what they would have been pre-fire. About half are being bought by developers, about half are being bought by end users.
--:-- John Bickley: But many of the actual people who live there, whose homes burn, are choosing not to come back. They're taking the insurance money and running and just abandoning their properties because they can't wait five, ten years or so to rebuild.
--:-- Human Hamati: And the housing, the reconstruction costs have also gone sky high. The other thing which is concerning is that many of us predicted, and we were called conspiracy theorists right after the fires, that this is going to be a sort of land grab by the government.
--:-- John Bickley: We were worried that they're going to take these properties either by force through eminent domain or by purchasing them at rock bottom prices from people who are unwilling or unable to build and turn it into low income housing, government constructed.
--:-- Human Hamati: And guess what just happened? You have state, I'm sorry, you have state Senator Ben Allen, as well as LA County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, who represents the area. Both of them are very much pro-government built homeless and low-income housing, both of whom had said, no, we're not going to change the zoning. We're not going to do anything here. We're not going to be buying land.
--:-- John Bickley: Guess what just happened? This last week, they held a town hall. They had the results of their independent blue ribbon commission, which is really made up of their own people. and they said, because of what the Blue Ribbon Commission said, we are going to impose bonds that are going to be financed via future property taxes from the burned out lots.
--:-- Human Hamati: We're going to use the bond money to build a land bank, to purchase properties from people who no longer have the means or the desire to rebuild, which means people who just can't afford it and are fed up with the permitting process that they're deliberately slowing down.
--:-- John Bickley: We will buy that land and we use taxpayer money to build affordable homes that then people can lease back.
--:-- Human Hamati: And around that same time Gavin Newsom authorized over a million for the construction of low housing in those kinds of areas. That's not a coincidence.
--:-- John Bickley: And guess what? Some of that low-income housing, the fine print says, has to go to people who have recently been in prison, people who've been in mental institutions recently.
--:-- Human Hamati: This is a disaster. Pacific Palisades was one of the last quiet, peaceful, beautiful, untouched single family, mostly single family neighborhoods in all of L.A.
--:-- John Bickley: People went there because they wanted their kids to be able to walk to school safely, to play outdoors safely, to not have noise and crime, etc.
--:-- Human Hamati: And now you know what they're planning to do. They're really pushing this densification and the low income housing and the government built and government owned housing on them.
--:-- John Bickley: And that's really going to spell disaster for that area. The roads simply can't even handle that much density.
--:-- Human Hamati: There's only one street in and out of the Palisades. That's Sunset Boulevard, two lanes in each direction. It's already been so gridlocked that when the fires occurred, the people couldn't get out and the fire trucks couldn't get in.
--:-- John Bickley: And you may remember those images of them having to bulldoze abandoned vehicles out of the way so the fire department could come in.
--:-- Human Hamati: Imagine now adding, you know, three, five, ten times more people to the same area. It's incapable of accommodating them just with respect to the traffic and good luck putting in a bus line there. It's really a fantasy in terms of them that this is somehow going to work out nicely.
--:-- John Bickley: But again, it fulfills what they want, which is a government ownership of land and government built rental properties.
--:-- Human Hamati: Like you said, six months ago, this was a conspiracy theory. Some elements of this look like they're coming true.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question. Where do you see the battle, the standoff with the Trump administration going in the next few months? Is there any sense of California giving in on any of these issues that they've really dug in on? Or is this going to continue?
--:-- Human Hamati: You know, look, I think there's zero chance that California, especially Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass will give in.
--:-- John Bickley: And here's why they have politicized this issue. They mistakenly believe that they're going to score points against the Trump administration by showing that they are the force of resistance.
--:-- Human Hamati: And you look at the Democrats in general. What have they become? They have become the anti-Trump party.
--:-- John Bickley: They don't really have necessarily a positive platform. They're not saying we have something to offer you. all that they've been offering lately since the election has been, we oppose everything that Trump does.
--:-- Human Hamati: And so with Newsom very obviously planning a 2028 presidential run and with Bass coming up for reelection another couple of years or less, they're both seeing this as an opportunity to define themselves as the anti-Trump resistance candidate.
--:-- John Bickley: And as a result of that, there's no chance they're going to back down.
--:-- Human Hamati: The moment Newsom backs down, he loses his only card to play in the presidential election. And so he's going to double down, triple down on this, and you're going to see Bass doing exactly the same.
--:-- John Bickley: And ultimately, that's going to harm the Californians and the LA residents. And it's going to create more havoc, cause the citizens a lot more, and create unnecessary disruption across the board.
--:-- John Bickley: A lot going on in your state. While Gavin Newsom, like you said, is on the road, even going into the Deep South on this sort of pseudo-campaign trail.
--:-- Human Hamati: Thanks so much for taking the time and talking with us today. It's a pleasure.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for having me.
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--:-- John Bickley: That was California political commentator Human Hamati, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
