Podcaster Tim Dillon slams California response to LA fires

Los Angeles-based comedian and podcaster, Tim Dillon, tore into the government’s handling of the wildfires on an episode of “The Tim Dillon Show” on Monday.

“Entire swathes of the city are gone. There was no water in the f—ing hydrants. Nobody cleared any of this brush, they didn’t do any controlled burns, they didn’t prepare any of these areas,” says Dillon, adding that these measures were ignored because “we didn’t want to upset a fish.”

President-elect Donald Trump set off a firestorm last week when he called out Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom for choosing “to protect an essentially worthless fish,” over the water needs of Californians. This wasn’t Trump’s first time calling out Newsom over this issue, slamming Newsom in the lead-up to the 2024 election during an interview with Joe Rogan in October. 

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“I was in [California] farm country with some of the congressmen,” Trump told Rogan. “We’re driving up a highway and I say, ‘How come all this land is so barren?’ It’s farmland and it looked terrible. It was just brown and bad. I said, ‘But there’s always that little corner that’s so green and beautiful.’ They said, ‘We have no water.’ I said, ‘Do you have a drought?’ ‘No, we don’t have a drought,'” he recalled.

Trump continued, “I said, ‘Why don’t you have [any] water?’ Because the water isn’t allowed to flow down. And in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean. Millions and millions of gallons of water gets poured.”

The governor’s press office said in response to Trump’s accusations that he was completely wrong, arguing the president-elect “is conflating two entirely unrelated things: the conveyance of water to Southern California and supply from local storage.”

“Broadly speaking, there is no water shortage in Southern California right now, despite Trump’s claims that he would open some imaginary spigot,” Newsom’s office added. “[The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power] said that because of the high water demand, pump stations at lower elevations did not have enough pressure refill tanks at higher elevations, and the ongoing fire hampered the ability of crews to access the pumps. To supplement, they used water tenders to supply water — a common tactic in wildland firefighting.”

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Dillon also expressed his frustration with California’s leadership, saying, “you go to bed thinking someone’s in charge. No one’s in charge. No one’s in charge. That’s the thing.” 

He added that “the only people that seem to have some type of clue seem to be actively working against the public interest all the time in any way that they can. The only people that seem to have any power in this society are actively making your lives harder and more dangerous by the minute, by the way. The only people that seem to have any authority or control are doing terrible things constantly that you can’t do anything about.”

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Comedian Tim Dillon performing on ‘Last Comic Standing,’ on March 24, 2015. (Ben Cohen/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images) (Ben Cohen/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

Talking about being confused by people who still support Gov. Newsom after the fires failed to be contained, Dillon asked, “what cult are you in, why are you in it, who put you in it, what do you get out of it?”

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Later in the podcast, Dillon continued to rail against the California government’s preparedness, stating, “You can’t have people running around psychotic lighting things on fire,” and that “you can’t not have any preparation.”

“We’ve let people run this city with crackpot ideas that sound good to a 19-year-old on Twitter. We need to run this city with actual operators who can get things done,” he said.

Fox News Digital’s Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.