JOHN BATCHELOR: This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchelor, welcoming Devin Nunes, the CEO of Truth Social as well as a former member of Congress from the San Joaquin Valley, the breadbasket of the solar system, a man who has taught me about California water for years.
Little did I know that it would pay off so spectacularly with Donald Trump's second term and water debates in California being at the center of the mystery of what is to be done for California. Following the L.A. fires, it is immediately pressing that L.A. have adequate water. These fires are willy-nilly these days. But the major story is the Central Valley getting enough water. And maybe now in that direction—well, we'll see.
Devin, a very good evening to you. My education of water in California is entirely thanks to you. And you inform me adequately so that when I listen to remarks saying, sending water to Los Angeles wasn't possible, we need all the water we have, releasing water for the smelt fish and the salmon is worthy environmentalism—I knew all of that was a lot of rationalization and political palaver.
What is the status of water management in California as it could now be, as it could be done? Good evening to you.
DEVIN NUNES: Thanks, John. And we've been talking about this on your show for, I don't know, some 15 years since the rationing really stepped up during the Obama years. But the history of California water is an interesting one because it started with, as California was settled, the founders of the state discovered that, wow, there's a lot of water that comes out of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, flows into the San Joaquin Valley, and then out to the Pacific Ocean through the San Francisco Bay.
So those folks that discovered that Los Angeles and San Diego had some of the best weather on the planet, but it was actually a desert, didn't have a lot of water. So they were able to divert some water from the Owens Valley. If you remember a famous movie, Chinatown, which was kind of a movie that was based off of Owens Valley, which was on the backside of the Sierras. And then they were able to get water from the Colorado River, divert some there. And then the founders of the state developed the most sophisticated water system on the planet, which runs from the Sacramento area in the north, building a huge series of aqueducts and dams throughout the state along the Sierra Nevadas and the pumping stations that then would pump that water into the aqueducts, store the water in the dams, let it flow out naturally, which the fish and habitat all benefit from that. And then the water gets a small percentage of that water will get picked up, put into the aqueduct, and sent south to allow the most fertile farmland in the world, the breadbasket of the solar system, as I like to say, to flourish. Then as it gets to the southern part of the valley near Bakersfield, it's pumped up again and then dropped into the L.A. basin.
That whole system was designed so that there would be more than enough water, plentiful water, as it was thought of and designed in the late 1800s all through the early 1900s. Many projects were built during the 20s and 30s and then culminating with a final project that came online in the 1960s. With all of that, John, it was plenty of water to do proper civil engineering, city planning, layouts for San Diego, Los Angeles, all through the San Joaquin Valley, even over to the central coast of California that includes parts of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, where plentiful water in wet years could be moved through that whole system so that you could properly plan a city.
And, you know, I think they originally could design to hold many more people than California has now because we've been on an actual population decline. There was always talk, you know, if you listen to the folks 10 years ago, California was going to be at 50 million people. Well, in fact, I don't think we ever actually hit 40 million, and now we're actually dropping in population. And it's really because of high taxes, high energy costs, high housing costs that have all been enhanced or by this kind of big government philosophy that focuses on this phony green energy concept that you know, green actually means red for communism. And it's about how do you use the water, use the resources, use the energy to control people. So there's been this no-growth, radical environmental agenda that has permeated throughout the Democratic Party, where San Francisco, Berkeley is kind of the home of this radical left environmental movement. And I always say that we were the guinea pigs in the San Joaquin Valley. So the first thing that started to dry up in the late 1990s was the San Joaquin Valley, which is where I grew up, and farming. And it was kind of easy to get away with it then because it's not a large population center. Even if it is the largest agricultural region on the planet, we just didn't have the votes.
And so even when the House of Representatives was under Republican control, the two Democratic senators from California would always stymie any type of legislation that we tried to move. You couple that with poor forest management. The timber industry was annihilated by Bill Clinton in the year 2000 when he created one of the largest monuments ever, national monuments so-called, where he put, you know, whatever, close to a million acres of forest that typically would have been managed properly. Trees fall, you bring the trees out, you use them for lumber and wood products. Well, in the year 2000, all that land was essentially made so that essentially man nor machine could go onto the property in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and kind of all the coastal foothills in and around the whole state, including down in Los Angeles County. So what that did is that it ended the timber industry. So what used to produce some of the most valuable timber on the planet, that industry is, for all effective purposes, gone in the state of California. I mean, there are a few left, but it's not nearly enough to deal with all the timber that's in the state.
So that industry ended, and kind of the third leg of the stool is you then they decided that livestock, including cattle and sheep and goats, were also not something that should be in the hills of Los Angeles County and parts of California because of global warming effects that these cattle and sheep and goats would have. So when you do poor land-use planning so that you don't have adequate water, so that you don't build green belts that would divide parts of these cities within Los Angeles from these foothills; you take out all the timber harvesting, so then you just have trees that grow, they fall, they're there; and then you take the cattle off and you don't allow machinery to go on there and build breaks. What it creates for, John, what we had the last couple of years was very wet years. So you mix wet winters with dry summers without removing any of that timber or brush equals to, you know, five foot to ten foot tall areas of brush. That when you go into a long, prolonged dry period, which right now Los Angeles is experiencing one of those—which is fairly typical, a wet year is usually followed by a very dry year—it creates for a massive fire hazard.
And we've had all that brush is just dry and you mix that with No timber harvesting. So the trees that are in that area creates for a, you might as well just put jet fuel around the entire city of Los Angeles. That's what we're dealing with. So it's water first, leads to poor planting in the timber industry, kick the livestock out, and it creates for the most catastrophic set of fuel buildup.
Timber and brush should be viewed as fuel by people who have any common sense. But common sense seems to have left the Democratic Party a long time ago in California and has led to this doom loop in California where you're accomplishing exactly what the radical left wanted, which is population decline. I just don't think they grasped the death that would incur with catastrophic fires and everything else because they just lack common sense. So in the name of saving species and stopping global warming, in their mind, has led to the last fifteen years of the biggest fires on the planet. totally unnecessary, all these fires that have happened, and the decline of the species and poor air quality. So in the name of green, it actually means red communism followed by death and destruction.
JOHN BATCHELOR: One detail I recall from your presentation over time is that it wasn't enough for San Francisco to say, we don't want you to have the water that comes from the Sierra Nevada. They had to come up with an explanation for why. And they came up with the smelt fish and the new one to me, salmon. Apparently, Mother Nature needs to be supplemented by Green Agenda. And therefore the water that would be yours in the Central Valley, some of it is diverted into the ocean or San Francisco Bay to sustain the life of creatures who have been doing very well for about 100 million years. Has that excuse gone away or are they still talking about that excuse?
DEVIN NUNES: Well, that excuse is still out there, even though nobody has... The Delta smelt is a species that is rarely seen. So I think most people are familiar with smelt. So smelt are plentiful. They're just little one-inch, two-inch little fish that are bait fish, really. And so there's plenty of smelt that have been all over California, all over the world. There is a Delta smelt that, as a matter of fact, I don't think, as far as the last I read, no one's seen one since 2019. So we're not even sure that they're even around anymore. Or if they are, they're hiding.
But, John, the hypocrisy knows no bounds. You mentioned San Francisco. People don't realize, even though San Francisco, the San Francisco Peninsula, is surrounded by water, it's actually seawater. It's not freshwater. So the peninsula itself is a desert. There's very little natural water there. And when, as most people are aware, San Francisco was one of the early big cities, big ports that allowed for the, you know, during the gold rush in the mid-1800s, San Francisco flourished. And in order to do that, because it was a desert, there wasn't enough water regionally, so they built their own private water infrastructure that comes from what is now Yosemite National Park, where they actually dammed up a beautiful, pristine valley. And they set up a series of pipelines that pipe it directly over to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. So they get fresh, pristine water consistently from Yosemite National Park, which is in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, John.
Now, why do I go through that whole story? Well, the irony is, everyone else gets their water from the same mountain range, except that water system runs on a separate set of rules. So as the farmers, Los Angeles, San Diego, everybody gave up water supply, San Francisco itself, which was the heart of this environmental radical movement that led to everybody getting their water supply cut off, the city of San Francisco has had uninterrupted water flowing from the same exact place under an entirely different set of rules. They've never been interrupted. They always have water. It's the height of hypocrisy. So you can, yes, the delta smelt, it's ridiculous. They use the delta smelt to use the Endangered Species Act to cut off the water supply. But this Hetch Hetchy project that runs from Yosemite National Park into San Francisco, it runs under a federal mandate that was mandated by Congress and the president that I believe dates back to around 1900, I don't remember the exact date that it was put that the law was passed and that system was built, but no other federal or state law, John, applies to it.
So they always have as much water as they want. They've never given up a drop, while they mandate everybody else get cut, which has led to this total destruction of forests, grazing land, stupid housing and planning processes that have been put in place that, like I said, have led to just death and destruction and depopulation throughout the state of California.
JOHN BATCHELOR: Devin, the President of the United States, Mr. Trump, made remarks in Washington and over the last several days and repeated them, that there was adequate water, and that there was a plan to move that water into Los Angeles as early as early 2020. That did not happen. And as I understand it, the president's remarks have been criticized as inaccurate.
One of the anecdotes of the tragedy of these last weeks, Los Angeles, is that the second largest reservoir in, I believe, Los Angeles Basin, was empty because they were doing repair work on the tarp that covers it—this is the one in the Pacific Palisades, it was empty. And that would have provided water in the early moments of the fire that swept over the Pacific Palisades. I'm recounting what I've been told and read. I don't know that this is all accurate. I don't live in California. But the president was speaking to Los Angeles having adequate water all the time. His remarks were criticized as inaccurate, and yet he spoke to exactly the facts you've now laid out about all of California water.
Is it possible that Sacramento and that Los Angeles are uneducated about their own water system?
DEVIN NUNES: That's exactly, well, or they're uneducated or just know the truth and don't want to admit it, I think is probably more likely the case because the Democratic Party is so beholden to this radical green movement that none of them want to reverse the crazy policies that have been enacted in this state over the course of the last 30 years.
But the the President is spot on. And in fact, in 2016, I brought him into California when he was then just the candidate for president. And he was fascinated by the water system that had been built. And I think he had, as you know, the president's first love in life is construction, big construction projects, you know, specifically buildings. And, you know, everybody knows his history in New York. He's a construction guy at heart. And he was fascinated by the water system. And then he quickly equated it because of the properties that he had in Beverly Hills and one of the best golf courses in the world in Los Angeles County, just south of near Long Beach that sits right on the Pacific Ocean. He didn't realize at that time in 2016 why he was being rationed with water as he was trying to take care of his golf course and his other athletes’ homes that he has in California. And when he learned that there was a whole entire system that wasn't operating at capacity for the better part of the last two decades—like probably a lot of your listeners right now who have heard me pontificate about this over the years, it's not believable at first. Like it's not believable. There's a Delta smelt? You mean you have pumping stations? I thought it was global warming and drought? I thought there was just no water?
But when you realize that, no, that 80% of the water that flows into, that comes out of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and flows out to San Francisco, out to the ocean, 80% of the water on average is being let out. And that's what effectively people don't realize. And in order to have an abundant water supply, all you need to do is allow the system to operate like it's operated.
So the President thought that was very articulate. He knows, I think he knows the water system better than most of the politicians in California, at least the Democrats that were at that conference on Friday. And no, I think he put it, precisely right, which was, Look, I don't understand it. You guys don't want to turn the water on. Me, from the President of the United States, I tried to do it in my first term. The governor opposed it. You guys stymied the changes that the President tried to make. They haven't built any new dams or delivery systems, even though the state of California has spent some $20 billion in the last year 20 years, this supposedly on water infrastructure.
But really, John, what it is, it's actually not water infrastructure. It's been spend $20 billion on ways to use less water, not to store water, but to use less water. So it's, it's went into stupid things like drought resistant plants and putting rocks in your yard, you know, going to desert landscape when what should have been happening, you should have realized that in those hills above your homes with trees and brush, you better either make sure you have a greenbelt and in conjunction making sure that you're managing the land properly so you don't have a catastrophic fire like what we've seen happen.
JOHN BATCHELOR: In addition to the President's remarks about water, watching that same press conference Friday—and I urge everybody to look at least pieces of it—the President was compassionate. He was articulate. He was eager to help the people who have been disowned by the fires, emphasizing, don't hold them up on permits. Let them start tonight. Very eager. He's the builder you said, having lived his life getting permits from New York City. I know my daughter's involved in that now as a project manager for rebuilding houses. And the reason they rebuild brownstones and limestones and buildings downtown is because it's so hard to get permission to build a new building, so you have to buy something old and gut it and rebuild it from the inside. That's what the President knows about, that permitting process.
I understand California has an equally creative permitting process. demand and the president was speaking to, let them start now tonight, private contractors, they'll put them together, go.
Now I wasn't clear, but it would appear that Sacramento the governor and the legislature and the mayor and the council of Los Angeles do not want that to happen. How did you read it? Why would they not want to move right away?
DEVIN NUNES: Well, John, the other policies that are put in place that are just completely radical is a coastal commission was created and that governs, it's like a separate governing body that governs the coast of California. Originally, it was intended to make sure that the public had access to beaches and that it was safe for people to go to the beaches and that we just didn't build homes on areas that would openly fall into the ocean through mudslides or what have you.
But what's happened over the last 30 years, once again, John, is it's turned into a depopulation. So the goal has been to make it virtually impossible if you own a home on the coast of California, good luck at doing it in construction there. And in fact, they've in parts of the central coast where I grow my grapes at for Devin Nunes Wines, the big joke there is they just eventually want all of those homes to fall into the ocean because, you know, because they won't allow the cliffs to be secured in terms of, because you have runoff and over time, if you don't, manicure and put in the right retaining walls and things of that nature, they'll slide off into the ocean. And so we've seen more and more of that, and it makes it virtually impossible to, well, there's virtually no new homes being built on the coast, on the shoreline.
And now, as many people have seen, those fires burned many of those homes in that Malibu Pacific Palisades, which is just north of kind of Santa Monica for people that know north of LAX along the water, many of those homes were destroyed. And so, you know, the question is, is they made it so tough the last 30 years, how are you ever going to be able to rebuild those homes? My guess is the answer is the radical left in California doesn't want those homes to be rebuilt. And you will watch, there will be a movement that will say, Because of global warming, we can no longer allow these homes to be here because of the catastrophic fire and lack of water that we have, because of global warming.
And John, it has nothing to do whether you believe in global warming or not—I think it's complete nonsense, because I've been around this and I've seen global warming blame for 30 years, 40 years of my life dealing with agriculture. Every time you turn around, the far left says global warming, global warming, global warming as they watch a million acres of forest in the Sierra Nevada burned year after year after year. Now they watch L.A. burned and species, everything gets killed, murdered. You put more CO2 into the air than you could ever do by having all gasoline cars, diesel cars, whatever you want to say. I can go on and on about the hypocrisy of it. But these policies along the coast, that Coastal Commission and the permitting process, it's just as arduous as trying to build and operate existing water infrastructure.
JOHN BATCHELOR: Let me understand this. I have read that what we just witnessed in Los Angeles—and it's ongoing, the fires are still breaking out—is a man-made catastrophe. Inadequately preparing and staging, inadequate fighting the fires right away when they started. And you make it very clear that this has been a long time coming because the timber industry is gone. They don't allow goats to eat the brush down to the bottom, so there's nothing to burn, and they flush 80% of the water into the ocean.
So they prepared the ground for a catastrophe. And then they didn't fill the reservoir in the Pacific Palisades because of construction—who knows why? And then the response was not staged beforehand, though they'd been warned about the Santa Ana winds, which come every year and have been 100 miles per hour before. I have a clipping from 1969, 100 mile per hour winds in Santa Ana. You and I have both lived through Santa Ana. We know it's impressive. You know it's coming in the fall, sometimes extending into January. All right, all of that.
But you're saying as well that there are strong voices in California that want Malibu to stay non-existent, that want the Pacific Palisades not to rebuild. Is that correct? Did I hear you correctly? They want that beach left empty?
DEVIN NUNES: Yeah, and it's going to create a fascinating political fight because, as the president said, something along the lines of this Coastal Commission, which he's had to deal with at the golf course that he owns over the years. And he says, You have to waive this coastal commission, get rid of it. Don't let them, you need to let the locals, let the city and the county go in, permit, let everybody come in right now, get all that brush out of there, start rebuilding, let these people rebuild immediately.
And you saw the people in the crowd cheered wildly. But the problem is that the elites in this state, probably which is only 5-10%, but that kind of dictate where 60% of the vote goes, they won't do it.
So the challenge is, can you educate the kind of folks in the middle that have tended to vote left just because, you know, once you—that's really the tipping point is, can you get 20% of the population to join the 40% who sit there and say what I'm saying, what I've been saying on these two, you know, the two episodes here, the two segments, you know, 40% of the population understands it.
They know there's plenty of water. They know we used to have a timber industry. It's like practical people with common sense that know how to do things. Can you somehow win over 20% of the state to join with the 40% of the state that says, Okay, the last 30, 40 years, it's been a nice attempt at, you know, making this great clean economy, but it's failed at every level.
It's failed. It's made dirtier air. It's killed more species than you could ever imagine, and it's driving people out of the state. And if you don't, if you just go—first of all, if they don't wave all these regs and get this stuff rebuilt, people are not going to rebuild. You're not even going to be able to get insurance, John, because now the insurance companies, which—this is another story that's not been told yet—that there's been an effort by the insurance companies that are in the state of California to get the hell out of the state of California as quickly as possible. They've made it—most people that I know have been losing their property insurance, because these insurance companies, the big national insurance companies, want to leave the state because they know that the way that California is going, that it is a desert. Everybody's in a fire hazard. And why would you want to insure something when you know you're just going to go back to the same exact problem?
There's no assurances. I mean, unless the governor and the Democrats in the state who run the state say, Okay, we're going to turn on the pumps. We're going to let all the water flow. We're going to go into Los Angeles. We're going to build parks and green belts. We're going to let people have their grass back. We're going to go in there and disc from the, between the green belt. We're going to disc and mow. And oh, by the way, we're going to fence in. We're going to invite, you know, all the cattle ranchers and farmers and livestock people that we ran out of the state or pushed them up into my part of California.
The ones that are, that still know, know that trade craft on how to do that. I mean, that's the other challenge is that there's just people that don't know how to handle livestock and don't understand the timber industry. You're going to have to bring back the livestock to parts of California where it's been gone for 20, 30 years. And then you're going to have to also build back the timber industry.
John, it took 30 years to destroy what had been built over the prior hundred and some odd years. And so it's going to take, you know, I mean, even if you just relaxed everything and let people, you know, let people be entrepreneurs and bring all these industries back to California. John, at a minimum, it would take 10 to 20 years and it would take, you know, you're talking about billions of dollars investment just to bring back in the timber industry. You know, it's not – the easiest thing to solve, quite frankly, is the water issue because they haven't been able to – they've taken a couple dams out, John, I should say, up in the northern part of California. They did knock it out, knocked down two dams and celebrated it like idiots. That wasn't actually part of this water system, but it was up in the very far north in an area called Klamath. But, yeah, it wasn't just it was just a couple of years ago that these morons were running around celebrating blowing up dams and restoring these this this water for fish. Well, you know, what's the old saying of, you know, Newsom's been fiddling while Rome burns.
JOHN BATCHELOR: Back in the 20th century when I first arrived in New York, Manhattan was dangerous. We used to say a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged in New York. I'm beginning to hear very carefully you describe that a conservative is a Malibu homeowner who's been burned out and can't rebuild.
Is there a possibility that we're talking about the state moving toward the Republican Party because the Democrats are responsible for this catastrophe? Is there any movement in that direction?
DEVIN NUNES: I mean, you've seen just recently, it seems like people are popping their head up and willing to, Republicans are popping their head up and willing to run for governor. The challenge with that is, even if you win, you become the dog that caught the car because the legislature is gerrymandered and the Democrats have super majority. The governor would have essentially zero say in anything, because the legislature approves the budget and passes the laws so it would be hard for a Republican to do much as governor, other than maybe some common sense. But look i think you're seeing there's a popular fox personality and name a guy named Steve Hilton—he's popped his head up saying he might run for governor. I think you have Rick Grinnell, who was the ambassador to Germany and the head of DNI and had other roles in the first Trump administration. I think he's a special envoy in the new Trump administration. He was at that event with Donald Trump. He's a very prominent Republican nationwide and a California resident. Then you have other potential candidates out there like Mike Garcia, who represented Northern Los Angeles County. Kevin McCarthy, another guy that potentially could run. So I think for the first time in the last 20 years, you'll see prominent Republicans begin to look at whether or not a Republican could win the state of California.
JOHN BATCHELOR: Devin Nunes is the CEO of Truth Social, which is where you read the remarks by the President of the United States. He is also a former member of Congress, prominent member of Congress in the San Joaquin Valley and head of the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives that was critical to revealing the hoax of Russiagate once upon a time. There's no hoaxing now. California needs help. All the help that can provide relief for the people who are burned out, for the people of Los Angeles who are certainly going to be rocked for years now, whatever happens, the road ahead.
This is Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchelor.
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