Comedian Adam Carolla thinks the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles for the past week will be a major turning point for the city, politically.
“It’s been said for quite some time, when do we start to change course? And the common wisdom to when we’re going to change course is when we bottom out,” Carolla told Fox News Digital via phone.
“And I would say this city burning to the ground is kind of a bottoming out moment. So maybe this is our bottom.”
Carolla, along with thousands of other residents in the Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Altadena areas of Los Angeles, had to evacuate last week when fires broke out. He is currently staying with his friend and longtime collaborator, Dr. Drew Pinsky.
“Standard operating procedure has been postponed for a little [bit],” he said. “Whatever that schedule was, going about your day doing your thing, it’s all been cattywampus.”
Carolla added that he’s been concerned not only for himself, but for so many people he knows who had to evacuate or lost their homes.
“It wasn’t really just about me being displaced and about a lot of other people in a lot of other parts of this place being displaced and then not knowing who was displaced,” he said.
Carolla has taken issue with the management of the city and state’s resources in the lead-up to the fires, feeling government leadership has focused on the wrong things.
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“The nuts and bolts of running a city aren’t things that excite them,” he said. “Cleaning up the floor of the forest or aqueducts or water pressure and all that stuff. It’s pretty boring. We’re California, we like to be first with things, and cleaning up the branches doesn’t sound that enticing to us. Outlawing internal combustion engines by 2030 feels pretty good. But cleaning up branches feels kinda boring. So… we don’t really do that stuff well. We do the idea stuff. Like we want to have electric leaf blowers and stuff like that.”
“[Gov.] Gavin Newsom wants fun stuff, not boring stuff,” he added. “Some people who run California and Los Angeles are sort of much more consumed with equity and the LGBT community and fun stuff, not boring stuff like aqueducts.”
The 60-year-old also feels more efforts could have been made for fire prevention, like burying power lines, replenishing aqueducts and recapturing rain from runoff, and repairing fire trucks.
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“I pay probably 13% state income tax and a lot of people pay a lot of extra taxes around here. And we pay about $5.50 a gallon for gas. And we should probably get something infrastructure-wise in return,” he said.
The exact cost and long-term impact of the fires remains to be seen, but Carolla believes they will spur change in the traditionally left-leaning Los Angeles and California at large.
“Hopefully the dopes that vote for these idiots have woken up now that their houses are falling to the ground and realize these people are incompetent idiots and idiots for voting for them, and they’ll wake up and go in a different direction,” he said.
“We’re going to have to have competent, pragmatic people run the city for a change, instead of sort of pie-in-the-sky incompetent idiots with their DEI hires and ‘this is a sanctuary city’ stuff. We’re going to have to get some adults,” Carolla continued.
“It’s funny, the people who were all saying when [President] Biden came into office, ‘Now the adults are back,’ were really horrible adolescents who ruined everything, and we’re going to have to get some actual adults back.”
