Welcome to the Tudor Dixon podcast. Today we are going to be covering the wildfires in California.

We're obviously all watching this devastated. Our prayers go out to all of the families who have evacuated.

We know so many people have lost everything. They have evacuated their homes. Some of them don't know

whether or not their home is there.

Some of them have lost their community, their schools. It's been actually completely shocking.

As we've seen just cameras going down the lake or the beach, the shore right there and seeing

that there are no houses, there's no structures. Everything is just rubble. I mean, it's really been

such a, it's just such a blow to the entire country. And so we wanted to get into not only what is

happening on the ground there, but what led up to this? How did this happen? Was this preventable?

What is the future? So we are talking today to

Jennifer Van Lars. She's the managing editor and an investigative journalist at Red State.

And we're so glad that we have you here because you're also based out there, you're in Ventura,

California, Ventura County. Tell us what is it like to be out there

on the ground right now? It's crazy. So I live in Ceeby Valley, which is where the Reagan Library is,

and about three quarters of our city has had no power for the last two days. I've been fortunate,

and I do have power, but that means the traffic lights are out. People are finding

the few restaurants that are open to eat because at this point, a lot of the food that would

have been in their, even their freezers is not usable. And so we're not even in the midst of it.

But I did take, my oldest son was out visiting for Christmas with his family and had to

fly out of LAX yesterday. So driving into LA and all this smoke was covering downtown LA. And it was

just almost apocalyptic then, but then seeing, I can't even get down to the areas that have

been heavily impacted. Seeing all of that is just, it's a lot to take in emotionally when that's your home

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