All personal photos courtesy of the Hoge Family.
In February, I attended a birthday party in the Malibu hills with my wife, and afterward, we realized that we weren’t too far from the Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles neighborhood that was scorched to the ground in the apocalyptic January 2025 fires.
Almost 7,000 structures were utterly destroyed, and at least 12 people lost their lives. Ponder that for a moment: 6,837 buildings and homes turned to smoke. That’s the equivalent of several towns and neighborhoods abruptly erased from the earth.
“You haven’t seen it,” she said.
I realized with a pang of guilt that, indeed, I had not witnessed it for myself. I had written numerous articles about the disaster, I had smelled the smoke in the air, I had friends whose homes were destroyed, and I had watched the videos. But I hadn’t seen it in person.
She had, a mere month after the conflagration was finally extinguished, and she’d told me what she’d seen back then: “It was as if Godzilla had flattened half the town.”
This is what a lot of it looked like then:
So off we went, and the experience was gut-wrenching, even 13 months after the flames. The sheer scope of the damage is almost impossible to describe; yes, it felt like a war had transpired, but even that is almost too glib. House after house had been destroyed by the flames, neighborhood after neighborhood had simply vanished. Blackened steel girders stood at awkward angles at almost every corner, dark symbols of the homes and buildings that once stood there and the people who inhabited them. And, yet, weirdly, every once in a while, there would be a house or structure that had been spared, sitting surrounded by ruin yet remaining utterly unscathed. Unsettling, to say the least.
You could still smell the acrid scent of destruction in the air.
I wanted to document it at the time, but all I had was my phone. My little I-device just didn’t seem worthy of depicting the true (preventable) horror of what had transpired.
My son, however, has become quite the photographer, and I asked him the other day if he would accompany us to the Pacific Palisades — and bring along some of his high-tech gear — to see if we could try to capture what happened then, and what was happening now. He was on board.
The good news: the landscape has changed considerably in the three months since I last visited. Despite what has been a glacial reconstruction phase, plagued by California’s Byzantine permitting rules and the reluctance of insurance companies to pay out, construction was clearly happening at a higher rate than before. The pounding of hammers resounded through the sunny afternoon, and pickup trucks loaded with supplies and ginormous construction vehicles dotted the town.
Away from the activity, however, it seemed like we were on an archaeological mission deep in the Cambodian jungle. (Note: We were very respectful of people's property and never trespassed or took pictures of anything that identified a specific residence.)
This was, until very recently, a presumably very large house, with an expansive backyard, but now it’s straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
As Jeff Goldblum’s scientist character says in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way”:
See this slide? See this jacuzzi? This pool we came across had them both, but I don’t think anybody will be using them anytime soon:
Meanwhile, we found a door to nowhere on a hill leading to nothing, in a weird way evoking Gavin Newsom’s bullet train to nowhere:
Was this an indoor or an outdoor kitchen? Who knows:
The Palisades is part of the City of Angels, but it has a small-town feel. This little slice of Americana, however, was, quite simply, devastated. Here is the iconic Business Block Building, dedicated in 1924, right at the center of things and, ironically, across the street from the Palisades Village — Rick Caruso’s high-end outdoor mall that escaped the fires unscathed with the help of private firefighters.
It is no more:
Its Spanish Colonial Revival-style glory days are now in the past, thanks — not to global warming — but to the ineptitude of California’s single-party rule regime. This photo is from 1925, and the building had lasted through wars, previous fires, and earthquakes, only to be scorched one hundred years later by incompetence.
MORE: Spencer Pratt's Mother's Day Ad Shows Emotional Aftermath of Palisades Fire
We have friends from the Palisades, and they said that a local business had been asked to replace a tattered American flag atop their location with a brand-new one. They said, “That flag survived the fire. It stays.”
I actually respect that.
Numerous such flags are fluttering in the wind, a testament to the “Pali Strong” banners you can see while driving through:
This next photo was taken right in the center of town. What was this building? Whatever stood there, most of it has now vanished like smoke:
Meanwhile, a high-end Tesla Cybertruck stood in sharp contrast to the Berkshire Hathaway office wreckage behind it:
We here at RedState have extensively documented the disastrous failures of the one-party Democrat rule here in the Golden State, helmed by the governor with the worst record of failure arguably in the history of the United States, Gavin Newsom. Meanwhile, LA Mayor Karen Bass jetted off to Ghana despite being warned that a looming catastrophe was on the way, a key reservoir above the Palisades was left empty by highly-paid, inept Department of Water and Power (DWP) officials, the LA Fire Department was more concerned with DEI and LGBTQ than fire prevention, the forestry service told firefighters to stand down because they cared more about plants than people… the list goes on, and on… and on.
The notable increase in construction gave me hope, but there’s a caveat: there are many stories and rumors about foreign interests and investment bros snapping up properties and planning on radically changing what once were leafy, family-friendly neighborhoods. Some theorize that the real “progressive” plan is to turn the whole area into high-density urban housing — nothing like it once was.
I’d say all that they were all just tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, except that the two links I provided in the above paragraph show that they are most certainly not. Meanwhile, I’ve lived in the formerly Golden State long enough to know that, however devilish you think the Left’s plans are for the failing West Coast progressive juggernaut, the reality is always worse. My fear is that the Palisades will never again be the idyllic, wonderful area that mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt grew up in. He watched as his own house and his parents' were incinerated beyond recognition, and that trauma has inspired his once unlikely but now increasingly viable run for mayor.
I attended a gathering in 2022 at the home of some dear friends. This is what was:
Today, the house is gone. The porch from which I took the photo is no more. Taking that picture would no longer be possible, because the homes below are torched, the trees burnt to a crisp. Today, as we surveyed the aftermath, it is an empty, charred lot surrounded by fences, overlooking devastation — not sunsets.
It was a powerful journey — and we ended up not even having time to document Malibu, where the beachfront is littered by seemingly mile after mile of burnt-out pylons signifying where homes once stood. People can wrongly mock the families and citizens who once called this their home for being wealthy, and rightly for consistently voting for the Democrats who destroyed their state. However, one can also feel compassion for all the memories lost, all the hard work turned to ash, all the souls who have lost everything. Many of them are not in fact loaded Hollywood celebrities with basements full of cash — they’re old Californians who bought their dream houses decades ago and now have no hope of being able to afford to rebuild them.
In fact, at least 17 percent of former residents are reportedly never coming back. I would guess that the real number ends up being significantly higher, but only time will tell.
The California Dream has turned into a dystopian nightmare. Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Xavier Becerra, Tom Steyer, and all their union cronies want to bring this socialist hallucination to you, the American people.
There is only one answer: vote different.
Editor’s Note: Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the “progressives” are ruining California.
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