"A Dirty Little Secret About Deadly LA Inferno" by Daniel Guss
It may explain why I was assaulted by three LA City Council staffers yesterday. I'll be on AM-870 KRLA with Jennifer Horn at 8:30am and on 790-KABC with John Phillips in the afternoon to discuss.
The inferno that continues burning greater Los Angeles to a crisp is no surprise to a contingent of independent online journalists who have spent years calling out the corruption, cronyism and failure that sparked it. Ditto that, for an even larger chorus of gadflies who, while not writing columns in places like Substack, have been canaries in the coal mine.
Think of us collectively as charismatic oracles with personal views as diverse as Southern California itself.
Yet hardly any of us disagree that the Los Angeles Times has for decades whitewashed that corruption, cronyism and failure on its news side and endorsed more of it on its opinion page.
At least until recently, when its owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong halted its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president and admitted a few days ago that endorsing Karen Bass for Mayor of Los Angeles was a mistake.
Three cheers for Patrick!
Hip-hip…keep going!
While I do not speak for him, I infer that it means most of its other disastrous endorsements were mistakes, too, because they were infected with the same malignant mindset where merit and accomplishment took a back seat to race and gender.
As LA burned, the media has continually and correctly stated that Bass was sipping cocktails in Ghana, where she went despite knowing what was about to take place here.
Well, LA media?
Where is the call for accountability from the person who serves as Acting Mayor when Bass is away?
That’s Los Angeles City Council president Marqueece Harris-Dawson, on whose watch the inferno worsened exponentially, with dozens of deaths and tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, in damages.
The Council president has immense power, controlling its agenda and assigning his colleagues to committees and choosing who chairs them.
But what was Harris-Dawson’s first move of the new year?
Ending, without announcement, the ability for concerned constituents to call-in to Council meetings, which marginalizes anyone (especially the elderly, disabled and working class) who can’t get to downtown Los Angeles by 10am on Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday, let alone safely and conveniently.
That’ll get you a whole 60 seconds for each agenda item! (Maximum three minutes total, where you will be predictably disrupted by the City Attorney when he wants to steal back a few seconds.)
Instead of expanding public participation, like allowing call-ins to Council committee meetings, Harris-Dawson single-handedly chose censorship, ludicrously suggesting that people who can’t get there can submit their comments online, as though anyone ever reads them.
Harris-Dawson claims that people abuse the call-ins, which is correct, but the simple solution would be to have members of the public register to call-in so that abusers can be blocked.
(I will have a bigger commentary on Harris-Dawson’s other dubious explanation for censoring the public in the coming days.)
Because of Harris-Dawson’s embrace of censorship, I got to City Hall early Wednesday and was one of the first to register on its kiosks to speak on a few items.
Part of the reason why the aforementioned gadflies sometimes use pseudonyms to sign-up to speak at the meetings is because Harris-Dawson and his predecessor Paul Krekorian developed a habit of randomly ending public participation that kept silencing many of us. But if you register as Cheryl Jackson-Diaz, your odds of being called to speak go up exponentially.
I didn’t use a pseudonym.
Despite being there early, and despite my bringing this to the attention of the sergeants-at-arms, my first trip to City Hall in months resulted in no public participation, which is consistent with the censorship employed by the City when call-ins were allowed.
If former mayor Eric Garcetti could be credited for doing one thing properly during his prior gig as LA City Council president, it was having the public speak at the time each agenda item was discussed and voted on. There were other major flaws in how he ran meetings, but in this one way, Garcetti got it right.
The meeting on Wednesday was unusually brief, especially considering that Harris-Dawson had canceled the one scheduled for Friday.
So afterwards, I started rolling video in the corridor outside of the meeting room to ask what I would have asked at the meeting, including whether chaos at the top of the LAFD distracted from fire safety preparation. In particular, when Kristina “Kady” Kepner, then-Assistant Chief at the Los Angeles Fire Department, violently attacked her then-live-in domestic partner while repeatedly threatening to kill both of them.
Note: I didn’t use the word alleged in my column about Kepner because I saw the video. So did other city officials, including LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who actually promoted Kepner despite seeing the video! It was only after I wrote about it that Kepner’s promotion was unwound.
First, Councilmember Tim McOsker walked by me and didn’t field my questions.
Then came Harris-Dawson and a crew of staffers around him.
As I called out my questions to Harris-Dawson in the cacophonous corridor, I was physically assaulted by three of them, you’ll see.
The first was when the aide on Harris-Dawson’s right — a woman with glasses — as my video will show, didn’t veer to the right toward the elevator bank where Harris-Dawson was headed.
Instead, she crossed in front of him and made a beeline to obstruct my camera before intentionally backing into me and shouting “don’t push me,” as though her walking into me could be construed as pushing her.
The second assault came from the man on Harris-Dawson’s left, who grabbed my right wrist and attempted to take my iPhone, which recorded Harris-Dawson as I asked my questions.
Other cameras in the corridor will confirm this.
After I told him, “get your fucking hands off of me,” (UPDATED: And then again “you get your hands off of me!”) he backed off and the scrum moved toward the elevator bank. At no time was I closer than six or seven feet from Harris-Dawson, with LAPD personnel in the immediate area trying to disperse a larger group of protestors who he, too, prevented from commenting at the meeting.
I continued to ask my questions of Harris-Dawson while he waited for an elevator. This is when a third staffer, this chap, walked past me and, once off camera, bumped into me with his shoulder.
(UPDATED: As Harris-Dawson and his crew scurried into an elevator, the first aide to make physical contact with me, the woman, falsely told LAPD officers, “he pushed me earlier,” even though it was she who made the aggressive move toward me across MHD’s path rather than in the direction they were walking.)
I kept recording, (UPDATED: and twice more admonished MHD’s people “don’t touch me!”). I told the LAPD officers that I wanted to file a criminal complaint for, at minimum, physical assault. They took the complaint and called paramedics to ice a bruise I sustained.
The video:
One day after the City Council spent more than an hour patting itself on the back for things like making masks available for dealing with the smoke caused by an inferno that their failures in leadership caused, City Hall has become anything but a town square.
Harris-Dawson knows that he has escaped scrutiny for the death and destruction that took place while he and he alone was in-charge of Los Angeles as Acting Mayor in Bass’s absence. His paranoia may also be elevated because of my recent collaboration on these issues with the U.S. version of the Daily Mail, which is now delving into the Kepner murder-suicide threat, what other officials knew about it, and other corruption.
He is intent on silencing critics at any cost, including getting physical with journalists.
Detectives investigating.
Lawyers waiting.
If their next dumb move is lawfare in the form of a temporary restraining order, they can anticipate a costly legal response.
This morning, I will discuss all of this and more on AM-870 KRLA with Jennifer Horn at 8:30am and on 790-KABC with John Phillips, whose show starts at 12pm.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards in June ‘23. In June ‘24, he won its “Best Commentary, Non-Political” award. He has contributed to the Daily Mail, CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)