January 12th 2025

Over the next few weeks you’re going to hear ….

Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It’s true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are fiery places. It’s true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership are shocking and scandalous.

It’s hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA firefighters haven’t had the water they needed. Newsom hasn’t built the new water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things. Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change. Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of California.

The Democrats in California aren’t like Democrats in other states. They are radicals. I would know, since when I was a young radical I moved to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else. Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide adequate funding to the police. They weakened the laws that allowed for burglaries and robberies. They subsidized homelessness, attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don’t know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within the housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing and wildlands. Or it could have been started by the homeless.

Whatever the case, California and LA didn’t invest enough in preventing fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing the fire department’s budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly said they couldn’t vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who would have prevented those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles, don’t believe them.

It’s time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile Leftism that has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We can’t trust our leaders to run anything. It’s not just incompetence. It’s that they really don’t care.

It’s time for Californians to demand new leaders — ones who aren’t beholden to the radicals who control the Democratic Party. .

For more than a decade, the media, Democrats, and Hollywood have told us that Western civilization in general and the United States in particular are white supremacist, genocidal, and unsustainable. The founding of America occurred not in 1776 but rather in 1619 with the beginning of slavery, whose effects are felt more strongly than ever. The original colonies and the expansion of the Western frontier depended on the extermination of indigenous people and theft of their lands. And our crimes against nature have resulted in apocalyptic climate change, which requires radical changes to the way we live our lives.

The consequences of this self-hating Woke ideology can be seen today in catastrophic fires, mass evacuations, and burned rubble of Los Angeles. So-called progressives finally achieved what they supposedly warned of but in truth wished for: the eviction of the affluent descendants of colonizers, the incineration of their homes, and the destruction of a city that, more than any other, represents our bloody history of white supremacy and conquest.

I’m not suggesting that Democrats consciously sought to destroy Los Angeles. The entertainment industry professionals in Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and Pacific Palisades, who voted overwhelmingly for California’s progressive Governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s radical Left mayor, Karen Bass, thought they were voting for social justice and sustainability. They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.

And yet that’s what their votes resulted in. Over the last 24 hours, the evidence of gross mismanagement and incompetence by Newsom and Bass has only grown more overwhelming. On January 2nd, a full eight days ago, the National Weather Service urgently warned of extreme fire conditions. To drive home the point, the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office held a press briefing warning of impending catastrophe.

On that day, Newsom and Bass should have called out the National Guard. They should have had planes and helicopters circling over Los Angeles spotting fires and putting them out immediately upon detecting them. They should have issued emergency warnings to residents. And they should have used various methods to spray water, including mobile sprinkler units alongside normal firefighter hoses, to wet down vulnerable areas.

Instead, the following day, Karen Bass flew to Ghana on a frivolous junket. And Gavin Newsom only called out the National Guard yesterday, seven days later than he should have.

In truth, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Newsom and Bass should have constructed two to three times more water reservoirs than Los Angeles has in order to deal with fires of that magnitude. Newsom and Bass should have not only built water recycling and desalination plants, like they have in Israel, they should have built them with excess capacity so that, in an emergency, those plants could have pumped fresh water to supplement the water in the reservoirs.

And instead of emptying the prisons and jails, subsidizing rampant homelessness, eliminating penalties for breaking the law, and allowing addicts the mentally ill to camp everywhere and start fires, Newsom and Bass should have cracked down on the rampant disorder and violent crime, all of which has skyrocketed under their misrule.

It now appears that at least one of the fires was started by a homeless man. Whether or not that’s the case, over half of all fires put out by the Los Angeles Fire Department are started by the homeless, which has diverted the agency from doing what it should have been doing, which was preventing catastrophic fires, including by putting them out as soon as they started.

Why didn’t they? Why did Newsom and Bass make so many catastrophic errors?

Part of the reason is that they are self-centered and craven politicians, typical of the people who hold office in California. They claim to care about society’s victims; in truth, they care only about themselves and their self-image. Newsom, Bass, and other California politicians are uninterested in doing a good job and instead obsessed with their own personal promotion. For that reason, they have long been focused like a laser on playing politics rather than governing effectively.

Another reason is that they are beholden to affluent, radical Left environmentalist and social justice donors who live in places like Marin County and Hollywood. These are the same people who bankroll radical Left groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, who have successfully blocked desalination and water storage plants, the proper clearing of flammable debris in forests, and effective management of landscapes around housing development, for over 45 years.

Before that, the same groups and financial interests halted the expansion of nuclear power, which is the perfect energy source for desalination.

And these are the same people who demanded that homeless encampments be allowed to spread throughout the city and that addicts and the mentally ill be given free housing with no strings attached.

All of these things were done in the name of saving the environment, social justice, and saving black lives. The result of them was the destruction of the environment, grotesque injustice, and the disproportionate loss of black lives, including from violent crime, which increased 15% since Newsom took office and grew to be 31% higher than the national average.

For decades, Hollywood cranked out movies and TV depicting the exhaustion of natural resources and climate as causing the apocalypse. Yesterday, some reporters and scientists blamed climate change for the lack of rain in LA. That’s ridiculous. There’s no trend in annual rainfall from 1877 to 2024. We have wet years and dry years.

Destroying civilization turned out to be expensive, not cheap. Californians pay the highest taxes for the most expensive gasoline, electricity, and water in the nation. Under Newsom, we spent $24 billion to increase homelessness by 40%.

Both ancient wisdom and modern psychology teach us that one can understand a person’s motivation by the consequences of their actions.

California’s Democrats, progressives, and politicians lied when they said their highest priority was protecting the people of California. They lied when they said they cared about social justice. And they lied when they said they cared about protecting the environment.

Instead, what they cared about was destroying the civilization they had long ago decided was evil. All civilizations require a story. The story that built Los Angeles and California was one of human progress. The story that destroyed it was of human sin. For decades, progressives, Democrats, and the news and entertainment media preached that civilization was evil and doomed. Slavery, indigenous genocide, and climate change were proof.

And now, as the city of angels smolders, it’s clear that progressives reaped what they sowed.

===Michael Shellenberger