Wildfires are breaking out all around the Los Angeles area. It’s horrifying.
But why is it happening?
According to the L.A. County fire chief, they have no idea how all of this happened. It’s possible the winds are to blame; it’s also possible that it’s copycats. That has happened many times in California recently. Homeless people living in these areas have used open flames. It’s possible that somebody threw a cigarette out.
We really have no idea at this point.
If you look at the pictures, firefighters are not there because there’s nothing they can do.
The big question is why California didn’t mitigate this.
Natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time. There are earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes, but the difference with wildfires is that public policy matters a great deal.
With every natural disaster situation, public policy can mitigate the effects of the natural disaster. This is why earthquakes that occur in a first-world country like the United States do not cause a lot of buildings to fall down. But an earthquake of the same magnitude in a third-world country could cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Buildings are built to code in places like the United States.
When it comes to hurricane response, response matters. This is why Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, handled disasters really, really well when it came to mitigation and response.
But when it comes to preparedness, California has been an absolute disaster area — for years. They’ve not done anything they could have done to mitigate the effects of seasons like this.
Gavin Newsom, the absolutely execrable governor of California, has spent more money than any governor in the history of the state of California by a long shot. He spends billions of dollars on useless rail projects.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
When I hosted a radio show in L.A. years ago, I interviewed Newsom and asked him about high-speed rail. At the time, he was running for governor. He said it was a dumb idea.
But then, he immediately reversed himself to spend billions of dollars on a rail that goes nowhere and has never been built.
So Newsom was trying to pretend he was handling the situation, even as much of the state is on fire.
One of the beautiful things about being a Democrat is you can blame everybody but yourself, even though you’re the person with authority.
So on Wednesday, Newsom spoke about whether he had any responsibility for anything that’s going on. It turned out, according to him, that everyone else who’s not Gavin Newsom is to blame.
What a shock.
In an interview with CNN, he was asked, “What is the situation with the water?”
“The local folks are trying to figure that out,” he answered. “I mean, when you have a system that’s not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in other extraordinarily large scale fires, whether it be pipe electricity or whether it just be the complete overwhelm of the system. I mean, those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire. You have something at this scale. But again, that’s going to be determined by the local authorities.”
California has had a significant water shortage for years because they refused to build the necessary infrastructure.
There’s a ton of mismanagement raging. It is a perfect storm, not just in terms of the fire conditions, but also in terms of the political conditions for fires to rage out of control — from DEI to budgeting, from environmentalism to blaming climate change. Democrats have done a horrifying job on all of this.
Although you can’t blame Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass for the fires, you can blame them for not doing the preparation necessary to deal with some of the most perfectly predictable weather. There are wildfires pretty much every year in California.
Let’s begin with DEI and firefighting. In L.A., they have been prioritizing intersectional characteristics for hiring firefighters. This is not a rip on the current firefighters in Los Angeles. It is a suggestion that placing the prioritization of effective firefighting below the race and sexual identity of the people who are doing the firefighting is stupid, wrong, and backwards.
A 2023 NPR piece wrote, “Firefighting is mostly white male. A California program aims to change that.”
When it comes to DEI and the fire department, that is a problem. It is also a tertiary or quaternary problem when it comes to the list of problems here. The top of the list would be things like lying about your wildfire prevention efforts, which Newsom did back in 2021.
According to see CapRadio in 2021:
On Gavin Newsom’s first full day in office, Jan. 8, 2019, the newly elected governor stood before the cameras, clad in jeans and sneakers and surrounded by emergency responders, and declared war on wildfires.
“Everybody has had enough,” the governor said, announcing he’d signed a sweeping executive order overhauling the state’s approach to wildfire prevention. Climate change was sparking fires more frequent, ferocious, and far-reaching than ever before, Newsom said, and confronting them would have to become a year-round effort.
The state’s response, Newsom added, “fundamentally has to change.”
But two-and-a-half years later, as California approaches what could be the worst wildfire season on record, it does so with little evidence of the year-round attention Newsom promised.
An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.
Overall, California’s response has faltered under Newsom. After an initial jump during his first year in office, data obtained by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom show Cal Fire’s fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020, to levels below Gov. Jerry Brown’s final year in office. At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget.
It’s not just on the statewide level. Just weeks ago, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department budget by nearly $20 million. Disaster preparedness is one of the few things the government can actually be good at. But California has been awful at it.
They haven’t done what they need to do on an environmental level. They did not clear the brush. They did not create the fuel breaks. They did not do backfires in order to burn and clear some of the areas that were most likely to become tinder for a giant wildfire like this.
L.A. and California are wildly mismanaged. They built no new reservoirs. They built no new dams. The same reservoir, which was a very important reservoir for holding water for situations like this, which was planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years, still has not been built.
That is how California works. California released reservoir water not all that long ago. They released water because they didn’t do the infrastructure work, and now the water is not there when they need it. Slow clap for the geniuses in California.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT IN ’25 WITH 25% OFF DAILYWIRE+ ANNUAL MEMBERSHIPS WITH CODE DW25
Of course, so much of this is also tied to the insane environmental policies. As was noted on X, “In 2007 the Sierra Club successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a Categorical Exclusion (CE) to NEPA for controlled burns (the technical term is ‘fuel reduction’). The CE would have allowed the forest service to conduct burns without having to perform a full EIS (the median time for which is 3.5 years). John Muir project helped to claw back the full scope of Categorial Exclusions from the 2018 Omnibus Bill as well (though some easement did make it through). In 2021 the outgoing Trump BLM was served with the following notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity for their fuel reduction plan in the Great Basin: BLM backed away from the plan after the transition.”
Disaster can strike anywhere. The preparation here is nonexistent. In fact, worse than nonexistent, damaging or actively damaging.
And yet Democrats keep being elected in California.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
Wildfires are breaking out all around the Los Angeles area. It’s horrifying.
But why is it happening?
According to the L.A. County fire chief, they have no idea how all of this happened. It’s possible the winds are to blame; it’s also possible that it’s copycats. That has happened many times in California recently. Homeless people living in these areas have used open flames. It’s possible that somebody threw a cigarette out.
We really have no idea at this point.
If you look at the pictures, firefighters are not there because there’s nothing they can do.
The big question is why California didn’t mitigate this.
Natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time. There are earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes, but the difference with wildfires is that public policy matters a great deal.
With every natural disaster situation, public policy can mitigate the effects of the natural disaster. This is why earthquakes that occur in a first-world country like the United States do not cause a lot of buildings to fall down. But an earthquake of the same magnitude in a third-world country could cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Buildings are built to code in places like the United States.
When it comes to hurricane response, response matters. This is why Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, handled disasters really, really well when it came to mitigation and response.
But when it comes to preparedness, California has been an absolute disaster area — for years. They’ve not done anything they could have done to mitigate the effects of seasons like this.
Gavin Newsom, the absolutely execrable governor of California, has spent more money than any governor in the history of the state of California by a long shot. He spends billions of dollars on useless rail projects.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
When I hosted a radio show in L.A. years ago, I interviewed Newsom and asked him about high-speed rail. At the time, he was running for governor. He said it was a dumb idea.
But then, he immediately reversed himself to spend billions of dollars on a rail that goes nowhere and has never been built.
So Newsom was trying to pretend he was handling the situation, even as much of the state is on fire.
One of the beautiful things about being a Democrat is you can blame everybody but yourself, even though you’re the person with authority.
So on Wednesday, Newsom spoke about whether he had any responsibility for anything that’s going on. It turned out, according to him, that everyone else who’s not Gavin Newsom is to blame.
What a shock.
In an interview with CNN, he was asked, “What is the situation with the water?”
“The local folks are trying to figure that out,” he answered. “I mean, when you have a system that’s not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in other extraordinarily large scale fires, whether it be pipe electricity or whether it just be the complete overwhelm of the system. I mean, those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire. You have something at this scale. But again, that’s going to be determined by the local authorities.”
California has had a significant water shortage for years because they refused to build the necessary infrastructure.
There’s a ton of mismanagement raging. It is a perfect storm, not just in terms of the fire conditions, but also in terms of the political conditions for fires to rage out of control — from DEI to budgeting, from environmentalism to blaming climate change. Democrats have done a horrifying job on all of this.
Although you can’t blame Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass for the fires, you can blame them for not doing the preparation necessary to deal with some of the most perfectly predictable weather. There are wildfires pretty much every year in California.
Let’s begin with DEI and firefighting. In L.A., they have been prioritizing intersectional characteristics for hiring firefighters. This is not a rip on the current firefighters in Los Angeles. It is a suggestion that placing the prioritization of effective firefighting below the race and sexual identity of the people who are doing the firefighting is stupid, wrong, and backwards.
A 2023 NPR piece wrote, “Firefighting is mostly white male. A California program aims to change that.”
When it comes to DEI and the fire department, that is a problem. It is also a tertiary or quaternary problem when it comes to the list of problems here. The top of the list would be things like lying about your wildfire prevention efforts, which Newsom did back in 2021.
According to see CapRadio in 2021:
On Gavin Newsom’s first full day in office, Jan. 8, 2019, the newly elected governor stood before the cameras, clad in jeans and sneakers and surrounded by emergency responders, and declared war on wildfires.
“Everybody has had enough,” the governor said, announcing he’d signed a sweeping executive order overhauling the state’s approach to wildfire prevention. Climate change was sparking fires more frequent, ferocious, and far-reaching than ever before, Newsom said, and confronting them would have to become a year-round effort.
The state’s response, Newsom added, “fundamentally has to change.”
But two-and-a-half years later, as California approaches what could be the worst wildfire season on record, it does so with little evidence of the year-round attention Newsom promised.
An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.
Overall, California’s response has faltered under Newsom. After an initial jump during his first year in office, data obtained by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom show Cal Fire’s fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020, to levels below Gov. Jerry Brown’s final year in office. At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget.
It’s not just on the statewide level. Just weeks ago, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department budget by nearly $20 million. Disaster preparedness is one of the few things the government can actually be good at. But California has been awful at it.
They haven’t done what they need to do on an environmental level. They did not clear the brush. They did not create the fuel breaks. They did not do backfires in order to burn and clear some of the areas that were most likely to become tinder for a giant wildfire like this.
L.A. and California are wildly mismanaged. They built no new reservoirs. They built no new dams. The same reservoir, which was a very important reservoir for holding water for situations like this, which was planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years, still has not been built.
That is how California works. California released reservoir water not all that long ago. They released water because they didn’t do the infrastructure work, and now the water is not there when they need it. Slow clap for the geniuses in California.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT IN ’25 WITH 25% OFF DAILYWIRE+ ANNUAL MEMBERSHIPS WITH CODE DW25
Of course, so much of this is also tied to the insane environmental policies. As was noted on X, “In 2007 the Sierra Club successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a Categorical Exclusion (CE) to NEPA for controlled burns (the technical term is ‘fuel reduction’). The CE would have allowed the forest service to conduct burns without having to perform a full EIS (the median time for which is 3.5 years). John Muir project helped to claw back the full scope of Categorial Exclusions from the 2018 Omnibus Bill as well (though some easement did make it through). In 2021 the outgoing Trump BLM was served with the following notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity for their fuel reduction plan in the Great Basin: BLM backed away from the plan after the transition.”
Disaster can strike anywhere. The preparation here is nonexistent. In fact, worse than nonexistent, damaging or actively damaging.
And yet Democrats keep being elected in California.
“}]]
