From the Pacific Palisades to Pasadena, the beachside Eden on Earth of Los Angeles County is burning to the ground. In less than one day, more than 80,000 Californians have been evacuated, multiple injured, and at least two dead. With more than 4,000 acres of some of the nation’s most valuable property up in flames, the Southern California wildfires could prove one of the most deadly disasters in American history.
But the tragedy is no natural disaster, act of God, or shock from the sky. It’s rather an obvious and unavoidable product of failed government policy, beginning with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) on down.
Fueling these fires are the Santa Ana winds, which exacerbate the state’s already ultra-arid environment. But neither the winds nor California’s dry climate are anything new. But unlike centuries of Indigenous Californians who subverted the state’s dry air by enacting controlled burns over more than 4 million acres of land, Newsom has let tinder and debris build up within the state. In 2019, Cal Fire enacted controlled burns over just 64,000 acres, and in 2020, a mere 32,000 — metrics that Newsom lied about and inflated by 690%. Newsom promised in 2020 to increase controlled burns to 1 million acres per year, but California only managed to burn 10% as much in 2022, the last year on record.
The state’s cyclical crisis of fiery climates and energy crises is no coincidence. Instead, it’s the direct result of calculated decisions made by its ruling class, primarily executed by the Democrats who have dominated California politics for decades.
Now that the inevitable chicken has come home to roost, state policy continues to fail the firefighters charged with putting out the conflagration. California has not constructed a new major reservoir since 1979, meaning that even though local reservoirs were reportedly at capacity before the Palisades fire, dozens of fire hydrants in the coastal city are completely out of water. Exacerbating the local water shortage is the state’s explicit policy preventing further water flows down south to preserve the delta smelt.
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We still don’t know how the handful of fires fueling the Angeleno apocalypse were started, but the Los Angeles Fire Department has estimated that 4 in 5 fires downtown and more than half citywide are caused by homeless people. The overwhelming majority of the near-billion-dollar budget of the LAFD is spent on homeless-related fires, but the LAFD has also spent millions in recent years on creating a DEI bureau and an electric fire truck. On a semi-related note, more than a quarter-million Californians were left wihout power as a result of the fires as of Wednesday morning.
In the Palisades, the epicenter of the devastation, the local park, high school, public library, Ralph’s, Gelson’s, and homes are gone. Even though Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who lost the LA mayoral race to the Obama-backed socialist Karen Bass, doused his outdoor mall in flame retardant, the $200 million Palisades Village that employs hundreds has been reduced to rubble, like the Tuileries incinerated by the Communards during the revolution. But unlike the radicals who believed their ruins actually stood for something, the apocalypse in Los Angeles is a simple product of the failure of California’s ruling from the governor down to the LAFD.
