Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:
Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.
Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.
So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?
First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.
Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.
Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.
On the other hand, Chris Bray has been pleasantly surprised to find that some of the legacy media haven’t completely abandoned the idea of reporting the news rather than blatantly cheerleading for Democrats:
California wildfires in the Palisades, January 2025.
The permission structures keep activating, even as they undermine the people who activate them. The automaticity and predictability of the performance suggest the degree to which years of practice have embedded the practice of narrative policing in the media, through a kind of muscle memory.
Here’s why the moment is so surprising: The news media, especially but not invariably the local news media, have been astonishingly sharp during the Los Angeles fires. The Los Angeles Times reported that the reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty as the neighborhood burned. A local reporter told Mayor Karen Bass, face-to-face, that he was in the Palisades with his crew for hours, watching hundreds of houses burn without ever seeing a single firefighter. TV news crews flew over a city maintenance yard full of unrepaired fire engines — video below — then found city memoranda detailing budget reductions that led to the loss of fire department mechanics.
Journalists are now interviewing people who say they called 911 about the start of the Palisades fire for 45 minutes before they saw anyone fighting it. A crew from KNBC interviewed a man in Altadena who spent days fighting spot fires on and around his home, using buckets of pool water to keep the house from burning. The fire started on Tuesday, the man said, and “there wasn’t a fireman ‘til Friday.”1 CNN, no less, broadcast an interview with a Los Angeles fire captain who broke down in tears as he slammed the failure of the city to prepare for a serious wildfire.
Flatly, the media is doing its job. On and on, in a damning flood of serious information. I’m surprised to say it, but they’re on it.
1. In a moment I’ve already described a bit here, I personally used buckets of pool water to cool hot spots next to a friend’s ruined house in Altadena, with his detached garage and a neighboring house still standing, in a neighborhood where homes were still burning and there was no fire department presence. What this man is describing: I saw this, and did this.
