by WorldTribune Staff, January 14, 2025 Real World News

The Los Angeles area wildfires have killed at least 24 people, displaced more than 200,000, and destroyed over 12,000 buildings.

The eventual price tag of the fires will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

Some fires that are still completely uncontained.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass with Gov. Gavin ‘Nero’ Newsom

“No one has really taken charge yet,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote in a Jan. 13 analysis. “And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.”

What is happening in L.A., Hanson wrote, is the result of “a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.”

The culprit of the catastrophe, Hanson continued, “is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.”

All of California’s statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country.

There are no Republicans on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

“Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific,” Hanson wrote.

“Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion plays a central role in virtually everything Democrats who run the state do.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, Hanson noted, “was warned of the current danger of dry hillsides of chaparral buffeted by record-high, 100-mph Santa Ana winds. Her response She went junketing a continent away to the inauguration festivities of the president of Ghana—a strange way to prepare for a possible inferno to come. Does Ghana have firefighting expertise to share with Bass?”

Bass flew back and was surprisingly confronted at the airport “by a now rare honest—and thus foreign—reporter,” Hanson noted. “He asked her why she cut over $17.6 million from the LA fire service budget—itself just 65% of the city’s homelessness expenditures. (She had planned to cut millions of dollars more). And why, he asked, was she in Africa at all in her city’s hour of need? Bass stood mute—shamed into silence.”

Hanson added that “Los Angelenos needed no answer since it was obvious to them: she went to Ghana because she could and wanted to—since identity chauvinism is what ensured she was elected, reelected, and immune from criticism. Look at her appointments and budget, and it is clear public safety, fires, and water are most certainly not her priorities.

“Bass was confident that if L.A. went up in smoke as she pursued her African agendas, the woke megaphones would silence critics as ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ or ‘sexist’ in the way Soviet commissars used to send to Siberia any ‘ideological enemies of the state’ who complained that the farms, industries, and trains of Russia no longer worked. And on spec, we now hear it is now racist to criticize a black woman incompetent mayor.”

How about the Bass-appointed DEI “deputy mayor for safety,” Brian Williams?

Did he step up in the mayor’s absence? That would be a no. He is currently under suspension for suspicion of phoning in a bomb threat to Los Angeles City Hall.

What about the much-acclaimed “first Latina” director of Los Angeles’s vast waterworks Janisse Quinones? What did she accomplish on her over $2,000-a-day salary?

“Well, the water very quickly ran out in Pacific Palisades, and the hydrants went dry—as many had been for months prior,” Hanson wrote. “And she forgot to tell the public that in fact there is a 117-million-gallon water reservoir atop Pacific Palisades built for some purpose unknown to her. Yet it was empty and ‘under repair’ for months because of a mere damaged cover. Consider that: a dry autumn, the onset of the usual Santa Ana winds, a recent plague of hilltop wildfires, and Quinones shuts down the linchpin of a prior generation’s plan to save the Palisades.”

What about LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley?

“She now blames the mayor for dry hydrants,” Hanson noted. “But in doing so, she pleaded that her job starts only after water flows out of them—as if their inert condition is not really her concern.

“The self-celebrity, nonbinary fire chief Kristen Crowley has talked nonstop for the last two years about ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and the ‘LGBTU community.’ Less was said about the need to ensure the most meritocratic force possible, unmatched equipment, and long preplanned measures to prevent conflagrations—and screaming to high heaven that fire hydrants were either being stolen or bone dry. Instead, like Bass, Crowley was mostly mute about the lack of preparation or the absence of sufficient warning to those about to be engulfed.”

What about the governor?

“Gavin ‘Nero’ Newsom made his usual performance art, virtual-signaling appearance,” Hanson wrote. “When asked why the hydrants were dry, he batted it off as a ‘local problem.’ He now uses his own campaign website, linked to Democratic fundraising efforts, to warn the fire-struck public about supposed ‘misinformation.’ But what could Newsom do or say? His entire tenure is synonymous with too many catastrophic forest fires and too little water.”

Newsom “did nothing after the catastrophic Aspen and Paradise fires to revive the timber industry to glean and clean the forests. He never allowed much new grazing on fuel-rich hills or sent crews in to cut back the chaparral. He never reconsidered his policies of diverting precious snowmelt from the Sacramento River tributaries to flow into the sea to help the delta smelt rather than to ensure that farmers could irrigate their crops or that Los Angeles County reservoirs were fully banked.”

Hanson continued:

“Despite an approved 2014 $7.5 billion bond to build three huge dams and reservoirs, Newsom ensured that we built none: not the easily constructed Sites reservoir, not Temperance Flat, and not Los Banos Grandes, all tertiary foothill reservoirs that could have given California by now nearly five million additional acre-feet of storage.

“Or is it worse than that?

“Governor Dam-Buster still brags about how he greenlit blowing up four dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam removal in American history. The dams provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power, farmers with irrigation water, and the public with recreation and flood control.

“Instead of following the voters’ bond to build reservoirs and dams, Newsom preferred to dynamite them. The ensuing muddy deluge wiped out the surrounding riparian ecosystem.”

Hanson concluded:

Add it all up. The California nihilist green ethos and the left-wing politicians who run the madhouse ensured there is no effort to glean the forests and hills of combustible fuel.

There is not enough water for hydrants, not enough to deliver to Los Angeles, and when it arrives, there is too much incompetence to know how to use it.

There were no real warnings to residents that they had mere minutes to flee for their lives. Or was it worse still? As the fires wore on, continuous false alarms of new fires sparked unnecessary and dangerous mass evacuations citywide, destroying what, if any, trust was left in the fire department.

There is no reason to believe that such derelict politicians during the next fire will not again be AWOL on DEI junkets, boasting of their genders, their race, and their sexual orientation, but not of their duties to those whose lives they are sworn to protect.

The final tragic irony?

California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem.

No one in the government dares to guess about what might have caused the fires, even as they cry “climate change”—as if to do so would expose their own incompetency or confirm rumors of sporadic homeless arsonists.

The California green utopians, by their very ideological zealotry, ensured their fires likely will have released into the atmosphere several weeks’ worth of the entire state’s collective auto emissions.

The fires will have wiped out thousands of protected flora and fauna, will have released toxic fumes into the air, and will have destroyed the lives of thousands of Los Angeles residents for years to come.

To paraphrase a 1960s California left-wing slogan—green-woke is not healthy for children and other living things.

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  California wildfires, Hanson: DEI + Green Nihilism = ‘veritable living hell’, WorldTribune.com

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