This terrible, tragic story about what is happening in Southern California isn’t about wildfires or climate change, no matter how badly the elected class in California tries to spin it as such. Wildfires have been a part of everyday life since Los Angeles was created. And climate change didn’t cause the explosion in the size of this wildfire. But blame for the utter devastation has a home.
Woke-brained ideologues and eco-zealous activists who have captured California government—at every level—have instituted reckless and dangerous utopian ideas and unrealistic and imbecilic initiatives, which have made this tragedy 100 times more dangerous and deadly than it had to be.
Wildfires in California are nothing new. No one should have been surprised about a wildfire in Southern California. No one should have been caught unprepared for the annual arrival of the Santa Anna winds. What is happening in California right now was bound to happen sooner or later. However, the inability of California’s state and local governments to mitigate the emergency has caused this natural disaster to become an unnatural disaster propagated by inferior intellect at the hands of social engineers of a dysfunctional ideology.
Traditionally—or until the woke mob assumed the throne—a large portion of California’s state, county, and city budgets were allocated to a reasonable amount of fire prevention, water management, and forest maintenance. But since the invasion of the woke, fire prevention budgets have been slashed, water management doesn’t exist, and forest maintenance is considered a crime.
At a time when a large portion of the budgets should have been devoted to securing the safety of the citizens of California by evolving fire prevention abilities, hiring more firemen and training them for wildfires, and solving the decades-old water crisis—the exact opposite has taken place.
Over 2,000 homes have burned to the ground (so far). Let that number sink in. It will take decades to rebuild all that was lost if, in fact, the people who lost their homes are allowed to get permits to do so for all the bureaucratic bullshit people have to go through in California. So, the overarching question for the moment is this: Why did this happen?
Los Angeles elected a radically extreme neo-Marxist activist for its mayor, Karen Bass. She is woke in a devout way; fully invested in the DEI culture that manufactures the equity of outcomes instead of the equality of opportunity.
Bass cut the fire department’s budget by $17.6 million in deference to the institution of DEI programs and their accompanying taxpayer-funded administrative salaries. At the same time, Bass’s budget found money for housing, educating, and healthcare for millions of illegal immigrants and the homeless.
By the way, with full knowledge that a massive wind event was to bear down on Los Angeles and its surrounding area, Bass went to Africa to celebrate the inauguration of Ghana’s president. Why would attending such an event serve the people of Los Angeles?
Then, we have the DEI hires who are the Fire Chief of Los Angeles, Kristin Crowley, an LGBTQ+ community member, devoted to DEI (and damn proud of it, according to her official department bio), and her deputy chief, Kristine Larson, also of the LGBTQ+ community. Larson heads up the department’s DEI Bureau. Both have publicly bragged about their devotion to ridding the Los Angeles Fire Dept of “old-school white guys” and hiring for “diversity.” In fact, Crowley said shewas “super inspired about bringing more women and LGBTQ-identifying persons in to fight fires.”
Honestly, if your house is on fire and you are trapped, do you give a damn who the person coming to rescue you is sleeping with? It’s inconsequential to the job at hand and the position. To base the hiring of a firefighter—or any first responder— on gender, sexual orientation, or skin color over the candidate’s ability to do the job is not only imbecilic, it’s a dereliction of duty.
This is illustrative of the whole of governments—with few exceptions—in the state of California.
During COVID, Bass and the Los Angeles Fire Department administration fired hundreds of professional firefighters who refused the vaccine. It goes without saying that those fire-tested professionals could have been valuable during this emergency, but then they would have needed equipment. To that point, were you aware a large portion of Los Angeles’ firefighting equipment was sent to Ukraine to aid in the war effort?
Then we have Janisse Quiñones, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, the nation’s largest publicly-owned utility. Under Quiñones, firefighters responding to the fires were met with fire hydrants that didn’t produce water. Within 24 hours, the tanks used as reservoirs for the hydrants were depleted, and Los Angeles' outdated infrastructure couldn’t refill the tanks fast enough to produce usable pressure for the hydrants. The water was there, but there was no pressure to bring it to the hydrants.
Could it possibly be that an individual whose salary was doubled upon taking the position as head of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power ($750,000 annually—the highest salary in municipal government) might begin efforts to upgrade a dilapidated system that, by all expectations, couldn’t perform in a worst-case scenario?
Then, we come to the eco-zealots of Southern California’s radically insane environmentalist community.
The area currently existing as an inferno is surrounded by state forests. However, the eco-zealot stewards of these woodlands have not controlled, cleared, or maintained undergrowth in 20 years. Many eco-zealots argue that undergrowth plays a crucial role in forest ecosystems, providing habitats for wildlife and contributing to biodiversity. Clearing it, they argue, would disrupt these natural processes. Besides, fire is a natural part of the forest ecosystems.
Preserving habitats is one thing, but allowing undergrowth to accumulate to the point that when it catches fire, it obliterates whole cities is the rationale behind the imbecile. This poses the question: How many habitats were destroyed in the current fires?
California has had two years of more-than-average rainfall, especially in Southern California. 2022-2023 was notably wet, with many regions of California receiving significantly more rain than average. Following the previous year, the 2023-2024 water year continued this trend with above-average rainfall across much of the state. Los Angeles, for example, recorded one of its highest two-year rainfall totals since the late 19th century, making these back-to-back years exceptionally wet by historical standards.
Yet that naturally available water wasn’t captured to fill new reservoirs that were appropriated in 2014 through Proposition 1. Instead of building new reservoirs, there's been a push towards “conservation.” The last water desalination plant was built in 2015 in Carlsbad, California,
Los Angeles is a city built on the Pacific Ocean. Yet the firefighters had no water? Why?
Well, the state government—spurred by a potent eco-zealot lobby—routes naturally occurring water to the ocean for several reasons, all of which are rooted in environmental regulations. These people lecture everyone about carbon footprints and how dangerous CO2 is for the environment (CO2 is required in the growth cycle to afford photosynthesis and plant growth) as they board their G6s to Davos.
So, while tens of thousands of people see their houses burn to the ground and, in a growing number of instances, find out that their neighbors have died, it’s pretty easy to see that the bulk of the blame for this horrific event lays at the feet of the woke assholes that are elected and appointed to public office in the State of California and the city and county of Los Angeles. Each has failed the people of Southern California in a spectacular way.
To add insult to injury, just weeks ago—you know, when warnings about a more intense than usual Santa Anna wind was forecast, many of the people affected by the fire had their fire insurance canceled. Aside from that action being tantamount to criminal, it begs the question: If the insurance robber barons were astute enough to know that a disaster was in the offing, how come the people elected to know about these things were caught completely unprepared?
The answer is simple. They are all DEI hires of the extremist ideological class, and their mission is not public service or the protection of their people but a mission of social engineering transformation. Well, they’ve succeeded in transforming a once beautiful and thriving area into an armageddon-like wasteland.
But, you get the government you vote for so it can be argued that the woke of California lit the match to this disaster because virtue signaling was more important to them than electing people of merit to very important roles.
But, hey, don’t worry. President Biden just announced the federal government will be picking up the tab for the disaster, so the woke who voted for their shit show of a government won’t suffer any consequences for their ideologically-based stupidity.
I wonder how Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee people feel about that.
Then, when we come back, our segment on America’s Third Watch, broadcast nationally from our flagship station WGUL AM930 & FM93.7 in Tampa, Florida.
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