A Progressive Hellscape

“February was the wettest month in downtown Los Angeles since 1998. With over 12 inches of rain drenching the city, it was the fourth-wettest February — and the seventh-wettest month overall — in the city’s nearly 150-year recorded history.” Judson Jones reported on Los Angeles’s weather on March 2, 2024, in the New York Times. Just under a year later, Los Angeles is on fire and the fire hydrants have run dry from a lack of water. Yes, a city by the sea does not have enough water.

“In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water. Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even hotter and drier one that is draining the state’s reservoirs at an alarming rate. But none of the more than half-dozen water storage projects scheduled to receive that money have been built,” reported Adam Beam of the Associated Press on August 31, 2021. We are now a decade beyond that 2014 vote and the last reservoir built for Los Angeles was completed in 1979.

Los Angeles is a victim of progressive mismanagement — something that for far too long its wealth could cover up. But now, the fires do not care if you are Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, progressive or conservative — they burn, in some cases up to four football fields of land a minute. The reservoir sending water to the fire hydrants is dry. The mountain brush has been unpruned for some time due to environmental sensitivities and lack of manpower.

On December 16, 2024, Robert Schmad reported at the Washington Examiner that the U.S. Forestry Service had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI workshops, all while failing to meet federal goals for forest management. The Associated Press reported back on June 27, 2023, that “federal land managers are scrambling to catch up after falling behind on several of their priority forests for thinning even as they exceeded goals elsewhere. And they have skipped over some highly at-risk communities to work in less threatened areas.” The AP continued, “Hindering the Forest Service nationwide is a shortage of workers to cut and remove trees on the scale demanded, government officials and forestry experts say.”

On top of the inability of the Forest Service to hire staff, environmentalists have blocked efforts to control brush, including repeatedly filing lawsuits to stop clearing efforts and reservoir construction.

Los Angeles set itself up for failure. In addition to dry fire hydrants, Los Angeles has a shortage of firefighters. Like the federal government, the city prioritized DEI over core competencies. Comedian Adam Carolla testified some time ago before a legislative hearing that the Los Angeles Fire Department told him it would take seven years to become a firefighter because he was white. Seven years after signing up to take the written test, he stood in line to take the test with a young black lady behind him. He testified he asked the young lady when she had signed up. “Wednesday,” she replied.

It is not just that Los Angeles chose to elevate diversity concerns over fully staffing a fire department, but it also fired competent firefighters who would not take the COVID vaccine. In 2022, Los Angeles officials made a very big deal of hiring the first female and first openly gay fire chief in county history. Last year, the Los Angeles County Commission cut fire department budget by $17.6 million. But the fire department continued to spend over $1 million on a “racial equity plan” designed to “end systemic, institutional, and structural racism” within the fire department.

On top of all the disastrous policies and progressive failures in the run up to today, California regulated fire insurance out of the state, prohibiting insurers from raising rates without state consent. The result has been a collapse in the ability to get fire insurance reasonably. California’s solution has been a state funded insurance program that is costly and inefficient.

The state that has spent billions on a progressive high-speed rail idea has fired firefighters, failed to build new reservoirs, failed to cut back vegetation, and elevated diversity concerns over competence. Now, instead of appreciating progressivism is a recipe for disaster, they will blame global warming and, undoubtedly, Donald Trump.

At the same time, I would encourage you not to wish what is happening to any of these people. While it may be the logical outcome of the policies a majority supported, but 1.2 million people in LA County voted for Trump and the fire does not distinguish between supporters and opponents. The rich, the poor, the famous, and the unknown are all suffering, and we should be praying for them and helping if we can, not mocking them or scoffing at them.