Will the Red-hot California Fires Red-pill Americans?

By Selwyn Duke

When all is said and done, the wildfires raging in and around Los Angeles may be the worst natural disaster in American history in terms of scope and cost. But did it have to be this way? For sure, there are factors beyond man’s control, such as the fierce Santa Ana winds and Southern California’s dry environment. Then, however, there are the controllable factors: Having quota (DEI) hires in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s upper echelons, failure to be proactive (authorities did have advance warning of extreme fire danger), poor forest management, not maintaining water stocks, and vagrancy’s normalization. (Approximately 50 percent of all Los Angeles fires are set by vagrants, according to reporter Michael Shellenberger.) But then, though it’s the hardest of ways to learn a lesson, there may be one silver lining in this very tragic cloud: More Americans may be waking up to the wages of woke governance.

To wit: “The Left is no longer getting away with blaming climate change for wildfire disasters,” wrote British publication The Telegraph January 11. “Instead, residents whose homes have been ravaged have rightly turned their ire on those in charge.” Apropos to this, ex-New York Times editor Bari Weiss said recently that the “fire is happening in a context of total incompetency” and put the onus on officials such as Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Yet another significant factor is recent victories over the censorship cartel. Entrepreneur Elon Musk has made X largely a free-speech platform, and Mark Zuckerberg has now vowed to follow suit with Facebook (we’ll see if that materializes). Most significantly, we apparently have reached a tipping point: The “alternative” media is becoming mainstream and the erstwhile mainstream media is increasingly marginalized. It can no longer control the “narrative” (at least for the present).

So information now flows with greater freedom, and what’s learned by more people than ever is interesting. For instance, the liberal Los Angeles Times recently wrote, paraphrasing wildfire expert Jack Cohen, that we must shift “the conversation away from climate change … because it gives us more control over our fire environment and will ultimately make us less vulnerable to these disasters. ‘We don’t have to solve climate change in order to solve our community wildfire risk problem,’” Cohen stated. Elaborating, the paper then quoted fire historian Stephen Pyne, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “‘We don’t necessarily need a trillion-dollar program and a fire czar to get control of the fire problem,’ Pyne said. ‘What we need are a thousand things that tweak the environment in favorable ways such that we can prevent these eruptions.’”

“For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings,” the Times continued. What a radical revelation: State and local officials must tend to kitchen-table concerns.

Instead, though, we have “leaders who are putting niche, luxury issues, ideological issues, over and above the most fundamental things: keeping you and your family safe from crime [and] fires,” the aforementioned Weiss also stated. One example is that California and federal officials spent millions of dollars the last two years to incorporate “indigenous knowledge” into government fire mitigation regimes. The kicker: This knowledge reflects science in prescribing controlled burns (though the Indians apparently embraced them for cultural and/or hunting purposes, and their burns weren’t always very “controlled”), yet such burns have been prohibited by the government in deference to greentopians.

Of course, most of us are not fire-mitigation experts. But something is for certain: Anytime you prioritize anything, worthwhile or woke, other things move down on the list. Competence cannot be your number one goal if diversity occupies that spot.

But then there’s that good news, relating to the tipping point: I suspect it will only make people madder if pusillanimous pols now try blaming the fires on climate change. For the political climate could be changing, and maybe, just perhaps, we’ll see some hair-gel politicians’ careers go up in smoke.

                   This article was originally published at The New American.