He's mad, he's back he's on fire...along with Calif.
The Woke Fires Turing California Red
By John Kass
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Don’t make the political mistake about California that so many others are making now.
They’re saying that La La Land was unprepared for the wildfires that destroyed tens of thousands of acres, destroyed thousands and thousands of homes and businesses and burned up billions of dollars worth of wealth. Not to mention all the human misery.
But suggesting the flames took California unaware would be a big fat lie. It would be like saying you were surprised by the gunshot, though you loaded that gun yourself and then pulled the trigger.
Now California will dangle its votes before incoming President Donald Trump and the ascendant GOP. With the Olympics and World Cup coming, the woke lords of the West will expect that the rest of the country bail them out, pay for the damage and make them whole. I think the people of California need our help, but first how about the Californians admitting what they’ve done to themselves?
The wildfires destroyed Southern California, burning tens of thousands of homes to the ground in one of the worst wildfires in history. It wasn’t an accident. And please don’t say California Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass were unprepared. That suggests what happened was by chance. But everything the Democrats did before the fires burned Los Angeles was deliberate, extremely so.
This was no accident. California was exceedingly prepared for what the left-wing Democrats who run the state wanted, because the left-wing Democrats were catering to the left-wing voters in the bluer-than-blue areas of Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica and Malibu. The fire hydrants ran dry in the Pacific Palisades because they let the reservoirs run dry, but they had plenty of DEI politics. The problem was DEI politics was not all that useful for putting out fires.
It was no accident that here was no water for the fire hydrants, no water in the reservoirs even though billions of tax dollars had already been spent for reservoirs. And more on dams up in Northern California to direct much-needed water to the south were blown up. The dams impeded the happiness of a tiny fish as big as your index finger, the smelt. And Newsome bragged that he had done something stupendous with the waters–he let all that water run out into the Pacific. So he checked the boxes claiming constituencies, from the radical environmentalists to the Indians who wanted the rivers to be restored so the tribes could harvest salmon and make a buck.
For decades and decades, the California Democrats blocked logging companies and prevented the clearing of dead brush in the hills and the forests. The environmentalists called this victory. But some who respected nature, like the loggers and hunters and campers and fishermen and just about everyone who have built a fire in the fireplace knew it by another name:
dry kindling.
And what happened to California was only a matter of time.
Just a few years ago, there was a television show that captured the the ethos of the woke California environmentalists, the ones who waged war on the logging companies and fell in love with their Subarus, the folks who wanted to rid the earth of gaseous cows and revered Barack and Michelle and still believe that humans are bad for the environment. The TV show was was called “Life Without People,” showing us in graphic detail what would happen to our great cities, these temples of the West once all the people were gone. The jungle and its vines would take the skyscrapers.
The first three episodes were the realization of the leftist enviro fantasy: “The Bodies Left Behind,” “Outbreak,” and “The Capital Threat,” in which, according to the producers, “Forces of nature threaten to destroy the landmarks and treasures of Washington, D.C., in a world without people; wilted palms set the stage for a massive inferno in Los Angeles.”
If you got the sense that the radical environmentalists would rather get rid of all humans and cattle, you’d be right.
Back in the unreal woke world preparing for the inferno, Los Angeles Mayor Bass left town despite the warning that the Santa Anna Winds were about to blow heavily and dangerously. Anyone who ever fought a forest fire knew there were many warnings. She ignored them to burnish her DEI politics credentials. Rather than staying home protecting her city, Mayor Bass was in the West African nation of Ghana for her woke cred. She returned to a burning city and just stood there like an idiot in the airport when a reporter asked her why she left.
But before she left and ignored warnings about the Santa Anna winds, Bass did something important. She cut more than $17 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department budget. So yes, the fires shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Though they cut fire department budgets and stopped the clearing of brush and paid to destroy the dams and empty water reservoirs, Mayor Bass, Newsom and other California Democrats spent more than $24 billion on the homeless, who love LA because it’s so warm and they can get high on the street and defecate in public without shame or worry, and the California Democrat politicians shower money on them.
There wasn’t enough water for the fire hydrants—they ran dry–but California Gov. Gavin Newsom was busy.
He was preparing a special legislative session to raise money to legally fight policies that California Democrats deem threatening, coming from incoming President Donald Trump.
And those Los Angeles fire hydrants that ran dry? That was no accident either. Trump accused Newsom of protecting a “worthless fish” and putting the fish’s welfare over human beings.
I’m a fly fisherman (or at least I was, once) and so wanted to examine this worthless fish called the Delta Smelt. It turns out that I grew up eating them. They’re delicious. We Greeks call them marithes.
Dredge lightly in flour, sautéed in butter and olive oil and there you go. Don’t forget to squeeze lemon.
So, we visited one of my old favorites, Greek Islands Chicago and ordered up a plate.
The marithes were superb.
But would I burn down an entire city for the marithes, plunging millions of people into chaos and misery just for smelt?
No.
Newsom who thought he once could be president ran to his ultra-rich political donors—those who hadn’t been burned– unleashed a counter offensive, a pack of spinners to protect him. The same media type who lied to us about the origins of COVID and insisted the Hunter Biden Laptop was just Russian propaganda have been working furiously to spin us about the wildfires.
But that doesn’t change the fact that firefighters couldn’t get water because the hydrants ran dry. It doesn’t change the fact that California Democrats were so concerned about the smelt that they obliterated the dams. And on top of all this pain being suffered by the people of California, there is more pain:
The state is suffering an insurance crisis, because Gavin Newsome and California Democrats refused to let insurers do proper pricing for risk.
So rebuilding will be incredibly costly, if not impossible.
And who will pay? Not Gavin of the greasy hair. I don’t think he paid for his meal when he showed up at the French Laundry for a gourmet dinner, while Democrats and their Karens wanted us masked and at home. So who’ll pay? California homeowners and taxpayers will pay for the mistake. And the rest of us will be asked to pay. I just saw Newsom on a video meeting with the other phony, China Joe Biden, Newsom was railing against “misinformation,” the last refuge for authoritarian scoundrels.
Many years ago, the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—the city’s great mayor who would have looked for a curb to scrape Newsom and Bass from the bottom of his shoe—had a saying for close aides at Chicago’s City Hall.
He’d say “take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.”
Daley was a practical commonsense Democrat. long before Democrats were infected by the woke mind virus spread by Barack and Michelle Obama. Now the Democrats are like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. And they don’t take care of the little things, like making sure the hydrants have water. They don’t make sure the reservoirs are full. They prize their left wing tribalism over competence. They invent scenarios and rail about “misinformation” which will work only as long as the corporate media carry their water.
They don’t take care of the little things. They take care of themselves and their liberal cred and their hair. Like mad woke Neros watching it all burn. When I think of Gavin Newsom and Mayor Bass and their team of spinners lying through their teeth to avoid a just reckoning, building layer upon layer of lies, I think of the great song by Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” which is metaphor for the Newsom and Bass political careers.
You cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch
Flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
(Copyright 2025 John Kass)
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