It’s fair to call the recent Los Angeles wildfires ‘apocalyptic,’ in the generally accepted use of the word: a total cataclysm. The immense destruction caused by the fires, whipped by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, will likely make this the worst natural disaster in US history—and as of this writing, the fires still rage.
But they have also been an apocalypse in the strict, etymological sense of the word: an unveiling of things hidden. The main thing uncovered by the harsh light of the flames is the utter bankruptcy of liberalism in power. It is impossible to say how things will turn politically for California after the fires have been doused and staggered Angelenos are left sifting through the ashes, but it is equally impossible to imagine that they will return to normal for one of the bluest states in America.
On X, some diehard California leftists have taken to blaming Donald Trump for the disaster. This is risible. The Republican Party scarcely exists there, and hasn’t for many years. At every political level, Democrats—and not just any Democrats, but among the most progressive in the nation —control the levers of power. Gov. Gavin Newsom is a Democrat. The state legislature is controlled by Democrats. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is not only a Democrat, but when she was younger, traveled to Castro’s Cuba to donate labor in an ideological work program designed to show solidarity with the island’s Communist dictatorship.
Moreover, L.A. has long prided itself on being a showcase of liberalism, most especially in Hollywood, the world’s dream factory, where liberal values take pride of place both on- and off-screen. Los Angeles has been inundated with illegal migrants from Latin America, of whom the city’s leaders boast. Diversity is our strength, after all. California has always positioned itself to the rest of America, and indeed the world, as a sun-splashed paradise, a charmed land of leisure and enlightenment. The charming Oscar-winning 2016 film musical La La Land hymns this vision of California and its premier city.
And now, it lies in ashes. There are lessons.
Back in the day, when the Democrats were still a party that cared about the working class, its urban leaders knew how to govern. True, they had their faults, but government more or less worked. Then, after the 1960s, American liberals turned their enthusiasm away from improving the economic conditions of the masses, and instead focused on the boutique enthusiasms of the educated. Left-wing identity politics and its particular passions—the various iterations of multiculturalism and sexual revolution—moved to center stage.
This has happened everywhere liberalism ruled, but perhaps nowhere has left-wing ideology triumphed as in California, a state whose great weather, abundant resources, and iconic status as the fullest expression of the American Dream shielded its people from the consequences of their political folly.
When ideology meets reality, it’s rarely a fair fight. Things have been declining in California for some time. High taxes and stifling regulations have driven many of the state’s most productive people out. Mass migration, a sacred cow in California political culture, has driven up the cost of government and diminished the quality of life. The rise of political extremism within the state’s education system has devastated public schooling and diminished its world-class public universities.
In recent years, homelessness has overwhelmed Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other municipalities. And the explosion of crime after the 2020 George Floyd killing, which suppressed policing and made racial minorities sacrosanct, has made California’s cities increasingly unlivable. Video clips of looting and brazen shoplifting there have become staples of social media discourse. Crime has become so bad that Democratic voters even drove progressive district attorneys, whose campaigns were promoted by George Soros, out of office.
And yet, somehow, California carried on. The national Democratic Party even nominated a California liberal, Kamala Harris, as its standard bearer in last fall’s presidential election. The state’s sitting governor, the handsome but oily Gavin Newsom, has been widely discussed as a leading candidate for president in 2028.
It’s all gone now. The California political class—again, all liberals to the marrow—stands utterly discredited by the L.A. catastrophe. It has been a bonfire of progressive vanities.
Southern California wildfires are common in the region’s dry climate. Clearing underbrush outside of fire season is standard practice to reduce the likelihood of wildfire, and to minimize their destructive capacity. We now know that leaders did not take adequate care of this simple, maintenance duty. Extensive state and national environmental regulations—California has the strictest such laws in the country—have made controlled burns of underbrush difficult to implement.
The Santa Ynez reservoir, which normally holds 117 million gallons of water for the Pacific Palisades area—the one hardest hit by the wildfires— sat drained and empty when the fire broke out. The state had emptied it near the start of fire season, said state officials, because of clean water regulations. Donald Trump alleged that the Newsom administration’s determination to protect the smelt, an endangered small fish, prevented reservoir water from going to L.A., but that has been credibly disputed. Whatever the truth, Los Angeles fire hydrants ran dry in the clutch.
Many homeowners whose houses have been reduced to smoking rubble have no insurance because state regulations forced insurance companies to abandon the market. Because the state would not allow them to raise rates commensurate to the risk of wildfires, insurers pulled out. Some progressive diehards are now howling about the wickedness of these companies, but common sense tells you that it makes no sense for insurers to plan to lose fortunes because of artificially controlled rates that compel them to deny real-world risk.
Like most liberal governments, the City of Los Angeles placed a premium on social justice. Across America, firefighting is a profession that overwhelmingly attracts white males. This is considered to be a very bad thing—and if fire departments have to lower their standards to attract more women and minorities, well, they say, it’s only fair. Thus, the Los Angeles Fire Department, led by a lesbian chief, made DEI and a DEI-related initiative two of its top three goals, more important than “disaster recovery capabilities.”
In a promotional video circulated before the fires, Kristine Larson, a black lesbian LA assistant fire chief taunted critics of diversity. Larson said that if someone questioned whether or not females had sufficient physical strength to do their jobs – like, carrying someone out of a burning building – she would respond by saying, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
Got that? A man who burns to death because the lady firefighter was not strong enough to lift him is at fault for his own demise. Social justice cannot fail; it can only be failed.
A black lesbian L.A. firefighter blaming victims for their own suffering is the perfect icon of contemporary liberalism. Above all, what the L.A. apocalypse reveals is the staggering cost of trying to force reality into an ideological straitjacket. Liberalism did not cause the wildfires, but what California liberalism tells people of the state is that if they’ve lost their homes and all their worldly possessions to the fires, well then, they got themselves in the wrong place.
When the smoke clears, this is a lesson that, no doubt, tens of thousands of middle-class Angelenos will take away from the conflagration. They will leave, relocating to states that have not been wrecked by progressive pieties and ideological illusions, and take their skills with them. California’s reputation as a sunny oasis of liberalism and prosperity has gone up in smoke.
The political careers of Gov. Newsom and Mayor Bass are over. Bass is especially disgraced. Not only did she cut $17.6 million from the fire department in this year’s budget, but she was in Africa on a political junket when the fires broke out. Even famously liberal celebrities are turning on their leaders. Actress Sara Foster, a pro-LGBT feminist Democrat, blasted Newsom and Bass on X, tweeting:
We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits. RESIGN. Your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party.
It is a cultural truism that what happens in California rarely stays in California. The state has always been a global trendsetter. If anything good can emerge like a phoenix from the ashes of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and other once-idyllic enclaves, it is the fierce hope that progressive ruling classes everywhere—even in Europe, where mass migration and economic decline are analogs to the L.A. fires—will have burned themselves out.
