Former Leftist and Gubernatorial Candidate on the L.A. Fires

Michael Schellenberger, an admitted former radical leftist who woke up and
realized how destructive 'progressivism' had become, has some common sense
comments on the failures of California government with regard to the fires.

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Over the next few weeks you're going to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor
Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing that could
have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the
funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water
resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding
for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she
knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It's true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are
fiery places. It's true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers
and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership
are shocking and scandalous.

It's hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA
firefighters haven't had the water they needed. Newsom hasn't built the new
water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for
water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things.
Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change.
Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the
radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump
and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of
California.

The Democrats in California aren't like Democrats in other states. They are
radicals. I would know, since I was a young radical just like them and I moved
to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We
understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of
the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on
the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else.
Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the
rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about
Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that
book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes
to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide
adequate funding to the police. They weakened criminal laws and that allowed
for burglaries and robberies to flourish. They subsidized homelessness,
attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and
start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by
the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don't know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within a
housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing
and wildlands. Or theycould have been started by the homeless, who are allowed
by city officials to camp in the brush and cook their food and drugs with no
consequence.

Whatever the case, California and L.A. didn't invest enough in preventing
fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing
the fire department's budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched
focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los
Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly
said they couldn't vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman
because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They
wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive
today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist
white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who
would have prevented (or at least significantly mitigated) those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor
Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party in the State Assembly tell you that
there's nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los
Angeles, don't believe them.

It's time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile leftism that
has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We simply can't trust our
current leaders to run anything. It's not just incompetence. It's that they
really don't care.

It's time for Californians to demand new leaders-- ones who aren't beholden to
the radicals who control the Democratic Party.