I spend more time reading the mainstream news media than right-wing media because the MSM is consistently better (even though my own views are right-wing). I don’t usually trust right-wing media stories outside of my expertise until I read coverage of them in the MSM and I have the opportunity to compare and contrast the narratives and based on my own knowledge and life experience, I seek out what makes the most sense. When elite narratives contradict my life experience, I try to understand that discrepancy. When the elites are clearly blinkered such as in their denial that different groups have different gifts, it is easy to dismiss their narratives.
Much of the right-wing coverage of LA’s fires is petty partisan point-scoring, but what jumps out to me is the dog that didn’t bark – the complete lack of defense among elites for LA mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsome. If the elites do not consider Bass and Newsome worth defending, if the elites aren’t going to bat for California governance, then that signifies a widespread acceptance among non-conservatives that liberal governance has failed in California.
The fact that the dog did not bark when you would expect it to do so while a horse was stolen led [Sherlock] Holmes to the conclusion that the evildoer was a not a stranger to the dog, but someone the dog recognized and thus would not cause him to bark. Holmes drew a conclusion from a fact (barking) that did not occur, which can be referred to as a “negative fact,” or for the purpose of this discussion, an expected fact absent from the record.
Karen Bass is a black Marxist. The MSM is usually reluctant to criticize left-wing black and latino political leaders. That the MSM has turned on Bass indicates we are in a different era.
It is not an axiom dictated by Heaven that implementing DEI results in lowered efficiency, it just always seems to work out that way. Commitment to DEI and to other left-wing nonsense goes hand-in-hand with inferior quality of services. On the other hand, I notice that no matter how woke our military has gotten, it is of far higher quality than the militaries of more masculine regimes in China and Russia.
Israel’s elite is left-wing, and Bibi’s right-wing government needed them to carry out his destruction of Hezbollah. Our elite is similarly left-wing, and we need them to be excellent. Populism wins elections, but doesn’t govern effectively unless it can coopt much of the elite. That seems to be what Trump is doing with his connections to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. You can’t get much done if 95% of the elite are against you (e.g., Trump’s first term).
The 1992 LA Riots and the 2025 LA Fires would not have occurred in Beverly Hills where you have more government efficiency. Trump supporters held rallies in Beverly Hills in 2020 and 2024 knowing that the BHPD would protect them.
When California legislators spent January Trump-proofing California, that took away time and money that would have better spent improving government efficiency with regard to disasters such as fire.
Jay Kaspian Kang writes for The New Yorker Jan. 16, 2025:
But I do wonder whether Californians, especially those in cities with crime rates that spiked during the pandemic, poorly maintained infrastructure, and large homeless populations might be questioning the priorities of the liberals who govern them. In the Bay Area, voters in both Oakland and San Francisco effectively deposed their mayors in last November’s election—Sheng Thao, of Oakland, was recalled in the midst of a bizarre corruption scandal; London Breed, the incumbent mayor of San Francisco, who once seemed primed for a run up the ladder of the Democratic Party, was defeated by Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi’s jeans fortune who has no real political experience. Even in Berkeley, where I live, two long-standing city-council members running for mayor were defeated by an unknown challenger who, as far as I could tell, was a complete unknown to many voters.
It’s difficult to classify or quantify these changes because they will likely not persuade voters in deep-blue districts to leave the Democratic Party. But what seems to be settling in is a general unease about the competence of local and state governance. I live in what Kamala Harris dubbed the East Bay Hills, where the most salient political issue is fire prevention. Most families I know have a go bag packed and can recite their evacuation plan. My house, along with hundreds of others in the neighborhood, was dropped from its fire-insurance policy last year. Most of my neighbors, like many of the people in the Pacific Palisades whose houses burned to the ground, received little to no warning. Nor were there any alternatives to just signing up for the state’s FAIR plan, which, as Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out this week, will come under incredible strain and scrutiny once the claims from Los Angeles start flooding in. It’s reasonable for residents to be skeptical that FAIR will actually pay out, or, at the very least, to expect that the claims process will be so broken, bureaucratic, and ultimately bankrupt that it would almost be easier to skip it.
There is a significant portion of the California electorate who will never vote Republican in a Presidential election, who hold socially progressive cultural beliefs when it comes to racial and gender issues, and who can’t figure out why a place of such wealth and high taxes can’t seem to run anything well on a local level. They carry around their own bag of annoyances about how the state is run. Some grievances, such as homeless encampments in cities, can trigger more strong reactions, while others, such as overzealous equity pushes in public schools, bad roads, high taxes, or property crime, are mostly just accepted as part of the deal if you want to live in the state.
Catastrophic events like the fires in Los Angeles have a way of turning these annoyances into disillusionment. As Trump, Musk, and their army of right-wing online warriors have stepped up the attacks on Bass and Newsom, I’ve been struck by how little resistance they’ve encountered, whether from elected Democrats, media figures, or even liberal posters. There are some obvious reasons why this has happened—Musk owns a social-media company and many of the state’s more politically inclined residents seem to have.
When the fires come for us—and it is a question of when and how much, not if—how many of us will feel the narrative pull to turn all our separate grievances about potholes or schools or petty corruption into one grand story of failing liberal leadership?
