Luke Ford

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.

An attorney writes:

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?

A friend says:

L.A. from the standpoint of the average citizen runs OK as long as there isn’t an emergency. The fault is that the persons elected to high office believe things will continue to run OK and do not plan for emergencies. As a result the overwhelmingly liberal and democratic electorate doesn’t really vote on competence because most people are not worried about a potentially catastrophic brush fire.

The first time that I realized that our leadership lacked much vision in planning for various exigencies was when the Rodney King riots occurred. The LAPD under Darryl Gates and the city under Tom Bradley., was not prepared. It took Pete Wilson to finally send in the national guard before order began to be restored. You would have thought the LAPD would have learned some lessons from the 1965 Watts riot when William Parker was the Chief of police.

One of the problems which has not been discussed is that neither the state nor the County nor the city is so rich that it can expected to pay for emergency services to be prepared for an emergency like the Palisades fire all the time. The issue is not just the failure to maintain and test the hydrants, and to be sure that when a reservoir is taken off line, that sufficient back up water supply is available, and that there be sufficient personnel to fight the fire, and to be sure that all firefighters are properly trained to fight this sort of fire, and to have sufficient fire stations for a low response time, but what is the purpose of the fire department. Should it provide the EMT services that it does now (which make up the majority of calls they respond to)? Should it emphasize DEI and opportunities for women, minorities and gays, if this has any negative impact on the first duty to fight fires? Should it be immune from the budget battles the other city agencies have to deal with?

A very large portion of the firefighting is being done by the LA County Fire Department, by the State, and by other Fire Departments providing “mutual aid.” You would have to have an extraordinarily large fire department if the entire burden was shouldered by the LAFD. (This is as relates to the fires within LA city limits)

Although I am highly critical of DEI in general, I am not sure that having the two top administrative positions in the department filed by Lesbians has made any difference in the LAFD’s effectiveness. I don’t think women should serve as firefighters in the field, but on the other hand they only make up 8 percent or so of the department, so they are almost always the only woman out of a crew of 15 to 20 and there must be things the can do that don’t require the same strength and agility as male firefighters. I have not heard anyone say that the firefighters were harmed or delayed by female firefighters. If the firemen was darting in and out of burning buildings and carrying humans to safety that would be one thing but I don’t think that happened.

The Palisades fire had some unusual features that don’t usually apply. First, the fire happened in Winter. Although this is not unheard of the prime fire season in California is the late summer through fall. Second, the fire happened in a very affluent area. I realize there have been fires in Malibu before, but those usually hit the areas in the hills in less densely populated areas and less affluent population than the Palisades. Third, this followed extremely wet winters the last two years so there was more brush growth that died off this past summer, fall and beginning of winter. Fourth, the water pressure failed and the reservoirs ran out of water.

I have seen attempts to blame this on the new DWP head. My understanding is that she was hired because of the extreme pressure on LADWP to get its electricity from greener sources. I doubt she knew anything about water. She had worked at PG&E which doesn’t deal with water, only gas and electricity. She did not come up from the department and I don’t think she has an engineering background (although she may). Her salary is of course, appalling, since it was double that of her predecessor. One would think that there would be someone in a subordinate position to hers in charge of water distribution to residential consumers, to commercial consumers, and for emergency purposes to hydrants for fire fighting. This subordinate should have apprised her of the risks of taking the large reservoir (Santa Ynez) of line to repair the roof. The DWP should have positioned many many water tenders that could be driven up hill from the Palisades so that the water would flow downhill from them to the hydrants.

There will be political fallout from the fires. Perhaps the most important is that the L.A. Times owner now says he regrets endorsing Karen Bass for Mayor. This gives cover to others to criticize Bass. It is interesting that the Fire Chief is willing to put Bass in an untenable position with her comments that Bass was warned about a possible conflagration yet ignored the warning. Now it also appears that a memo she sent to the Mayor was removed from the Mayor’s website or files because it would reflect poorly on Bass. Of course Bass’s promise to not travel overseas while mayor is being brought up as well as Bass’s participate in the 1960’s in the Venceremos Brigade cutting sugarcane in Cuba.

Bass is not out of the mainstream as a progressive Black woman democrat, although she will be painted as some sort of radical. I don’t think her policies are any more radical than those of Villaraigosa or Eric Garcetti. But Soon-Shiong wants to make competence an issue. If he can persuade others that the Democrats practice activist and identarian politics and that is inconsistent with pragmatism, then perhaps Karen Bass can be recalled and if not recalled, defeated in the next election.

It is worth looking at how the LAFD (and LACOFD) dealt with the fires after the first day to see what might have been. First the wind made aerial drops impossible, and it was those aerial drops that were most effective in stopping the spread of the fires. Second, it is not at all clear whether if the Fire Department had predeployed both Fire Department Assets and personnel, that those would have been in the Palisades. There are many areas of Los Angeles that contain hills with plenty of fuel for a big brush fire. Third, it does appear that the failure to have more firefighters ready to join in the fight hurt the attempts to save property in the Palisades. Fourth it appears that the failure to repair fire department equipment, which the Chief blamed on budget cuts also may have hurt to effort. There is no question that the problems with water exacerbated the ability to fight fires. Again the inability to tap the Santa Ynez reservoir for water really put a crimp in the ability to put water on the fires, but if the reservoir had to be drained for necessary repair, it makes more sense it was taken off line in January than during the traditional fire season of August through November. The one lesson learned is that if a reservoir is drained, the Fire Department has to pre position water tenders so as to make sure there can be a continuous supply of water.