The Real Reason L.A. Is Burning — And It’s Not Climate Change

Normally when a politician becomes the mayor of a major city, it’s because they’ve supposedly spent their career working in the city and advancing its interests. Eric Adams became the mayor of New York after working in local law enforcement for more than 20 years. So did the mayor of Fresno, a man named Jerry Dyer. Meanwhile, the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, helped ensure that the Bay Area would be the home of Super Bowl 50 a few years back.

That’s not to say that these are necessarily good politicians. But if you look through their careers, at the very least, you’ll find that they clearly had an interest in the city that they would later represent as mayor.

But the current mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is an exception. If you look at what Karen Bass has been talking about for the past decade, you’ll find that, by her own admission, she was never particularly interested in California. Instead, again and again, she’s talked about advancing the interests of Africa. Here’s just a small selection of her appearances on African media. Watch:

Again, this is an allegedly American politician, who supposedly represents Americans. But in reality, she’s doing the Ilhan Omar routine, where she constantly promises to use America’s resources to help people who aren’t American.

So, it was fitting that, as an unprecedented, massive wildfire broke out in Los Angeles this week, Bass was again in Africa, attending the inauguration of Ghana’s new president. Why is the mayor of an American city taking time off of work to attend the inauguration of a third world leader 7,000 miles away? Well, that’s a good question.

This was not simply “bad timing,” as you may have seen it portrayed in the media. It was more like an inevitability. Democrats like Bass spend so much time representing their real constituents — foreigners — that they’re rarely in town when a disaster materializes back at home.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

Democrats are able to get away with this betrayal because, for the most part, the media lets them do it. So it must have come as a great shock to Karen when, after she landed at LAX, she was immediately confronted by a reporter who grilled her about her many failures.

This reporter, David Blevins, is the “Senior Ireland Correspondent” at Sky News. Here’s how the conversation went:

Total flying time from Ghana to Los Angeles is something like 18 hours. And that whole time, Bass apparently didn’t prepare any kind of response to these questions — all of which were highly predictable. She didn’t think about why she had slashed the fire department budget by $18 million just a few months ago. She didn’t have any message for the thousands of displaced families that she supposedly represents.

Instead, Karen Bass kept quiet until her staffers handed her some talking points to read. And then once she had those talking points, she promptly humiliated herself once again. Watch:

It would be impossible to script a more on-the-nose satire of Democrats’ priorities (and total incompetence) than what Karen Bass just pulled off. She abandons her constituents during a massive fire in order to pander to Africans, and then she transforms into Ron Burgundy when she belatedly returns. In case you didn’t catch it, she read the URL as, literally, “url.”

By Bass’ own admission, she needs to be removed from office immediately. And we know Bass agrees with that, because she wrote this post on social media when Ted Cruz infamously went on vacation during a disaster in Texas: “Ted Cruz fleeing Texas in the middle of a deadly crisis is part of a larger pattern of the GOP abandoning folks in crisis. We need to build a movement to kick them all out.”

Politicians like Bass are why climate change is such a common talking point on the Left. It’s their “Get out of jail free card” when their incompetence becomes extremely obvious. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, just put out a tweet claiming that the wildfires prove that climate change is “real.” 

There are a few major problems with that claim. The first one is that no one — even the alleged “scientific experts” — thinks it’s true. Michael Shellenberger just spoke to Jon Keeley, a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey who’s been studying fires like this for decades. Keeley stated: 

“I don’t think these fires are the result of climate change. You certainly could get these events without climate change.”

Of course you could. The thing driving the fires is wind. Wind is not a product of climate change. We’ve always had wind, for as long as we’ve had Earth itself. As for the origin of the fires themselves, that’s a different question.

An important question to ask, especially since we were promised — just a few years ago — that electing Joe Biden would effectively end wildfires in this country. Biden said it himself, after the last big wildfire he pretended to care about. Watch:

It took less than four years for this particular “climate change” prediction to blow up in their faces. We’ve gone from “Biden will end wildfires forever” to “Biden will use wildfires as an opportunity to make personal announcements about his family.”

Here he was yesterday:

It’s very similar to what Joe Biden did after the Maui fires, which he also used as an occasion to talk about his personal life. Meanwhile the rest of us — people who aren’t elected Democrats — are left wondering exactly what went wrong here, and how to fix it.

Yesterday, officials offered one possible explanation for why these fires are now wildly out of control. They stated that there’s a shortage of firefighters in Los Angeles. Watch:

Q: Were you prepared, do you have resources?
"No," county was "not prepared for this type of widespread disaster," says Chief Marrone. "We're doing the very best we can. But no, we don't have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all of the departments to handle this." pic.twitter.com/r3xml5pBdv

— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) January 8, 2025

Why might there be a shortage of firefighters? It turns out, that’s not a great mystery either. Just a few years ago, Los Angeles officials celebrated the suspension and termination of more than 100 firefighters because they wouldn’t take the COVID shot. Watch:

A few months after terminating all of these firefighters for not taking the COVID shot, a new chief took over at the Los Angeles Fire Department. And this new chief doubled down on DEI hiring. She went out of her way to “diversify” the ranks of the LAFD, meaning she wanted to hire fewer white men, and more lesbians like herself. Watch:

Los Angeles recently appointed its very 1st female, LGBTQ+ fire chief with the goal of recruiting more women & gay firefighters pic.twitter.com/h8vfAYkbiV

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2025

So this is the fire chief’s top priority. And she got to work immediately, creating a DEI Bureau within just one year. Watch:

They’re “doing the work” at the Los Angeles Fire Department, whatever that means. To be fair to this fire chief, a month ago, she did send a letter to the mayor, explaining that her department would struggle to respond to wildfires because of the funding cuts. Here’s what that letter looked like:

L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned Mayor Karen Bass (D) last month the $17+ million she cut from the department's budget "severely limited the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires" pic.twitter.com/tgzIAeHIsQ

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 9, 2025

The fire chief states that Bass’ budget cuts had, quote, “Severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”

What’s particularly strange about these budget cuts (and the fire department’s focus on DEI) is that it’s been widely known for years that a massive, devastating wildfire was potentially imminent in Los Angeles. Insurance companies have known that, which is why they tried to raise rates on disaster coverage for homeowners in recent years.

But instead of responding to the risk, Democrats in California banned the insurance companies from raising rates, and then they fired the firefighters for not taking the COVID shot. So the insurance companies dropped thousands of California residents from coverage. Meanwhile, California’s leaders also took down a massive dam, just to ensure that emergency personnel would have as little available water as possible in the event of a fire. Watch:

Biden and Gavin Newsom recently did the largest water dam removal in U.S. history because tribal leaders said to save fish pic.twitter.com/QfGlviRNYE

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2025

So they redirect rainwater to the ocean and shut down the dams to save the fish and appease the “tribal elders.” And now they’re apparently out of water to fight these fires. Firefighters are using traffic cones to scoop water now, as you can see here:

LAFD firefighter scoops water with a traffic cone. Fire hydrants are out of water… in a coastal area. pic.twitter.com/FvYCidSXCl

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 9, 2025

These are images that are going to be remembered many years from now. As the mayor of Los Angeles hangs out in Ghana, and the Fire Department leadership pushes DEI hiring, and the politicians empty the reservoirs and remove the dams, and the brush remains uncleared, the rank-and-file firefighters are reduced to scooping water into traffic cones.

This is what Donald Trump warned about just a few months ago on Joe Rogan’s podcast. In fact, he’s been warning about it for years. And now it’s happened.

In case it’s not clear, it’s necessary to scoop water into traffic cones because no water is coming out of the fire hydrants. The businessman Rick Caruso called into local news to make that observation. Watch:

This is obviously an extremely damaging piece of information for local officials. That’s presumably why an anchor at the local Fox affiliate tried to fact-check Rick Caruso, and imply he was wrong about this. And then he was immediately fact-checked by a Fox reporter on the ground, who confirmed that indeed, the firefighters are out of water:

In an attempt to debunk Rick Caruso, LA morning anchor Melvin Robert is embarrassingly fact-checked by their own on-the-ground reporter: pic.twitter.com/lCvfMEnXxJ

— MarioFakerREAL ???? (@mario_faker) January 8, 2025

This is one of the most basic factual issues of this entire disaster, and the local media obviously has no idea what’s going on. Neither do the people who are supposedly running the state. Yesterday evening, CNN asked Gavin Newsom about why there was no water coming out of the fire hydrants. And he had no answer to that question:

Shortly after that interview was shot, another fire began in the Hollywood Hills. Arson obviously seems like a strong possibility to explain it, because California is a lawless state when no one — even arsonists — are prosecuted. Additionally, late last night, someone shot footage of what appear to be arson attacks taking place in the city. This is from Santa Monica. Watch:

People are lighting fires in otherwise non-burning urban areas of LA. Saw this happen first hand at 302 Pico in Santa Monica. Called it in & fire dept & police responded. Stay safe and call in any activity ASAP. We don’t need more flames out here. pic.twitter.com/AZ4GLr6N3q

— Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) January 9, 2025

Based on that footage, and the sheer number of separate fires, it seems more likely than not that we’re dealing with a series of arson attacks here. But at the moment, we don’t know for sure. What we do know, as this catastrophe continues to unfold in Los Angeles, is that no one is buying the “climate change” narrative anymore. The people running the state of California are simply too incompetent and too incoherent to pull it off.

Yes, it’s too late for the people living in the many destroyed areas of Los Angeles, which are becoming more numerous by the hour. But the rest of the country now understands exactly where climate change derangement leads. Along with DEI and the rest of the “equity agenda,” it leads to destruction and blame-shifting and ultimately, total disaster. And as entire enclaves in Left-wing cities burn to the ground, the reality is now simply too obvious — even for the most committed members of the climate cult — to ignore any longer.

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