by Kurt Schlichter
After a fire that never should have happened burned thousands of houses to the ground in a liberal enclave of Los Angeles through a combination of Democrat incompetence and more Democrat incompetence, you might ask yourself whether the deep blue people of Los Angeles are ever going to come to their senses and start electing people who aren’t a bunch of communist morons more concerned with Ghana junkets and lesbian representation at the fire department then with actually doing their jobs. Don’t bother asking. The answer is “No.” They’re never going to change. They can’t change. They’re going to keep on electing the same brand of Democrat mediocrities who got them into this mess, but they do have a plan. They’re going to blame the weather, insurance companies that don’t want to lose money, Donald Trump, and anything but themselves for the chaos they voted for.
If California’s Democrats didn’t have their incompetence, they wouldn’t have any kind of competence at all.
People ask me if California has finally hit bottom, but there’s a problem with that premise. The problem is that it assumes that there is a bottom and that hitting the bottom would result in some sort of directional change in the downward trajectory of what was once the greatest state in the Union. But there is no bottom, not for them. You need to understand that. These Democrats are not concerned with governing, so their complete inability to do it is utterly irrelevant to the analysis. Being competent and governing wisely was never the objective. Instead, the elite is concerned with power, and the leftists who vote for them – whose houses are now all burned down – are only concerned with the failures of government when it comes and bites them on the fourth point of contact.
Now, you need to understand that experiencing the true fallout of government incompetence is not something that the kind of people who live in Pacific Palisades often experience. Instead, they are usually insulated from the consequences of their choices. Do you think bums, losers, and scumbags wander around in Pacific Palisades like they do in the rest of LA? Oh no. The LAPD has instructions to actually enforce the law in rich neighborhoods like the Palisades. They are disconnected from the utter chaos of the social pathology that the rest of the city experiences. They rarely have to face it, so they don’t really care about it. But now the fires have come, and you think they might care about it, but they won’t care about it for long. They’ll get over it. They’re going to cry and complain a little bit about Governor Hairstyle and Mayor Dumb Bass, and then on Election Day, they’re going to look at their ballots, and they’re going to mark somebody with a D.
It’s not that they can’t learn. They’re not stupid in the sense that they don’t understand that the people they’re voting for are blithering idiots. It’s that human nature prevents them from accepting the fact that they’ve been wrong so that they can change. They are emotionally invested in the liberal project that they grew up in, and to vote against it now would require introspection and an admission that everything they believed in was baloney. Most of them can’t do that. Most of them won’t do that. And nothing’s going to change.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I’ve lived here 50-odd years, and I know the score. I got here when California was the Golden State, and now it’s the Charred Black State. It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving. That’s OK with the Democrats because it was the middle class that made California a Republican state for so long. They were the ones who demanded good government. Most of them are now in Texas or Idaho.
That leaves a bunch of really poor people and a few really rich ones. The poor people vote Democrat because the Dems feed them scraps, and the rich people vote Democrat because it makes them feel that they’re not the complete scumbags that, in many cases, they are. Have you noticed how it’s always the worst people who seem to be the most vocally liberal? Paging Harvey Weinstein – he probably worked with half the people whose houses burned down, and he probably tried to score with the other half.
The thing you must understand about the rich Californians who vote for Democrats – and not only vote for them but actively campaign for them and donate to them – is that this kind of leftism isn’t just a belief system. It’s their religion. Well, more accurately, it’s a substitute for religion. There’s an empty space inside every human being that normal people fill up with things like faith, family, and patriotism. The rich blue voters of California fill it up with commie gobbledygook. They add some wokeness, a dash of climate change, and a heaping helping of smug self-satisfaction. The resulting dog’s breakfast is what passes for their souls.
So, to ask them to look at the reality in front of them, that the people that they’ve diligently insured were running the city were never actually running the city, is to ask them to do a 180° turn away from the liberalism that has been their core identity all their lives. A few can. Have you noticed that a significant number of us conservatives are former leftists, but few leftists are former conservatives except the Never Trumpers who get paid to be? The most you get are people who grew up in Middle America, came to LA, and decided to crap all over where they came from for social cachet. They weren’t really conservative. They were just teenagers mad because their parents wouldn’t let them be trashy back in their small towns.
In any case, it’s very hard to ask somebody to admit they were wrong about everything they ever believed. It’s much easier to blame someone else. See, it’s not the total ineptitude of the California Democrats who run everything that is the problem. The problem is Donald Trump pointing it out and not being nice when he does it. It’s childish, and it’s stupid, and they don’t believe it, but it’s human nature. It’s much easier to blame someone else instead of looking at yourself in the mirror and realizing that you were looking at the cause of your own misfortune. And the cause of California’s misfortune is Californians.
Governor Nuisance prefers to blame it all on Global Warming/Climate Change the same way they used to blame Witches for Bad Weather and they want all Skeptics burned at the stake
Democrats run for office to get into a high-paying position where they can do nothing, sit back and just draw their wages. If something needs to be done, they’ll just use taxpayer funds to hire their friends… who will sit back, do nothing and just draw their wages. When the bottom falls out, they blame their political opponents or some cultish belief system like “climate change”.
People just keep gobbling it up, over and over. I guess we’ll see if total devastation is enough to change a substantial number of minds.
Palisades reservoir empty no maintenence scheduled.
millions of dollars worth of fire trucks in boneyard due to needed maintenence
“Excess” equipment sent to Ukraine
Uninspected non operational hydrants, many stolen and sold for scrap, pretty rainbow scrap
DEI hires replacing experienced fire fighters
More taxpayer dollars would not have helped the fire dept budget, using the money in a non democrat way would have done it.
They destroy everything they touch.
California today is the perfect example of the Democrat party. While all their Democrat policies have culminated to bring them to the point of entire communities burning to the ground, they spend money and energy to prevent anyone coming in with better ideas to save them. I just wish people would take some notice.
When Spanish explorers first saw southern California they asked the Indian tribe that lived there what it was called.
“Valley of Smoke,” was the answer.
The Los Angeles basin has been a fire threat for eons.
It takes constant brush clearing, dead tree clearing, fire break making to even keep the inevitable fires from spreading like they did this time.
One of the biggest myths that so-called greenie environmentalists keep touting is that wilderness must be “kept pristine.”
The land needs to be groomed.
The massive destructiveness of this fire puts the lie to that myth.
Well put. I’m one of those former leftists turned right wing small government monarchist. I was once a Bernie Bro who couldn’t vote for Hillary or Trump but eventually my eyes were opened fully to the scam that is socialism/communism and Trump grew on me so that I actually became a fan and voted for him in 2020 and 2024. I’m hoping now that he’ll be in office again he’ll do a better job this time around with respect to personnel but still kick ass with respect to peace, border security and the economy.