California Shows You What Happens Long-Term When Liberals Ignore Reality

As this column is being written, California is still burning – and not just in the woods either.

Los Angeles is on fire:

As terrible as this fire is, it’s not some sort of unpredictable, “black swan” event.

Anything but.

California typically has millions of acres burn every decade and 4 of the 5 worst fires in the state’s history before this one happened since 2018.

So, why is this one so bad?

There are lots of things we could point out that SOME PEOPLE might chalk up to mere partisanship, although they’re really not.

For example, the LAFD launched a DEI bureau in 2022:

In 2022, LA sent “surplus” firefighting gear (that they could undoubtedly use today) to Ukraine:

LA’s mayor also cut 17.6 million from their firefighting budget (which incidentally, was roughly 65% of their homeless budget to start with – how’s that for priorities?):

However, what I find particularly noteworthy is that Donald Trump has been beating the drum about what a terrible job California is doing in preparing for fires for quite a while now. Here’s a tweet from 2018:

Here’s more from 2019:

When Trump did his now famous interview with Joe Rogan during the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump also talked about this issue:

Trump even threatened to cut off federal aid to California for fighting fires both in 2019 and 2024 if California didn’t release more water, in part to fight these fires:

“We’re tired of giving California hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars all the time for their forest fires when you wouldn’t have them if they manage their forests properly,” he said. “So California, get on the ball because we’re not going to hand you any more money; it’s ridiculous.”

Of course, the pushback to all of this from the Left has been the same old, same old. Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Experts” say Trump is wrong! How dare he threaten such a thing, etc., etc.

Except everything that’s happening today in California proves that Donald Trump was 100% right about this and has been for a long time.

Incidentally, Donald Trump didn’t get this right because he’s some kind of super genius with the ability to see things no one else could. The fact that California is fire-prone because they do a terrible job of managing their forests and their water supply has not been a secret.

It’s worth noting that the point of all this isn’t to pick on the people of California, who are suffering terribly right now because of the incompetence of the people who run their state, but to note that this kind of problem is becoming very common in the United States.

We have the federal and state governments all over the country doing things that are very obviously a bad idea. Things that will clearly lead to terrible consequences. You don’t need a fortune teller, advanced AI, or Einstein to see the problems with these policies. Even children should be able to predict how this is going to turn out.

There are lots of examples, but let’s just discuss a few of them.

New York City habitually refuses to jail career criminals with staggering numbers of arrests for anything more than short stints. How’s that working out for them?

People have been pointing out that California’s attempt to build high-speed rail has been a disaster for over a decade now, yet they’re still wasting almost unfathomable amounts of money on it even though it no longer makes any sense at all:

People have been warning that our nation’s deficit spending is out of hand for so long that most Americans have tuned them out, but look at what’s happening right now:

Incidentally, as that debt has to be refinanced at higher rates, that number is going to dramatically escalate. How long do you think people will keep buying our debt once they’ve correctly concluded we intend to inflate our dollar so much that the money will be practically worthless when we pay it back?

We can go on and on with these examples.

The school system in Chicago is doing such a bad job it’s essentially churning out illiterates. Leaving the borders so open allows illegals to come here by the millions as well as terrorists, criminals, and foreign agents to cross at will. Everywhere DEI is implemented reduces the quality of the workforce. Bringing in so many immigrants based on family ties instead of merit reduces the quality of immigrants we have here. Refusing to take some of the most basic precautions to ensure an honest vote could lead to a constitutional crisis. Having a multicultural nation where people are incessantly encouraged to nurse racial grievances will eventually lead to horrible strife. City and state governments going deeply into debt and giving workers pension plans they have no way to pay for down the road will obviously lead to bankruptcies. Soros prosecutors refusing to prosecute many criminals leads to spikes in crime. Encouraging kids, who are famous for their lack of judgment, to permanently chemically and surgically transform their bodies to pretend to be the other gender is guaranteed to lead to lots of suicides. Allowing men pretending to be women to share intimate spaces with women will lead to problems at best and sexual assault at worst.

Again, we could go on and on with these examples, and here’s the thing – none of them should really be ideological issues. You shouldn’t need to be a diehard Libertarian to figure out there’s a huge price to be paid if a country continually spends money it doesn’t have or a law-and-order conservative to know that letting criminals run wild leads to more crime. Ideology shouldn’t blind people to the most basic tenets of reality.

We’re reaching a point in our society where so many people are doing things that are so evidently a terrible idea that it almost feels nihilistic, like someone playing Russian roulette for the hell of it. Government officials all across our country are reaching the sort of levels of stupidity you’d expect from some white trash hillbilly that destroyed his brain by sniffing paint thinner for a decade and they STILL GET VOTED BACK INTO OFFICE.

The economic, cultural, and military successes of previous generations of Americans have allowed us to do very well as a nation despite making an enormous number of mistakes, but if we keep slamming our heads into walls everyone should have seen 1,000 yards away, not even a country with as many advantages as America will be able to continue to stay on top.

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