The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: California's Catastrophic Wildfires Are ‘A DEI, Green New Deal Disaster’

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

In this edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Hanson, author of “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation,” provides an analysis of California's wildfire management and policy failures under Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Hanson discusses the mismanagement of resources, lack of effective forest management, and prioritization of diversity and inclusion over merit in firefighting efforts. He labels the situation as a “systems breakdown” and warns of the larger implications for California's future. The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: https://www.dailysignal.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk. Business. So I would characterize it as a DEI Green New Deal, Hyvigin Bomb. It's something out of Dante's inferno. When you look at the people in charge, Gavin Newsom flew in to sort of do these performance aren't stunts. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal. I'm here in California. I've been a lifelong resident in the state, fifth generation to live in the same house.

I had a house in the Sierra, it would almost burn down three years ago during the Aspen fire, and I'm speaking on the evening when you've all heard about the disastrous fire in Los Angeles. As I'm speaking on a Wednesday night, there's been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody's talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change. I mean everybody that people in power, but it was preventable. And once it started this fire, it could have been assuage.

You could have had it lessened that the severity didn't have to be as catastrophic. So I would characterize it as a DEI Green New Deal, Hyvage and Bomb. It's something out of Dante's Inferno. And what I mean by that is it's a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, Gavin Newsom flew in to sort of do these performance aren't stunts. But he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea rather than into the aqueduct. So Los Angeles didn't have sufficient amounts of water. He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River.

They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up. California's fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I'm speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. He's dismantled it. We don't clean the forest.

We don't let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It's sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned. It's almost as we don't like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem. Second breakdown was the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Africa. You tell me why the mayor of the third largest city in the United States at fire season when she had been warned and warned for days on end that the Santa Ana winds were up to 100 miles an hour in the evening, and there was a danger of fire. And she goes off to

Africa for the inauguration of the president of Ghana. With all due respect, Mayor Obama, who cares? You have an obligation to the six million people of greater Los Angeles. And then we have the fire chief. I don't really care that she's LGBTQ. I don't care any of that. All I do care is her emphases. She's been bragging for the last two years that her goal was to make sure it was diverse and inclusive.

That can be good if it's competent. But when you announce that 70% of your hiring will not be meritocratic, but will be based on diversity, equity, inclusion, then you're not putting the interest of your constituents first. There wasn't enough water pressure in Pacific Palisides. Pacific Palisides is not where I live. It's one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the United States.

If they don't have water, then no one's going to get water. Believe me, there's not enough insurance. There were famous actors that didn't have insurance. Why? Because this industry is over-regulated. It's fraught with people who make fraudulent claims, and the insurance industry knows that California is hostile to it, but more importantly, that it will never clean up its forest

or take preventive, time-tried, ancient protocols to lessen the dangers of fire. And so put it all together, whether it's a deliberate policy to not store water, not preserve water. Last year was one of the wettest years that we've had. We've had three out of the last four years that have been very wet. We had a huge snowpack. We had rivers that were running in 19th century fashion,

but out to the sea to save the delta smell. So it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, and forest management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy, you put it all together, and it's something like a DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. Gavin Newsom was fiddling. He's almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable, this system's breakdown. And to finish, what we're seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th century pastoral condition.

They are de-civilizing the state and de-industrializing the state and de-farming the state, but they're not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19-7. century when you had no protection from fire. You didn't have enough water in California. You didn't have enough power. You didn't pump oil. So we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property. And we're doing it in almost a purely neolithic fashion. And Karen Bass should resign. She came to the airport back from Africa. She had nothing to say. She was confronted at the airport. Why were you in Africa? Why did you cut the fire department?

They cut the fire department by almost $18 million. They gave fire protective equipment to Ukraine's first respondent. And she had nothing to say it. She had nothing to say because she couldn't say anything. I don't want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad. And if this continues, and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a third world country if we're not in parts already. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Please subscribe to the Daily Signal for our next episode.