California's Dreamin' Comes to an End

It's all fun and games until a real disaster strikes

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by…focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

The confluence of all of these left-wing policies created a situation that eventually exceeded California’s capacity for resilience in its sociopolitical systems. When this happens, it has real world consequences. Any one of these alone would probably still have been manageable and California could have continued on merrily as a relatively harmless national laughingstock. Combine them and you have a serious problem. Having lesbian grrrrrlboss fire chiefs is only maintainable provided that all of your firefighters are working class chuds with access to fire hydrants that actually work.

As always, demographic-structural theory (DST) impinges upon this whole situation. The incompetence that pervades California’s government is really a classic expression of late collapse phase looting which elites always display right before the end. The state pumping more money into housing illegal aliens (much of which goes into various pockets along the way) than providing basic safety services to its populace is a great illustration of this. Then we couple this with the massive amounts of intersectional patronage that is handed out to various Democrat-voting blocs as a way of buttressing the state elite’s structural power, but which has the concurrent effect of elevating those who are incapable of really fulfilling the duties of their offices over and against the out-of-favour straight white males who would be capable. All of this has fast led California to what can clearly be seen as a local Seneca Point, a point where the relatively slow process of ongoing collapse suddenly crystallises into a point of decision.

This is really a shame, too. California was - and still should be by all rights - the crown jewel of the American collection. It has a mild climate, multivarious ecosystems, abundant natural resources, beautiful wildlands, fertile agriculture, everything you could want. If you watch old shows set in the LA basin like Emergency 51 and Adam-12, you see a time when California was a really groovy place to live, like totally far out. It was the epitome of the American dream.

Yet, this heritage was squandered by being handed over to left-wing whackjobs as a consequence of not controlling immigration back when we still had the chance. Ronald Reagan - the worst “best president” we had in modern times - signed off on the 1986 amnesty and permanently altered the demographics and voter profile of the state (as well as the rest of the country, to greater and lesser degrees). This led directly to the disasters of Gavin Newsome and DEI fire departments that worry about “representation” rather than public safety. It coupled with other oddities (the gays, the power crystal types, etc.) that by themselves would not have been very effective, but when given a large mass of Left-sympathetic clients to vote for them, were thrust into positions where they could do serious, long-term damage. If nothing else, this ought to drive home the point that immigration really is the most important issue we face and that anyone (including boomer-tier classical liberal Amurrikan conservatives) who pushes the “natural conservative hard-wurkin’ immurgrunt” line simply has no idea what they’re talking about.

So how can this problem be resolved?

At this point, and for the good of the nation as a whole, California needs to be reverted back to territorial status. Its government needs to be “reconstructed,” purged of the left-wing elements, and returned to normalcy. California has become home to a rot that invariably spreads outward and infects the rest of the country and this cannot be tolerated in the long run. For the good of the union as a whole, for the sake of reining in the excesses, California must be broken down and rebuilt.

Keep in mind that there is a constitutional basis for this, by the way. Article IV, Section 4 of the federal Constitution tasks the federal government with guaranteeing that every state should have a republican (small-r) form of government. What California currently has is a patronage-driven DEI minority-controlled looter government that actively detriments the safety and welfare of its own citizens while using its courts to overturn every effort by the people to implement their own will. This cannot under any reasonable definition, whether ancient or modern, be called a “republican government.” The whole purpose of this provision in the Constitution was that all members of the American federation - each of the states - would share basic, fundamental characteristics of government that would enable them to co-exist under the same roof more or less in comity. Each one has latitude to “do their own thing” with respect to internal laws, serving as a “laboratory” to test and see what works best. But this variation remains within a theme. A state that essentially becomes a communist kleptocracy buttressed by foreigners strays far beyond what can be reconciled with what the Founders intended.

For the good of the country this must be done, certainly if we don’t want to see a breakup of the American polity within the next couple of decades. From a stability standpoint, California’s errors are far more egregious than slavery was in the old South. At least the plantation owners of yore didn’t allow preventable natural disasters to burn down their major cities because they were too busy grifting to provide for basic safety measures. At any rate, it’s time for the real Right to get serious about the measures needed to stop the insanity.