Los Angeles Burns - They Did It, They Really Did It

At the end of the original Planet of the Apes film, there is an iconic scene when Charlton Heston discovers a piece of the Statue of Liberty and is finally forced to confront the awful truth. He is home, and the madmen who “ruled” have finally done the unthinkable: They have destroyed everything.

It was until very recently a powerful moment, yet purely the realm of science fiction. No more. All around us, we see what the madmen of the Democratic Party have done to this nation in a remarkably short period of time. Consider Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is burning to the ground. There are at least five separate wildfires. None of them are under control. On the contrary, they are expanding every moment. Roughly 300,000 people have been ordered to leave their homes and effectively run for their lives. Already estimates are that damages exceed $57 billion. The Los Angeles County Sheriff says he has no idea how many people have died.

This is not happening in some remote area on the periphery of the city. This is happening in Malibu. This is happening in Hollywood.

Fire hydrants are running dry. Water storage tanks linked to the fire hydrants have been drained. L.A. city officials blame “tremendous demand”. Years of neglect of critical infrastructure are coming home to roost.

“The hydrants are down,” said one firefighter in internal radio communications. “Water supply just dropped,” said another.

Rick Caruso a developer in the city blasted the city for its inability to fulfill basic services.

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen.”

L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park also criticized the city for its lack of preparedness.

“The chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full display over the last 24 hours,” Park said. “I am extremely concerned about this. I’m already working with my team to take a closer look at this, and I think we’ve got more questions than answers at this point.”

Incredibly the Los Angeles County Fire Department shipped “surplus” equipment to Ukraine in 2022. It is now caught without the capacity to respond to the fires destroying the city. The Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation a private entity is desperately trying to raise money to provide firefighters fighting the blazes with basic equipment like coats, helmets, and medical equipment.

In her latest budget radical Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was off on a junket to Africa when the fires erupted, cut over $17 million from the Fire Department budget. She wanted to cut $23 million. The city has faced firefighter shortages for years.

The city could not find funds to maintain basic fire services. It did find the cash to create an entirely new Equity and Human Resources Bureau in the Fire Department. The mission of that office is to root out the male “racists” and “sexists” who have been oppressing everyone at the department all these years and to double the number of female firefighters. Four pages of the Fire Department’s 2023-26 strategic plan are devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The city also found funds to dedicate to housing the homeless, most of whom are illegal aliens. In its last budget, Los Angeles spent $1.3 billion on housing the homeless.

There was no ambiguity about what the impact of the cut to the Fire Department’s budget would be. Only weeks before the city burst into flame, Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned that Mayor Karen Bass’s (D.) budget cuts to her department "severely limited" its response to wide-scale emergencies—including wildfires.

In a memo dated December 4, 2024, Crowley wrote that Bass’s cuts "severely limited the department’s ability to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events."

"These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations," such as training and fire prevention, Crowley wrote". Specialized programs and resources, such as Air Operations, Tactical EMS Units, Disaster Response, and Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), which rely heavily on [overtime], are now at risk of reduced effectiveness."

The money was not restored. The city did find $5 million to buy some new electric fire vehicles. The Fire Department’s strategic plan also calls for spending on the following “sustainability” measures: “reduce electricity usage at all facilities” by implementing eco-friendly upgrades to lighting, power, and HVAC control systems; “install … solar energy parking shade structures”; “implement technology to monitor the Department’s net carbon emissions”; “purchase electric vehicles (EV) … to create a zero-emissions fleet”; “establish an EV emergency backup power system”; and “increase purchasing of certified energy-efficient products.”

One of the most basic functions of municipal governments has always been firefighting. Anytime people crowd together in urban areas the threat of fire is present. The ideologues who run Los Angeles and California more broadly no longer perform these kinds of basic functions. They are far too busy fighting climate change, destroying the patriarchy, erasing our borders, and waging war on the fundamental building block of our society, the family.

They are revolutionaries. They are on the right side of history. The ends justify the means and a little chaos and destruction is a small price to pay to usher in the new utopian paradise. “Burn it down” has been a common refrain at radical leftist rallies across the country for years.

Well, they did it. They really did it.