California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has never seen a camera he didn’t hog or a bottle of hair gel he didn’t like, bears a rather suspicious physical resemblance to a superhero movie villain.
Increasingly, he plays the part.
The braggart of Sacramento has been on a veritable tear ever since historically horrible wildfires, which have thus far claimed the lives of at least 27, began to burn through Los Angeles last week.
Newsom, who harbors the most thinly veiled presidential ambitions imaginable, is a political animal—it’s what he does best. So slick Gavin went on the popular Obama bro podcast, ‘Pod Save America,’ on Saturday to launch a preemptive P.R. strike against his critics.
He was promptly excoriated for passing the buck onto beleaguered local leaders. ‘I want to get the answers,’ Newsom said to former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau. ‘And I’ll be candid with you, I wasn’t getting straight answers.’
As always in Gavin’s mind, he is blameless. It’s everyone else’s fault, don’t you see?
But surely, his heedless lack of priorities and negligence when it came to fire safety cannot be ignored.
After Donald Trump’s landslide electoral victory, Newsom got to work furiously ‘Trump-proofing’ the state of California.
He called a special legislative session in Sacramento, bringing in legislators, lawyers, and activists to shield his state from the incoming administration’s supposedly imminent federal meddling. And much of the focus, euphemistically sold to the masses as an attempt to ‘protect California values,’ focused on protecting draconian progressive green-energy policies.
‘The disconnect between what Californians need and what Democrats are focused on is astounding,’ California Assemblyman James Gallagher said following that latest bout of decadent virtue-signaling.
Indeed. Fact is, Newsom and California Democrats should have spent less time ‘Trump-proofing’ and more time fire-proofing.
Just hours after Democrats in Sacramento on Monday vowed to affirmatively resist federal deportation efforts—a legally dubious proposition—Newsom was forced to accept reality and convene a special legislative session to address the raging wildfire crisis in Los Angeles County.
Newsom is now calling for $1 billion in emergency funding, additional monies to expedite school repairs, and $1.5 billion more toward future wildfire prevention and mitigation.
Quite the change in priorities.
California’s fiscal year 2025 budget, which Newsom signed into law last June, cut funding for wildfire and forest resilience by a whopping $101 million. In the city of Los Angeles, feckless Mayor Karen Bass similarly approved a $17.6 million budget cut for the Los Angeles Fire Department in the most recent municipal budget.
Maybe try being less catastrophically stupid next time, fellas?
In 2014, under then Governor-Jerry Brown, Californians voted to borrow $7.5 billion in order to stockpile and conserve more water. But Sacramento never got the message. Newsom, who has reigned since 2019, certainly never listened; the last reservoir built for the notoriously wildfire-prone Los Angeles area was completed back in 1979.
But at least the local fire hydrants have water to put out the fires, right?
Wrong.
There are reports of fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades and other hard-hit areas running dry from a lack of water, rendering firefighters useless.
Apparently, the power cuts triggered by the fires shut off water pumping stations, according to none other than President Joe Biden. The mind reels at this predictable and catastrophic failure of emergency planning.
When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper why fire hydrants ran dry during the worst wildfires in state history, Newsom blamed ‘local folks’ in the Palisades and other ravaged areas.
Way to take responsibility, Gavin!
Making matters even worse, California under Newsom’s ‘leadership’ has resisted the kind of controlled burns that have been standard forestry best practice for generations.
In September, a harrowingly prescient New York Times headline asked, ‘In California, Controlled Fires Can Save Homes. Why Aren’t More Happening?’ Chris Field, a Stanford scientist who has studied controlled burns, told The Gray Lady: ‘The state is struggling to get anywhere close to the targets they have for prescribed fire.’
Yet again, it’s a question of priorities.
Radical greenie activists in the Golden State rejected controlled burns, lobbying against them in the name of ‘climate change.’
Ironically if unsurprisingly, ‘climate change’ is the same one-size-fits-all answer the same zealots now offer up as an explanation of the deadly conflagrations. Like the medieval Europeans who chalked up the bubonic plague to demonic spirits, so too do leftists now blame their pagan forces of choice for the lethal destruction. There is nothing new under the sun, as we know from Ecclesiastes.
Southern California has had many wildfires in its history, and it was always going to have more. That much should be clear. But it’s equally clear that deliberate actions by officials in charge made the situation worse—much, much worse.
Like the superhero villains that he physically resembles, Newsom’s egomania knows no bounds.
Equally boundless is his desperation for the microphones and cameras, as he demonstrated by palling around with Obama bros while his state’s largest city burned.
It’s no shock that a new Daily Mail poll showed nearly half of Californians hold Newsom responsible for the devastation – and now Trump reportedly has designs on turning the Blue state ‘Republican Red’ by the 2028 election.
The sickening irony of it all is that instead of ‘Trump-proofing’ California, Newsom may have handed it to the president-elect on a charred golden platter.