California is burning. It will be a long time before we understand the extent of the carnage and how it could have been more effectively contained. Politicians and members of the media who suppress the truth as a way of life are making an urgent case that now is not the time to point fingers. They are wrong. Now is precisely the right time to learn the painful lessons of failed leadership and guard against repeating them. Elected leaders embrace ideologies that drive their policies and governing priorities. Choices have consequences.
California state and local officials are facing the wrath of their constituents as the loss of life and property climbs to unfathomable heights. They are scrambling to deflect blame for their lack of preparedness to effectively battle some of the most horrific wildfires ever seen. Leadership was missing in action, resources unavailable, water reservoirs were empty, and fire hydrants ran dry leaving firefighters to watch helplessly as neighborhoods burned to the ground.
Extreme Liberal Ideology Induced Misery
California is the most heavily regulated state in the country. Extreme liberal views on environmental protection and “social justice” drive much of the regulation. When the ashes settle we are likely to learn that regulations, misplaced priorities, and incompetent leadership played significant roles in making it impossible for first responders to do their jobs.
President-Elect Donald Trump was quick to call out California’s political agenda for contributing to the devastation. When Trump claimed regulations aimed at protecting a small fish called longfin smelt contributed to the unavailability of water to fight the fires, the media, Governor Newsom, and President Biden all blasted him for spreading “misinformation.”
The facts. In August 2024, the US Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that San Francisco Bay-Delta longfin smelt are federally endangered. Smelt were already on the state’s endangered species list.
The Courthouse News Service explained: “The group attributes the fish’s decline to diversion of Central Valley tributary rivers that slash annual freshwater flow into the bay. This overuse of freshwater resources, which are mostly diverted for large-scale agricultural purposes, causes perpetual drought-like conditions for longfin smelt and other native fish in the bay.”
Translated: Diverting the vast amounts of water from the mountains inland for important human purposes such as agriculture (or firefighting) rather than letting it all run into the bay is hurting a species of fish, which requires an influx of freshwater into the sea for survival. What does your gut tell you is the truth about the role this conservation initiative played in making water unavailable for firefighting? My money is on Trump.
The extent of the devastation is also attributed in part to a lack of proper forestry management. Shrubby vegetation grows over most of the lands in LA County (watersheds) that drain into the sea. Periodic burning is necessary to manage the overgrowth. If it is not burned, the dead material piles up and can ignite easily, burn intensely, and spread rapidly. In California, private landowners are required to keep their land cleared but the public land, which in LA County is larger than Rhode Island, hasn’t been managed for decades due to objections from “environmentalists.” This became tinder for the wildfires.
More than a decade ago, California voters approved $2.7 billion for new water storage projects. Those projects were so bogged down in the red tape of the absurdly slow-moving environmental review and planning process that it took 4 years for the California Water Commission to even set the level of funding available for 8 projects. None of them will be operational until between 2027 and 2035.
Late in 2024, the LA Fire Chief wrote to the city Fire Board that budget cuts and cuts in personnel were creating “unprecedented operational challenges” for the Fire Department. The Board forwarded the concerns on to Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council.California has spent more than $500 million on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives. The Center for Organizational Research and Education (CORE) called California’s DEI Initiatives the “next billion-dollar industry – funded on the taxpayer’s dime.”
California has the highest individual income tax rates and the highest sales tax burden in the country.
California has buried its citizens in extreme regulations to achieve a goal of zero carbon emissions by 2035 such as banning plastic drinking straws, banning plastic bags in stores, banning gas powered lawn tools including mowers and leaf blowers, and limiting cars on public streets by authorizing “slow streets”.
California spends about $23 billion a year on services to illegal immigrants that include cash payments, driver’s licenses, in-state tuition and financial aid to universities, health care and housing. While California burns, the state Legislature convened a special session at Governor Newsom’s request and approved $50 million to fight Trump on deporting illegal immigrants.
Heed the Lessons or Pay the Price
California may seem a world away from Wisconsin in many respects but we are not protected from the misery imposed by liberal extremism unless we understand it and eliminate it from our state. The Cato Institute, an organization focused on individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace, ranks California 49th of the 50 states in regulatory freedom, an index of personal and economic freedom. Wisconsin is ranked 9th. Maintaining and improving our position requires heeding the important lessons from the California catastrophe.
Competence matters. Patrick Soon-Siong is a businessman, investor, medical researcher, and transplant surgeon who resides in Los Angeles. He owns the Los Angeles Times. Last week he spoke very publicly and directly about the incompetence of Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass. He stated the obvious…successful leadership in government, as in the private sector, starts with people who understand what it means to get things done. Strategic and tactical competence are essential. Compare what we are seeing in California with Governor DeSantis in Florida when a hurricane hits. He plans, prepositions resources, effectively mobilizes, and communicates clearly and directly with the residents. He leaves no question he is in charge and accountable for his state’s welfare. Newsom and Bass are pretenders, fully exposed, and now the people who elected them are paying a high price.
Social engineering is not the role of the government. Over the past decades, liberal ideologues have abandoned the fundamentals of freedom to dictate a preferred way of living. Individual freedom, personal responsibility and loyalty to the truth have given way to behavioral prescriptions that are imposed as “social justice.” Resources are diverted and individual rights trampled all in the name of fairness. Californians have allowed themselves to be regulated and taxed to such extremes that freedom loving Americans have been leaving for other states by the hundreds of thousands.
The climate change political agenda has become a weapon of liberal extremism. It is used to deflect attention from incompetent leadership and to coerce a politically prescribed correct way to live. Members of the media and liberal politicians have amped up their rhetoric every time there is a natural disaster to warn if we don’t change how we live we won’t be alive at all. Serious debate is blocked by labeling those who do not agree with the political agenda as climate deniers.
To engage in this important debate we must understand and be able to speak to the facts. We live in a dynamic and ever-changing world. Everything, including the climate, is in a constant state of change. For millions of years all living species have responded to changing conditions by moving, adapting, or becoming extinct. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, scientific study “illustrates that global ocean temperatures and glacial ice varied widely over the past 6 million years.” There is no dispute that the climate is ever changing – now and throughout existence.
In the 1970’s scientists began to question whether human activity affects climate change. Over time, consensus developed among some scientists that deliberate changes in human behavior could alter the course of climate change. This is the greatest unprovable theory ever proposed. Like weather forecasting, it is predictive science. Speculative theory has taken on a political life of its own and has now become a weapon for dictating how we must live.
The disagreement we have is not whether the climate is changing. It is what cost and interference with our individual freedom we are willing to tolerate in deference to an unprovable theory. The acceptable balance between enhancing life today with our magnificent and abundant resources and making changes that we hope will contribute to preserving the earth for generations yet to come is a matter of opinion and debate.
We observe first-hand how the debate played out in California. Is the protection of a species of fish an acceptable tradeoff for depriving densely populated areas of the fresh water needed for human purposes? Is the protection of particular plant species an acceptable tradeoff for neglecting forest underbrush and allowing it to become an accelerant for wildfires? The will of the people, not political bureaucrats, must decide.
An Immediate Threat
Freedom loving Wisconsinites do not have the luxury of time. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 1 is extremely high risk. This will be the only opportunity to flip the court to a conservative majority until 2028. The justices who currently comprise the court majority are liberal judicial activists who will not hesitate to legislate from bench in pursuit of the liberal extremist agenda. They rule based on what they believe the law should be rather than strictly adhering to the law as written. They have constrained themselves pending the result of the next election, but their liberal extremism will be fully unleashed for the foreseeable future if they remain in the majority. It is critical that we elect Brad Schimel on April 1 to flip the court majority back to conservative control. Schimel will adhere strictly to the Constitution and the law when ruling on matters that come before the court. We remain hampered by the seriously flawed election system that makes our elections unverifiable and will have to rely once again on massive voter turnout. To underestimate the threat to individual freedom of a liberal majority Supreme Court would be a serious mistake. We see what extreme liberal governance looks like in California. There is no escaping the consequences of our choices.
