“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
It’s been another disastrous week for the Democrats. Between the continuing revelation of the deadly consequences of blue state management that are impossible to miss (yet still being denied) in the sad saga of the California wildfires, the continuing repudiation of DEI in corporate America, the announcement of the end of Facebook’s strict censorship regime, and the news that Donald Trump has a positive favorability rating for the first time in his political career, the Vibe Shift seen at election time is looking more and more like a generational political realignment.
It’s so obvious that even some social scientists are admitting it. Liberal economist and journalist Noah Smith wrote resignedly on X/Twitter this weekend that: “I see a major conservative backlash happening throughout all of American society. If the late 70s/early 80s are a precedent, it’ll last for 7 or 8 years. I have no idea how to stop it, or even if it can be stopped. All I know how to do is rebuild liberalism after it’s over.”
It’s not clear that “liberalism” in its current form ought to be rebuilt at all. But, if so, the main vehicle for it, the Democratic Party, is going to have to stop trying to convince Americans, as the Red Queen did in the quotation from the sequel to Alice in Wonderland at the top of this article, to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Maybe this columnist is going out on a limb, but asking Americans to believe impossible things at all should be stricken from the Democratic playbook. DEI is falling away because Americans have seen how impossible it is to believe that racism in business—even if it’s called “antiracism”—produces a good outcome. Censorship is falling because Americans are seeing how impossible it is to believe that governments will not try to censor truth and not falsehood when it suits them. After all, that’s what we saw happen with Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop. Donald Trump is now being seen positively because the many impossible things claimed about him turned out to be indisputably false.
But nowhere is the problem of impossible things (including DEI and the neo-Hitlerian Donald Trump) being seen so clearly as in the wildfires afflicting Los Angeles.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have been working overtime with their media allies to try to pin the disastrous fires on “climate change” or Donald Trump—who is, it must be repeated, not even President yet—but the evidence keeps coming that the reason these have turned out to be the most destructive wildfires in California history mostly has to do with California governance.
The public learned that Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) is short on firefighters. But they also learned that over one hundred LAFD firefighters had been laid off or fired because of a refusal to receive the Covid shots. While some were brought back in June 2024, much of the money that might have gone toward recruiting went into DEI initiatives. “Firefighting is mostly white and male. A California program aims to change that,” read the headline of a 2023 NPR story about one such use of taxpayer money.
These initiatives were given a face when a DEI-themed video featuring LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson went viral. In the video, Larson explains that it’s wonderful for people in emergencies to be aided by somebody “that looks like you.” Larson then says she is often asked by women whether she is “strong enough to do this” or “carry my husband out of a fire.” Larson’s horrific answer was: “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
In other words, no, she couldn’t carry your husband out of the fire. And it’s his fault, anyway. This is peak DEI thinking. It’s better to recruit for various “identities” than it is for the ability to do the job.
But it gets worse. A leaked memo dated January 6, the day before the fires began to rage, shows that Karen Bass wanted to take another $48.8 million from the LAFD budget. The memo stated that “[t]he only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.” One current 25-year veteran firefighter was quoted by The Daily Mail as saying that the mayor has been trying to do something about the homeless by taking money from budgets of core services: “But we already exhausted our budget. It’s already tapped. That’s why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money. That’s why we’re not testing if hydrants work any more. We’re doing everything we can to save money.”
Add to the staffing problems the difficulty that the Santa Ynez reservoir, which has a 117 million gallon capacity, has been empty and off-line since February 2024. And that there were a great many broken fire hydrants among those that had not been tested. This meant that those fighting the fire in the Palisades ran out of water. The Daily Mail reported that Janisse Quiñones, $750k/year head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), had known about these water supply problems for months.
In fact, as a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, the entire LA water system is years out of date. And yet, “California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.” Despite the fact that “nothing California does to subsidize EVs or punish fossil fuels will have any effect on global temperature,” the WSJ noted, Gavin Newsom’s “budget last year included $2.6 billion for ‘forest and wildfire resilience’—far less than the $14.7 billion provisioned for zero-emission vehicles and its ‘clean energy’ transition.” (And don’t even ask how many billions of dollars Newsom has spent on illegal immigrants!)
Indeed, the WSJ gives credit to a serious critic of Gavin Newsom: Donald Trump. If you want to know why people trust him, take a look at his seven-minute rant about California’s mismanagement of water on the Joe Rogan Show last year, particularly the refusal to save water in order to protect the Delta Smelt. As the WSJ puts it, Trump “has a point. The state never has enough [water] to go around because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack—one of the state’s largest natural reservoirs—gets flushed out to the Pacific Ocean rather than stored for dry years.”
Trump also argued that California’s bureaucrats need to get rid of the excess fuel, dry kindling and brush, that allows these fires to blaze out of control. They need better forest management. He has a point there as well. Yet, on this topic, too, California has surrendered to the environmentalists, who use environmental reviews to stall any work on forests, meaning more and more fuel lies ready when the next wildfire starts.
The governor has made gestures toward safety. Newsom himself started the “California Vegetation Treatment Program, an initiative designed to speed environmental reviews for forest management projects,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. Yet, according to the state’s publicly available data, in 2022, after two years of the program, the number of completed projects was zero. Indeed, the Free Beacon’s examination of the program as of today shows that, “of the 525 approved projects spanning 666,450 acres, only 231 projects spanning just 6,000 acres have been completed.” In Los Angeles County, only two projects spanning 130 acres have been started; neither has been finished.
Is it any wonder why Donald Trump now has a positive favorability rating? He may at times exaggerate, say things in a rude fashion, or garble some of the details. But he doesn’t ask you to believe the impossible.
Americans are tired of being told that DEI produces better results. They’re tired of hearing that you can spend money on everything except public safety and infrastructure. They’re exhausted from the laws that are supposedly designed to save the climate but actually endanger the land, animals, and plants that surround them.
In an influential October article in Tablet titled “The Democrats’ Insanity Defense,” Park MacDougald noted that the absolute craziness of policies and proposals made by Kamala Harris et al. was itself a potent weapon against Republicans sounding the alarm. In fact, Republican activists had to tone down what they revealed to focus groups of voters about the Democrats: “Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense?”
The November election was a sign that the craziness had finally broken through to enough voters for the electorate to say no to Democrats at the national level. Now, we may hope, the tragedy of the California fires will clarify the disastrous consequences of present policies and governance. Americans are smart enough to realize California is a state that will always be subject to such fires. But they are now more and more aware that bad policy based on impossibilities is a Democratic habit that threatens to burn them in ways literal and figurative.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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