Chickens Coming Home to Roost?
“We’ve lived on the same street for 34 years. I don’t know why we got spared,” Bill Simon confessed to the WSJ’s Jason L. Riley. Bill is the son of William Simon, the investor and philanthropist who served as Treasury secretary under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Bill and his wife are long-time friends of Jason Riley and his wife.
By the time Mr. Riley and Mr. Simon spoke, the Simons had evacuated their home. Mr. Simon noted that about half of the houses on their block had burned to the ground, along with the “Catholic church at the end of the street, the town library, the village theater, and two large grocery stores.”
A House of Cards
According to Mr. Simon, some areas look like Dresden in World War II, or Hiroshima.
Just house after house after house destroyed. The amount of displacement. The amount of suffering.
The National Weather Service did warn of “extreme fire risk” and “life-threatening” winds before the blazes began, and Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for investigations.
Mayor Karen Bass and Fire Chief Kristin Crowley are deflecting and pointing fingers. Investigators haven’t ruled out arson. A former head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Patrick Jordan, wrote on social media Sunday that “50% of the fires in Los Angeles are homeless related.” According to federal data, more than one-fifth of all homeless people in the country live in Los Angeles County.
There are two schools of thought on what is playing out in California right now:
- This was really unusual, and nobody could have foreseen it.
- You can’t have a whole reservoir that is completely dry in a highly populated area with a long history of fires. There’s a public-policy failure somewhere here. There’s a direct connection between the negligence at the governmental level—state, local, whatever—and a lot of human suffering.”
The bigger problem, writes Mr. Riley, might be the insularity of the state’s political establishment, a condition certainly not unique to the Golden State.
Governor Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass are liberal Democrats, as are most of the lawmakers in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in California since 2006.
Democrats also dominate New York and Illinois, where progressive overreach has manifested itself in everything from decriminalized shoplifting to sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. ‘
Lack of serious political opposition has emboldened the left to take foolish risks without fear of paying a price. “You look at the folks who are in charge of public policy, all of whom are of one political party,” Mr. Simon said.
“Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost.”