We owe to the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus the immortal image of the Emperor Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned.
In actual fact, according to Tacitus, Nero didn’t play the fiddle as flames engulfed the city. He “mounted his domestic stage and sung of the extirpation of Troy, assimilating present calamities to olden disasters,” Tacitus says.
If an instrument he played, it was probably a lyre or cithara—something like a small harp, rather than a fiddle, which was a later invention. Tacitus was also careful to note that Nero’s impromptu musical performance, while certainly in keeping with the rest of his despotic, debauched reign, was only a rumor and not an established fact.
Fiddle or no, I couldn’t help but think of Nero when I read—and wrote—the news today that California Governor Gavin Newsom had decided, in the midst of one of the worst natural disasters in American history, in his own state, to set up a special website to combat “misinformation” about his role in the calamity.
Shouldn’t putting out the fires be the first priority—protecting lives and property—not the governor’s reputation?
Apparently not.
“A lot of misinformation out there,” Newsom Tweeted on Saturday, as he announced the launch of californiafirefacts.com. Newsom wanted to be sure the general public knew he hadn’t cut the state firefighting budget, and actually he’d doubled the number of firefighters, “built the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet” and increased forest management “tenfold” during his tenure.
So there: now you know.
Newsom has been hard-pressed after a series of revelations about his role in signing-off massive cuts to firefighting programs in California. Newsweek reported a few days ago how Newsom approved cuts of over $100 million to seven state-level “firefighting and resilience” programs last year, back in June. The cuts included $28 million from state conservancies that increase resilience to wildfires; $12 million from a project to protect homes from fires; $8 million from wildlife monitoring and research; $4 million from a forestry project that shows homeowners how to manage their land and protect against fires; and $5 million from vegetation-management programs.
It’s not just Newsom, though: it’s pretty much everyone who’s anyone and involved with disaster provision at a high level in California. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was on official business in Ghana for some inexplicable reason on Tuesday night, was trying to close 16 fire stations the week before the conflagration broke out. Nearly 120,000 people have now signed a petition for her to resign, but like so many politicians today she clearly lacks the basic humanity—the shame—to do so.
It’s also been said the city’s water chief Janisse Quiñones was well aware the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty and disconnected, denying the city millions of gallons of water, and that large numbers of hydrants in the city were broken. The reservoir was scheduled for maintenance, apparently.
Estimates now suggest that the fires could cost well upwards of $150 billion, or around 4% of the state’s entire GDP. Those costs are only likely to climb. On Sunday, the Palisades fire had spread to 23,000 acres with only 11% containment. The Easton fire had spread to 14,000 acres, with 27% containment. Only the far smaller Hurst fire, covering around 800 acres, had almost fully been contained, at 89%.
What’s clear, I think, to anyone with eyes to see, is that, however the Los Angeles fires began, they’ve been exacerbated to a considerable degree by official incompetence and mismanagement. Incompetence and mismanagement that stretch back months and even years, maybe decades.
The devastation and the loss of life would not be anywhere near so great—futile though it may be to speculate—had the reservoirs been full and the hydrants working and the brush cleared and all the fire stations open and fully staffed with competent men called Dave and Steve instead of sassy, hamburger-faced butch dykes with pronouns in their Zoom bios.
It’s a familiar and depressing pattern, one that we see in states and cities across America. It’s a function of leftist government and its insane priorities, of course: the states and cities are almost always blue. Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York welcome hordes of Turd World migrants, as many as will come, and who suffers but the natives? The migrants get put up in hotels at vast expense, and huge amounts of money, hundreds of millions even billions of dollars, must be diverted from other sources, like policing and firefighting, to compensate.
Open-border policies are just the start. It’s also DEI and environmentalism—Quixotic causes like the plight of the delta smelt, a tiny fish nobody can even be sure exists, which prevents effective water management in northern California.
But part of me thinks there’s something more to it than that: that the coincidences and regularities we see in these bungling responses point to a deeper utility beneath the surface-level incompetence and stupidity.
The political commentator Sam Francis described the dominant mode of governance today as “anarcho-tyranny,” in which chaos is carefully fostered by the authorities, and certain kinds of lawlessness above all, to maintain tighter control over the nation’s tax base. Francis was concerned particularly with law enforcement, and how petty and violent crime are allowed to flourish, even as the law is harshly enforced against the taxpaying middle classes for things like tax violations and affronts to the new civic religion of political correctness. Average Joe taxpayer is literally “scared straight”: hemmed in on one side by cutthroats on the street, and on the other by cutthroats in cheap suits working in offices for the government.
That incompetent disaster-management might have a role to play in keeping people in line, and even in punishing political opponents, doesn’t seem all that fat-fetched to me.
In Maui, after the terrible fires, we’ve seen landgrabs, as large property players attempt to reap the benefits of “regeneration” by buying up the smoldering remains of people’s houses, apparently in collusion with the local government.
And then we saw, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the punishment of Trump supporters by FEMA agents, who deliberately withheld aid from them. Indeed, it would be hard to look at the overall federal response, at the time of the hurricane, or in the weeks and months since, and not think that the government has been deliberately punishing the people of North Carolina and Tennessee simply because they happen to be poor, white and Trump supporters.
It’s chaos, and it has functions. We’ll see what the regeneration of California looks like in the coming years, but you can bet there will be inside deals and profiteering off the back of this appalling, utterly preventable tragedy. It will be California residents who suffer even more than they already have.
I don’t know. But when I see Karen Bass running to avoid awkward questions from the press or Gavin Newsom touting his new misinformation website while tens of thousands of acres are still burning, I do know one thing: These people don’t really give a sh*t about anybody but themselves.