Apocalyptic global warming predictions of doom have long been fashionable, quasi-religious beliefs of 21st-century liberalism. But after the recent wildfires that have devastated the state, some California Democrats will be clinging to climate change as a matter of political survival. [emphasis, links added]
The epic incompetence demonstrated both by Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass during the crisis isn’t just a matter of bad optics and some excruciatingly embarrassing moments for two career politicians.
It has also created the possibility that even in a one-party state completely dominated by the Democrats, they might be held accountable for their egregious lack of leadership and terrible decisions that turned a natural disaster into an unprecedented catastrophe that has cost dozens of lives and destroyed more than 12,000 homes and buildings.
While the notion that this might be a turning point to reverse the overwhelming advantage possessed by Democrats in California might be fanciful, the two are highly vulnerable to recall elections that, especially in the case of Bass, might actually force her from office.
That’s only if the voters of the fire-ravaged state are ready to think seriously about the glaring evidence of bungling that left some reservoirs empty, fire departments not fully budgeted, as well as neglect of proper water, land, and forest management practices that could have, at the very least mitigated the suffering and the billions in damage inflicted on the state’s people.
Newsom and Bass have not gotten off scot-free when it comes to critical scrutiny from the media for their poor crisis management skills and for decisions that helped turn the fire from a bad problem into something much worse.
But the response from most of the liberal chorus in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times has been to defend both of them.
LA Columnists like Mark Barabak and Steve Lopez have both decried what they call the “politicization” of the fires by President Donald Trump and other Republicans.
They prefer to blame “Mother Nature” and climate change.
Liberal pundits can be relied upon to demonstrate loyalty to their party despite the sorry performance of the people in charge. But the party line about the disaster isn’t so much a function of opinion slingers.
Rather, it is a concerted effort throughout legacy media to shift the public’s attention away from the evidence of ineptitude, often rooted in liberal ideologies like DEI policies and extreme environmentalism.
Instead, the coverage of the fires in major outlets like The LA Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have been peppered with a steady stream of articles insisting that the fires were in part or principally the result of global warming.
As journalist Michael Shellenberger pointed out, most of these articles are based on “junk science” rooted in assumptions about warming rainfall and temperature that are not backed up by empirical evidence.
Some reporters and scientists are blaming climate change for the lack of rain in LA. It’s ridiculous. There’s no trend in annual rainfall from 1877 to 2024. We have wet years and dry years.
Climate change isn’t responsible for the LA fires. Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass are. https://t.co/JftaPPPMLV pic.twitter.com/iX4Q7TxfdH
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) January 10, 2025
Like so much of left-wing commentary, these pieces seem to be primarily a form of virtue signaling that takes it as a given that even the mildest skepticism about claims that climate change is producing more extreme weather than in the past is “denial” that must be dismissed rather than examined or debated.
This is backed up by the way leftist-controlled search engines like Google treat the subject.
Searches about Newsom and Bass and the fires or how prioritizing DEI over life-saving skills or environmentalist-based management decisions impacted the fire produced page after page of articles solely devoted to “debunking” any claims about their mistakes.
Readers are instructed that what has happened is merely “Mother Nature” taking its revenge on humanity for having the nerve to build houses in a dry climate.
But even left-wing outlets are starting to notice that, as with their efforts to instruct Americans how to vote in the 2024 presidential election, not all Californians are ready to parrot the propaganda the media is throwing at them.
As one Politico columnist noted with dismay, even in those areas of LA where Trump lost to Kamala Harris by more than 60 points, most people aren’t blaming their losses on the climate change mantra, preferring instead to focus on the more immediate causes of the problem, including the failures of Democrat politicians.
That’s a huge potential problem for Newsom and Bass.
Government by plebiscite, including recall votes, is the last vestige of the political progressives who held sway in California in the early 1900s.
Read rest at The Federalist
Top image via NBC News/YouTube screencap
