Burning Down the House

Elections Have Consequences

Credit: AP Photo

I am no student of history, but my sense is that the big events that matter often result from those that seemingly don’t. Random, unrelated, and even anodyne factors converge, combine, and then quite suddenly combust into something momentous. That’s what gets you from the Beer Hall Putsch to the Reichstag Fire, from the Russo Japanese War to the Russian Revolution. From the Gulf of Tonkin to the Vietnam Memorial.

Revisiting 2024, the single catalyzing event that may have brought all else into alignment occurred on a midsummer’s afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania when a bullet flew past Donald Trump’s head, grazing his ear. Trump had just turned his head moments before to motion toward a billboard outlining the surge in illegal immigration into the United States during the Biden years.

Consider if Trump had been holding forth on a less fevered topic; say, corporate taxation or healthcare reform. Something not meriting an outsized graphic with which to startle and energize his audience. Might he not be looking straight ahead, and might the outcome be a sensationally morbid hi-def replay of Dealey Plaza 11/63? And might that be effectively the end of the campaign with the Democratic candidate becoming the winner by walkover?

But that did not happen because the Biden administration due to its incompetence, mendacity, or outright malevolence - take your pick - turned illegal immigration into an invasion, which, in turn, made it a pivotal campaign issue, producing that stage prop in Butler. And that happened because the person tasked with the immigration issue replied when asked why she had failed to even visit the border: “And I haven’t been to Europe.” The same person who, when she did get to Europe, made it a point to go shopping for cookware in Paris.

And so the billboard went up. And Donald Trump turned his head. At the right moment. And his response to this near miss was not to cower, but to urge, embody, and voice defiance.

Providence, you could argue, intervened, saving Donald Trump, and perhaps the country in the process.

Providence

“Providence” is one of those old fashioned words you don’t much hear these days. It has an antique ring, dating from a time when people invested more faith in God and respect for the fates. It bespeaks the perils of the journey in the quest for the promised land and implies the need of divine intervention for safe arrival. Providence also suggests something that is foreordained,

Which brings us to the Great Los Angeles Fire of 2025, a climactic/ hinge moment along the lines of Butler, which in a sense was waiting to happen. It was certainly imaginable, given local conditions. And yet it was manageable, if not preventable, given the region’s prior history and experience with wildfire.

But those charged with keeping people safe from this deadly - and ever present - threat….Well, they’ve had other agendas in mind for some time now which has not only yielded the steady degradation of city and state but contributed to in seminal fashion this cataclysm.

The Animals in Charge

Twenty-first century California, especially Los Angeles, is an anomaly. On the one hand, it is as affluently postmodern as it gets, yet it is in places cobbled together like a Third World backwater. With Third World outcomes.

Scrolling back through the skein of recent history, the deadwood began accumulating in the foothills above the city years ago, just as it built up in the city’s one-party commissariat. Many of the apparatchiks were and are not fit to lead and administer - only to manage and hope that people were too busy to notice the shortfall.

While the fires have bared the ground beneath what until recently were very expensive houses, they have likewise revealed the substrate of mind and character of those running the state.

Most notable, of course, are the hapless Karen Bass and the relentlessly unctuous Gavin Newsom, but I suspect this sort of craven “leadership” runs pretty deep through the fractured institutional landscape of California.

The state, like much of Blue America, has effectively sheepified its populace through a combination of the people’s indolence and the elites’ legerdemain. No one is standing up and exhorting people to “Fight, Fight, Fight!” Rather, the animals in charge indulge and soothe the people with an array of luxury beliefs. Most every policy and program comes wrapped in a shiny package labeled “virtue” and with a lifetime warranty, indemnifying both parties from blame, liability - and, ergo, responsibility. Accordingly, both priesthood and flock rest assured that each action taken is not simply “the right thing,” but places all among the elect, e.g. “on the right side of history.”

The Fire This Time

Pacific Palisades is a long way from Butler, in both distance and attitude. It’s a safe bet that very few of the locals would entertain - or risk - wearing, say, a Trump hat in public. (At least ten days ago.)

And yet, many residents here, among the most materially comfortable on the planet, whether they knew it or not, were effectively red pilled and MAGA’d overnight - good and hard - when the fires came. Life in paradise didn’t just go up in smoke here. Hell’s Gates blew off their hinges, sucking the lotus eaters into an all-consuming inferno.

While The Great L.A. Fire is fitting for the locale that spawned it, where life can seem ephemeral on the best of days, and where it can shift as mercurially as the Santa Ana winds, it is unfair to blame one city and its denizens for a disaster so biblical in scale.

This is really America’s fire. After all, this level of corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, and cynical self-dealing can be experienced in other precincts - notably those places subjected to the same brand of one-party rule inflicted on California by the Democrats. This sort of malpractice has been going on for some time now, to deleterious effect. (Figuratively speaking at least, there are a number of other American cities currently on fire.)

And, to be sure, this fire is the perfect capstone to the most Godawfully heedless and destructive presidency that any American alive has ever been forced to suffer through.

This is a searing event that should imprint deeply on the national psyche and doubly so in the minds of California’s so called leaders. The latter, alas, may be a vain hope. After all, these folks are now spending time and a serious amount of other people’s money, $25 million, in order to “Trump proof” their state. Doing a better job of fireproofing their largest city might have spared very many people a mountain of grief.