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Nearly a year after LA’s worst wildfires, we’re closer than ever to knowing what happened. And the answers were DEI, a small weed and fish. And an obsessive hatred for Ronald Reagan.
The roots of the environmentalist insanity that killed a dozen people and destroyed over 5,000 buildings actually go back a generation to the construction of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. While RDS or Reagan Derangement Syndrome has become a distant memory, it was burning fiercely back then and the construction of the library seemed to be adding insult to injury..
Leftists looking for some way to block the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library seized on the presence of any plants in the area that they could brand as endangered including Lyon’s pentachaeta, a tiny daisy, and a weed, and a variety of milk vetch, an otherwise unremarkable plant that has a short life and tends to sprout after wildfires. The Reagan library was forced to agree to transplant the weeds, which didn’t work, but ate up time and money at the library.
The construction of the Reagan library went on in spite of the environmental obstructionism, but the campaign succeeded in listing the tiny daisy as an endangered species and began listing some milk vetches as endangered, crippling future developments and fire clearing projects.
Under the Clinton administration, activists at U.S. Fish and Wildlife proposed that Braunton’s milk vetch be added to the list of endangered species.
Before long California wildfires were spinning out of control because Fish and Wildlife was blocking controlled burns to protect “endangered species”. The ‘2003 Firestorm’ which caused over $1 billion in damages and killed 6 people was blamed on Fish and Wildlife spending six years blocking controlled burns in those areas to protect ‘endangered species’.
The 2024 Palisades fire has now been traced back to a failed effort to put out the previous Lachman fire.
The Lachman fire, a small brush fire, broke out on New Year’s Day and firefighters had mostly succeeded in putting it out when they were told to pull out even though the ground was still smoldering. The proper procedure would have been to bring in bulldozers to dig up a perimeter around the fire to assure it was really out instead of smoldering under ash or vegetation.
But current reports are that calls to use a bulldozer were rejected because of protected plants.
Even though smoke was still coming out of the ground, indicating that the fire was still smoldering, the Los Angeles Fire Department limited personnel to a ‘hand cut’ perimeter.
Less than a week later, the fire sprang to life and became the most devastating fire in LA history.
The obsession with protecting the Braunton’s milkvetch had been previously flagged as a potential cause of the fires. Fallen power lines have caused Southern California wildfires in the past and the Braunton’s milkvetch had been used to block the building of new utility poles.
But this time there may have been an even more direct link between the weed and the wildfires.
A year before the wildfires, the Biden administration was putting out press releases about the work that Fish and Wildlife were doing to protect Braunton’s milk-vetch. While environmentalist activists embedded in the federal government claimed that the weed prevented wildfires, the growth of the milk-vetch was actually a post-fire reaction by the landscape. Fish and Wildlife obstructed controlled burns, claiming that this would endanger the Braunton’s milk-vetch.
But the lack of fire control was actually endangering the weed by leading to more serious fires and a more severe fire cycle. The more environmentalists tried to protect the weed, the worse the fires became. And Fish and Wildlife’s weed protectionism was killing people and its weed.
Meanwhile over a decade of wokeness had shifted the LAFD’s priority away from protecting people to DEI and environmentalism. When the LA wildfires hit, the LAFD was being run by three lesbians named ‘Kirsten’. Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had become the historic ‘first’ female lesbian fire chief, and she had replaced Chief Ralph Terrazas, the first Latino fire chief, who had replaced Chief Douglas Barry, the first black chief.
When Mayor Karen Bass, the first black female mayor, ousted the first lesbian fire chief, Ronnie Villanueva, the historic second Latino fire chief, temporarily took over.
The LAFD’s investigations of the fire went nowhere until the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms stepped in.
Villanueva told the LA Times “that neither he nor the LAFD’s arson squad knew what a holdover fire was until federal investigators explained it to them.” Villanueva claimed that the LAFD had no idea that the fire was still burning, but that wasn’t actually true. Firefighters on the scene were worried about it, but were told to stand down by their bosses who were following orders.
Some of those bosses may not have even understood that a ‘holdover fire’ could keep on burning underground even while it seemed to be out on the surface. But they did understand that protecting a weed was a top priority and much more important than protecting people.
Bulldozing the weed could and has led to millions of dollars in fines. It was easier to walk away from the fire than to tamper with yet another patch of Braunton’s milk-vetch which, despite its endangered status, continued popping up everywhere that lives needed to be saved,
Similarly, there wasn’t enough water to fight the fires because the ‘delta smelt’, an otherwise uninteresting tiny fish on the endangered species list, had to be protected. After the fires the first ‘Latina’ head of the Department of Water and Power Janisse Quinones, who was given a $750,000 salary, also got $700,000 in security because of the public outrage over her actions.
DEI, tiny fish and weeds are much more important than people to California’s leadership.
Nearly a year later, we know more or less what was behind the fires, no thanks to state investigators whose main role, as usual, is covering up for the mistakes of the system. But if the state investigation was a complete coverup, the federal investigation is still a partial coverup, indicting the man who started the Lachman fire, but not the system that allowed it to burn.
The Lachman fire did not kill a dozen people, Federal and California authorities did.
What was an entirely manageable problem spun out of control because of decades of toxic environmental activism, federal intervention, state, county and municipal incompetence, all caused by different levels of authority putting their leftist ideology over public safety.
Only in California could obsessive hatred of Reagan have manifested in a crazed attempt to protect a weed leading to catastrophic wildfires that devastated entire communities when a DEI fire department proved more concerned about the weed than about stopping a fire.
The Trump administration can’t fix most of California’s insane broken politics, but it can remove the milk vetches and other weeds from the list of endangered species. The original list of endangered species in 1967 had included the grizzly bear and the red wolf, but no weeds. If we have to have a list of endangered species, it should include substantial animals, not weeds.
Like USAID, U.S. Fish and Wildlife is one of those parts of the federal government that we would be better off without. The bureau has cost lives while protecting weeds. The Trump administration may wish to consider if it would rather save lives than weeds.
