Op-Ed: LA wildfires force reckoning with bad policy, rotten ideologies

In the face of disastrous wildfires in the greater Los Angeles area, much of which were preventable, pundits on the left wasted no time gaslighting their political opponents and insulting the public conscience. Gov. Gavin Newsom was ready and willing to police thought, blame the conservatives and allege “misinformation.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had left the city on Jan. 4 on a foreign policy mission despite warnings from the National Weather Service about “extreme fire weather conditions.”

The Los Angeles Times ran a column calling her absence “bad timing.” Ladies on The View lashed out at Bass’s critics for perpetuating racism and sexism. The Atlantic downplayed colossal human failures behind the devastation — “it is about well-intentioned policies with unintended consequences,” wrote M. Nolan Gray, California YIMBY’s senior director of legislation and research.

Once again, environmental justice advocates, who should take part of the blame for their decades-long lobbying against sensible fire prevention legislation, have decried “climate change” as the culprit.

In this collective refusal for accountability and finger-pointing schemes — as if progressives have not governed the Golden State for at least the last two decades — incompetent public leaders and their media pals have stooped to a new low.

Nobody should wish such destruction on their worst enemy. However, taking an avoidant and excusing stance is the wrong approach. To move forward, we must reckon with the fact that the unprecedented havoc wrought by the wildfires in Los Angeles could have been prevented or mitigated.

The ruinous aftermath we face is at least partly the result of policy failures.

Confront public policy failures under incompetent leaders

It does not take an expert to figure this one out. Proactive fire prevention and active fire management should have been top priorities for a state and a municipality with a long history of wildfires.

Cal Fire, the primary party responsible for state-level fire prevention, suppression and safety, has been bogged down in expensive bureaucracy, misguided priorities and corruption.

With a $17.6 million budget cut, the city diminished the Los Angeles Fire Department’s capacity for emergency response and preventative maintenance. Ineffective fire management is further exacerbated by mismanagement of forests, water resources and public infrastructure, which have compounded the damages.

Bad policies fueled by bad ideologies

Any human enterprise is limited by finite resources, funding and energy. When obsessing with its participants’ immutable characteristics from race to gender, an agency’s bandwidth becomes overstretched on matters with little productive value.

Consequently, resources, funding and energy are diverted from the agency’s core operations to pay for futile ideological exercises.

Take the Los Angeles Fire Department, for example. Despite budget cuts, the department never wavered in its commitment to DEI. The fire chief, assistant fire chief and equity bureau chief, all of whom were hailed as historic hires on account of race and gender, have annual salaries amounting to over $1 million.

The fire department’s 2023-26 strategic plan proudly proclaims “an organizational culture that embraces DEI,” pledging to “train all supervisors to be change agents who model inclusive behavior” and “increase funding” targeting diverse candidates.

To double down on the DEI craze, the department even lists “respect for diversity” as a hiring factor.

In January 2023, the California Water Resources Control Board released its “2023-2025 Racial Equity Action Plan.” The plan, like countless similar initiatives, exemplifies the cancerous politicization and racialization of public policies throughout California.

No meaningful solution can be devised without honest soul-searching. In California, this means contending with inevitably disastrous consequences of incompetent leaders and bad policies enabled by divisive, corrupt and wrong ideologies.

We must find a way forward, and the way forward is not about shifting blame. Redress against leaders whose incompetence borders criminal negligence must happen immediately to open room for long-term changes in attitudes and cultures.

Wenyuan Wu is the executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a nonpartisan 501c(3) organization.