The Great Fire

Friends,

The following is the best account I’ve read of the fire that’s consuming Los Angeles. It’s from Steve Schmidt’s substack, The Warning. (steveschmidt.substack.com.

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Like the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Great Fire of Los Angeles will be recalled for 500 years.

The scale of the conflagration is biblical. These epochal fires will join Chicago and San Francisco atop an infamous registry of American destruction.

The fires are still spreading, still growing. There is no precedent, and no similar event by scale, cost or damage that has ever occurred in America. None.

The “Big One” came, but it wasn’t an earthquake that triggered the inferno, it was January winds that brought with it a storm surge of fire.

The worst case scenario has arrived, and don’t let anyone tell you that it was unforeseeable.

The conflagration was entirely predictable, and ultimately, inevitable. In fact, it was destiny. I don’t say that lightly.

The winds have brought Armageddon, and a brutal judgement upon the genius and arrogance of mankind’s building on a Garden of Eden, tempting the wrath of creation.

This is why I have written about Titanic so often. The lessons are enduring — even if the learnings have been fleeting.

There is an old saw about what starts in California ultimately spreads to every corner of the United States.

There is a lot of truth to the saying.

Consider the immense technological, cultural, and legislative invention that has come from the Golden State. The state is home to 39 million Americans. Its economy ranks fifth internationally, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan. On a per capita basis, California's GDP is greater than that of all of these countries.

I love California, and have from the second I first set foot there more than 30 years ago.

Among the great good fortunes of my life is that I have lived in California for many years, and have explored every part of it. My political career has brought me to nearly every town and ghost town in the state. I ran Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 re-election campaign for governor — the last time time a Republican was elected to that office. That was almost 20 years ago.

There is no other place like California in the world.

Her beauty is as magnificent as her dangers are deadly.

It has become fashionable in recent years to bash California. The state’s governance has become a punchline, a caricature and a MAGA war cry. Among the great grotesqueries and stupidities of our time is the sheer number of MAGA politicians who openly disdain the nation’s economic, technological, social, cultural, and innovation furnace. There is no scenario in which America succeeds with a failing California. Only an imbecile would root for California to fail or burn, and tragically, there is no shortage of fools in America rooting for both.

California is a mythological land. It is a place of sublime beauty and deep complication. It is the most complex state in the most complex nation in the history of the world. It is a place where one political party rules.

One party rule breeds corruption, incompetence, mediocrity, arrogance, entitlement and delusion. Of course, the California Republican Party has long been a collection of cranks, conspiracy nuts, ideological clowns and oddballs who prefaced the rise of their federal brethren.

California is a place where MAGA holds zero sway. There are 60 Democrats out of the 80-seat State Assembly, 30 out of the 40 State Senate seats. There are eight elected statewide officials, and every single one of them is a Democrat. These are epic supermajorities.

Sacramento isn’t Washington, DC, nor is it a proxy front in the MAGA drama produced by corporate media mandarins who ignore western state issues like fire, water, and drought with as much determination as they ignored the opioid crisis and fanned Trump’s rise.

The recriminations are just beginning in California. They will get much worse because what will become clear is that the failures were epic, systemic, plain as day, completely ignored, wished away, and left to build until the instant of catastrophe.

Everything will change in California after the fires, and everything will stay the same. This tension will upend the state’s political establishment, and destroy the line of succession that has taken root during the term limits era.

A succession of mediocrities — each a political careerist — has bounced from office to office for an entire generation doing nothing but ignore growing problems, while seeking elevation to the next office.

The initiative and referendum process will be abused by political profiteers, while corrupt recovery deals proliferate like the deadly conflagration exploded.

Recovery profiteers will seek fortunes, while politicians plot for attention and advancement.

The charred wasteland will become a battlefield on which competence and incompetence will meet in daily battle. Insurance companies will deny claims saying that it was a wind event, not fire, that burned down 10,000 structures. The ordinary family devastated in a biblical fire is about to become a lonely pawn in a vicious game of musical chairs where paying out is the sucker’s move.

There are devastating, brutal days ahead for so many people.

Yet, this time there is a difference.

Southern California television news has long abhorred substance and seriousness. Politics and government were treated like genital sores by TV news executives for 40 years, as they covered freeway chases and all manner of stupidity, while the clock ticked down, while the fuse burned down. The story of the Great Inferno is the story of “The Looming Tower.”

This did not have to happen, but it also could not be stopped. It could not be stopped because nothing could stop people from building in the most beautiful places anyone had ever seen once the first thing structure was built there.

There has always been a precariousness about California, an impermanence.

When the ships came through the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush, there were so many of them they were abandoned. They became the ground fill on which the Marina district in San Francisco rose. It has crumbled, burned, and been rebuilt more than once.

There were 160,000 in California before the discovery of gold. Five years after the US Civil War there were 560,000 Americans, and by the beginning of the roaring 1920s there were 3.4 million. The count was 10.6 million in 1950, and 34 million in 2000.

The people kept coming. They kept coming and coming and coming until there were more than 39 million by 2025 when it all burned down.

The scale of the environmental disaster will dwarf the damage caused by the 9/11 clean-up. The pollution is toxic, cancerous and deadly. The magnitude of the environmental crisis is almost impossible to comprehend.

It is hard watching people who have lost everything appear on television demonstrating unbelievable perseverance and grit, and declare that they will rebuild. Some will, but the truth is that many will not, and should not.

This is going to be the most expensive disaster in the history of the United States.
The costs will beggar imagination and become multiples of the initial estimates of $160 billion in damage, but it is beyond that.

The scale of the disaster and the nature of fire as a destructive force has reduced vast swaths of the second largest metro area in the United States to ashes.

The age of hyperbole has finally yielded to a reality for which there are truly no words.

What can be said?

The California political class seems to be mostly going with, “Who me?” which is always the awful predicate to, “Why me?”

For the uninitiated, let me introduce you to the LA City Council. Though the story is old, the machine remains.

America’s cities were spared the type of destruction that reigned down on European and Japanese cities like Tokyo 80 years ago. There is no modern frame of reference for an event like this occurring in a modern city anywhere in the world.

Vast parts of Los Angeles have been reduced by different means to what Tokyo was by firebombing.

Tokyo after the 1945 firebombing (USAF)

When the smoke lifts and the full sweep of the destruction can be understood it will boggle the American mind.

Then things will change.

Dramatically.

Donald Trump has talked at length about his revenge.

It has begun. It is underway. It is happening. Right now. It’s not in my head, and not in my imagination.

During the greatest crisis in the history of California en route to becoming the costliest natural disaster in American history, Donald Trump has offered snarling insults, veiled threats, misinformation and unrestrained malice.

He has used the disaster to attack the California governor, and has said nothing that matters of any consequence to the multitudes who are terrified and have lost everything.

Instead, like always, he has debased, inflamed and manipulated when he should have done the exact opposite. He seeks to gain from suffering, and incredibly, he doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore. More than anything else, it is this revelation from his chaotic transition that is most bone-chilling.

Our president is Arthur Fleck deep down.

Somehow he has concluded that a firestorm that has devoured a geography larger than Manhattan, and is only six per cent contained, is good for him. Donald has decided it proves him right about something — if only any of us could know what that might be. It certainly has nothing to do with his idiocies around the Delta smelt, a small fish that is the subject of controversy hundreds of miles away, as it has been for more than 30 years.

The capitulant Wall Street media should cover the dishonesty and incoherence of Trump’s inanity and insanity like the evil it is. Have no doubt, malice masks predation, and it is premeditated and purposeful. Trump looks at this disaster, and he sees one thing, and one thing only.

Opportunity.

He sees an opportunity to attack and weaken the enemy, which in his sick mind, is California.

The enemy is us.

Trump is happy today. Do you doubt it?

Over and over again, he has made clear what he wants to happen.

Trump despises California. He has made that clear enough.

Ten days from now, he will take command. What better way to pay back “Shifty Schiff” than by making his constituents suffer?

Why would anyone think anything else would happen?

In fact, just when California needs a mass deportation least, it’s going to get one.

It’s going to get it because common sense is in short supply around Donald Trump. Up in the thin air, where the stupid never takes a break, there will be no let up.

Delivering on this promise — long discounted by the media, which constantly asserts that he doesn’t really mean it and can’t possibly do it — he has been playing like Lucy does Charlie Brown for the last 10 years.

Nothing ever goes back.

Nothing burned to nothingness can be restored. Nothing.

The highrises built in Miami on the edge of the ocean are sinking into the sand. The waters are rising. The temperatures are becoming more extreme.

The hour long predicted has arrived.

It doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

2025 is off to a brutal beginning in these United States, and it is going to get worse.

Defiance will be required, and more than anything, the faith to maintain it.

Pray for California and her people.