MAGA fiddles while Los Angeles burns | Opinion
For the past week, I’ve watched in horror as wildfires have devastated and continue to threaten the Los Angeles suburban communities where my journalism career began.
There’s Pasadena/Altadena, where I worked as a reporter and city editor for the Pasadena Star-News, just before moving to Wichita.
There’s Sylmar, part of my coverage area in my first full-time job as a reporter for the San Fernando Sun.
There’s the Angeles National Forest, part of my beat at the Los Angeles Daily News, and Calabasas, where I got my first chance to be the editor of a paper, the hometown weekly News-Enterprise.
There’s Pacific Palisades and the Malibu coast, where I covered mudslides, brushfires and the threat of beach erosion over the years.
As of this writing, those communities and others have suffered the loss of at least 12,000 homes and businesses.
At least 16 people have died, a figure that’s likely to rise, and 300,000 people remain in danger, under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders.
A total loss
After 20 years as a Los Angeles-area journalist, I couldn’t even count the wildfires I covered. And I’ve never seen anything like this.
I watched a heartrending Facebook video as the son of a former colleague and supervisor of mine picked through the ashes of the family’s Malibu-area home, trying to identify where the rooms that he’d grown up in had been.
About the only identifiable items to survive the firestorm were my friend’s set of cast-iron skillets — after she retired from daily journalism, she made a name for herself in the food-blogging world.
If I were still there, I’d almost certainly be out somewhere in the fire zone, eating smoke and gathering info to try to make some sense out of this.
And my wife would probably be at a news desk, editing stories and prepping them for national distribution, which is what she did before I brought her to Wichita.
We’d almost certainly be hosting friends, now fire refugees, as house guests.
This was my place and these were my people, and I still care about them as much as I have learned to care about the people of Wichita now.
While they face uncontrollable firestorms driven by hurricane winds, here I sit in safety, half a continent away. I’ve been overwhelmed with feelings of powerlessness and guilt.
But after reading a column by right-wing commentator/provocateur Todd Starnes, I realized there is at least one thing I can do for them.
While my friends, former readers and news sources struggle to survive and salvage what they can from the ashes of utter destruction, I can raise my voice to defend them against pundits and politicians who maintain that Californians brought devastation on themselves by being too liberal, too environmentally conscious, too woke.
Bigotry, lies and insults
Starnes’ reprehensible take on the situation is that diversity, equity and inclusion is the main reason that firefighters were unable to control the blazes — not the 70 to 100 mph Santa Ana winds that fed air to the fires like a blacksmith’s forge, and made it impossible to fly tanker planes and helicopters that would ordinarily be dropping water and fire-retardant chemicals.
No, Starnes says the problem is that the city of Los Angeles has a fire chief who’s a lesbian, whom he dismissively called “a diversity hire.”
Never mind that Chief Kristin Crowley came to the job with more than 20 years in the LAFD as a firefighter, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, captain, battalion chief, assistant chief, fire marshal and deputy chief.
Of course, no Starnes column would be complete without the obligatory belligerent quote from our once and future bloviator-in-chief, Donald John Trump.
Trump blames California’s efforts to protect endangered fish in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta — 400 miles north of L.A. — for localized water supply problems that hampered the firefighting effort.
As he’s quoted in Starnes’ piece: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”
It makes no sense, but there it is.
Nobody but Trump seems to know what a “water restoration declaration” is. And calling the governor “Newscum” instead of Newsom — in the midst of a natural disaster — is ridiculously petty, even by Trump standards.
Setting that aside, the fact is that California, like many states, has limited water resources and has to balance the needs of its Central Valley farmers and wildlife protection.
I myself started covering this back around 1981 when I was a college journalist at a National Public Radio station — and it was going on long before I got there.
To bring this home to Kansas, it’s much the same dilemma that our own drought-plagued state faces in balancing the water needs of the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge and Stafford County farmers.
There’s another local tie-in here: The CEO of Starnes’ production company is Wichita City Council member Dalton Glasscock.
Like the L.A. fire chief, Glasscock happens to be gay.
I was there the night he publicly came out, after the homophobe wing of his own party outed him in a whispering campaign, trying to prevent his election as chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party.
In the past week, Wichita has been hit hard by winter weather — snow, sleet, ice, high winds and temperatures dipping to single digits. A young couple died when their car slid off an icy street and rolled down an embankment.
Starnes ended his column about the L.A. fires thusly: “At least we still have the smelt fish and a lesbian fire chief. Was it worth the price Los Angeles?”
It makes one wonder if Starnes considers Glasscock a diversity hire. Does he believe that the Wichitans killed in the car crash would still be alive, if only we hadn’t elected a gay man to public service?
When we were better
We used to live in a country where, when disaster struck any of us, we all pitched in, regardless of whether the state was red or blue.
When my family did mission work in Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our meals came free of charge from a group of hippies running an impromptu commune and dining hall in a storm-gutted YMCA. They gave us beans and rice every day and never once asked who we voted for in the last election.
Now that Southern California’s been devastated, the group that’s about to take power doesn’t even offer thoughts and prayers — just worthless political canards and childish insults.
Speaking as a near-lifelong Republican, if this is what “Making America Great Again” looks like, count me out.
It’s nihilism that offers no solutions to make things better for the people. It’s mainly just a list of enemies to be dismissed, demeaned, deported, defeated, destroyed.
At the top of the list are LGBTQ people, liberals, environmentalists and immigrants. California has more of those than anyplace else, so of course it’s No. 1 on the MAGA target sheet.
Another former colleague of mine posted this observation on Facebook Friday: “It’s going to be very hard to rebuild L.A. if its carpenters, welders, roofers, dry wallers, painters, cabinet makers, tilers and landscapers are deported.”
Sadly, my old friend, you’re missing the point. Trump and his minions like Starnes don’t want you to rebuild.
They want you to suffer — as much as possible for as long as possible — to keep you focused on survival while they tighten their grip on what used to be a pretty damn good country.
This story was originally published January 13, 2025 at 5:17 AM with the headline "MAGA fiddles while Los Angeles burns | Opinion."
