Karen Bass Slashed $17 Million from LA's Firefighting Budget, With the Monies Cut Mostly from Fire Prevention.
Here's What Angelinos Got In Return.

They used that money to pay for "gay men's choruses" and "trans cafes."

I'm sure you're all shocked. Stunned, even!

The City of Los Angeles cut funding for its fire department and allocated thousands of dollars to various progressive programs, including a "Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe" and a Gay Men's Chorus.

Fires swept through Southern California on Wednesday, destroying hundreds of homes in Los Angeles County, and high winds only fueled the destruction. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was slammed for slashing the Los Angeles Fire Department's (LAFD) budget by $17.6 million for fiscal year 2024 to 2025, Fox 11 reported, citing LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

Bass claimed in a press conference that none of the reductions made "would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days." She added that the city is "in tough budgetary times."

Los Angeles allocated $100,000 to the Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department for a "Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe," according to its 2024 to 2025 budget. The funding's purpose is to "support a safe haven for unsheltered transgender individuals in Hollywood," the document noted.

Similarly, the Cultural Affairs Department Special Appropriations budget allocated $100,000 for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Awards.

The budget also appropriated $8,670 for the "One Institute the International Gay and Lesbian Archives."

The ONE Archives at the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries currently has an exhibit titled "Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation," which focuses on the occult and "the LGBTQ movement."

The budget also allocated $13,000 for "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month Programs" and $14,010 to the "Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles."

Los Angeles' African American History Month, American Indian Heritage Month, Latino Heritage Month and Asian American History Month Programs were each allocated $13,000.

The budget also appropriated $170,000 in total for "Social Justice Art-Worker Investments."

The LAFD was blasted for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and its 2023 to 2026 strategic plan stated that DEI was one of its "key goals." A stated priority of the city's first "LGBTQ" and woman fire chief, Kristin F. Crowley, is "promoting a culture that values [DEI]."

DEI in a fire, as Boss Moss said.

Governor Hairgel is also to blame. He vetoed spending for the training of seasonal firefighters -- that is, firefighters who would not be paid all year long, but just for wildfire season.

He claimed that he would later restore money to train this pool of emergency wildfire firefighters but, get this, he lied.

I think this is the straw that broke the camel's back. I think Newsome, Bass, the Woke Lesbian Fire Brigade have now given millions and millions of Democrats the permission necessary to finally walk away from the party.

I really think this is one of those major inflection points in history. At some point, people just get sick of the endless excuses for catastrophe and failure and decide they're tired of the government they pay for police and fire services being turned into little but a massive transfer-of-wealth mafia to take money from Enemy Groups and pay off Friend Groups.

Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger

Over the next few weeks you're going to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there's nothing that could have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It's true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are fiery places. It's true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership are shocking and scandalous.

It's hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA firefighters haven't had the water they needed. Newsom hasn't built the new water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things. Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change. Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of California.

The Democrats in California aren't like Democrats in other states. They are radicals. I would know, since when I was a young radical I moved to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else. Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide adequate funding to the police. They weakened the laws that allowed for burglaries and robberies. They subsidized homelessness, attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don't know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within the housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing and wildlands. Or it could have been started by the homeless.

Whatever the case, California and LA didn't invest enough in preventing fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing the fire department's budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly said they couldn't vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who would have prevented those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there's nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles, don't believe them.

It's time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile Leftism that has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We can't trust our leaders to run anything. It's not just incompetence. It's that they really don't care.

It's time for Californians to demand new leaders -- ones who aren't beholden to the radicals who control the Democratic Party.

posted by Ace at 01:25 PM

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