Be sure to Click LIKE at the bottom of this commentary, and share it everywhere!! By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot – Commentary

“Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis” – Don Henley, The Eagles

The song, Hotel California is said to be “all about American decadence and burnout, too much money, corruption, drugs and arrogance; too little humility and heart.” Those lyrics by Don Henley seem now to be strikingly haunting in light of what began on January 7^th, 2025 in the hills surrounding Los Angeles.

First one fire, the Eaton Fire, then another, the Palisades fire, followed by another, and another and so on and so forth. The Santa Ana winds at over or near 100mph on the first day and night of the inferno drove those fires like never before, and it rapidly became obvious that neither L.A. nor California had a clue as to what to do.

I’ll get back to that shortly, but first, although there has been no definitive word, we need to look into possible causes, and there is no shortage of speculation in that regard. Arson seems to be a very popular theory, and why not? Last year alone, there were 13, 909 fires started by homeless people in Southern California. Certainly not all of those were started out of a desire to cause harm, but just as clearly…some were.

Could it have all started as an act of terrorism? That’s yet another popular theory, and the answer is yes, it could have been terrorism as we know there are sleeper calls operating within the U.S. and we are also well-aware that due to the Biden/Harris regime and their open border policy, we have known terrorists that have crossed our border in large numbers.

Could the fires have been touched off by accident? Yes…a careless discarding of a cigarette, a campfire not properly put out, even a spark from a passing vehicle near dry brush at the side of a road could have been the cause.

How about natural causes such as lightning? Possible, although there were no such reports of storms in the area when the fires began, but lightning isn’t the only possible natural cause. Those Santa Ana winds are hot, and dry, and they pick up particulate matter, dust, sand, and other material. Blown at high speeds for long distances, particulate material can, and does build up an electrostatic charge and such static electricity in enough volume can, and sometimes does create its own lightning. Also, when such charged material comes into contact with other objects…it can spark…and let’s just be honest here, it was more than dry enough given the lack of ground moisture and the lack of humidity for just about any spark to set off what would become an inferno.

And then, there are the always suspect power lines, most of them in that area belonging to PG&E which have before, will again and potentially did this time cause one or more blazes. After all, in the hours leading to the break-out of one fire after the other, Whisker Labs, a company that monitors electrical activity says faults along the Los Angeles power grid skyrocketed in the same areas where three of last week’s major wildfires, the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst Fires burned. According to Whisker Labs, “faults are caused by tree limbs touching wires or wires blowing in the wind and touching. That creates a spark in a fault, and we detect all of those things.” Interesting. How many such faults occurred? Well, in the case of the Eaton Fire near Altadena, there were 317 such faults detected, and with regard to the Hurst Fire, there were 230 faults…all just in the hours before the fires were reported, and right in the area where the fires were reported.

Now then, add the power grid faults, literally hundreds of them in the precise areas of the fires at exactly the right time, to the electrostatically charged, Santa Ana wind driven particulate matter and you’ve got the perfect storm…so to speak. Personally, I think it could have been a combination of causes from the list I outlined including both natural and man-made. Take the perfect storm, add in a few arsonists, and maybe an accidental source the result is now the costliest set of wildfires in American history…but it didn’t have to be that way.

While the exact cause, or causes will be investigated and speculated about for years, what led to the scope of the devastation was pure malfeasance.

Let me start with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. She not only was out of town when it all started, she was out of the country, in Ghana, for an inauguration. Her second in command, Deputy Mayor Brian K Williams, had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into an alleged bomb threat against City Hall. Who was running the show? To be clear, Bass knew full-well of the high potential for wildfires and the forecast for the Santa Ana Winds, and she was also well-aware of the extremely dry conditions, but off she went to Ghana anyway.

As the Mayor, Karen Bass signed the City of Los Angeles’ budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year which included the budget for the city’s fire department at $819.64 million. The previous year’s total budget for LAFD was $837.2 million. That’s a budget cut for the LAFD of roughly $17.5 million. Bass can argue all she wants to that the massive cut didn’t hurt the Department’s ability to fight fires, but how could it not?

LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said, “My message is the fire department needs to be properly funded. It’s not.” But let’s be honest, Crowley seems to be trying to insulate herself from her own problems in all of this. Yes, Crowley is on record both before and during the recent fires as complaining about the budget cuts, but at the same time, it has been Crowley pushing DEI and “woke” agenda policies onto her own Department through “bias training” sessions and DEI workshops. How bad is it within the LAFD? Well…just a day or so before the fires started, Deputy Fire Chief Kristine Larson said in a video that the department priority is that residents in crisis are rescued by first responders that “look like” them.

I understand that County and City budgets are different things, but both should have one top priority…keeping their citizens safe. So, other than fighting fires, protecting people’s lives and property, what was money being spent on out of the L.A. County budget? How about $14,010 to the “Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles” and $190,000 to the Homeless and HIV Program, including a “syringe exchange” program that provides sterile syringes to homeless drug addicts. $100,000 went to pay for Juneteenth celebrations, $13,000 went to “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month Programs,” and a stunning $100,000 funded a “Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe” to fund housing for homeless transgender people in Hollywood.

Holy crap.

Trust me, I’m just scratching the surface with any of this, but suffice it to say there will eventually be plenty of blame to go around. Not only are local and county officials deeply at fault in all of this, so too are state officials, and that all lands directly in the hands, and on the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Here’s just a partial list of malfeasance.

Fire hydrants, in the first day of the inferno, ran dry. We’ve been told that either the pumps that force water through the system, or the electricity that runs the pumps went out. Okay, why then aren’t there backup pumps and generators to run them? When it comes to people’s lives, redundancy is key.

Knowing that fire season was upon them, the Pacific Palisades water reservoir was bone dry. The 117 million gallon reservoir was “off-line” and emptied to repair a tear in the giant tarp covering it. Total negligence.

Just last summer, Gavin Newsom CUT the state “wildfire and forest resilience” budget by a staggering $100 million dollars. Here’s how Fox News reported what they discovered:

Cal Fire had a $5 million reduction in spending on fuel reduction teams, including funds used to pay for vegetation management work by the California National Guard, the report noted.

Other changes:

• $28 million cut from multiple state conservancies that expand wildfire resilience
• $12 million cut from a “home hardening” experiment that would protect homes from wildfires
• $8 million cut from monitoring and research spending, mostly dedicated to Cal Fire and state universities
• $4 million cut from the forest legacy program, which encourages landowners to manage their properties
• $3 million cut from funding for an inter-agency forest data hub

Newsom’s office called that report a lie, and provided Fox News with a laundry list of things Newsom has done since taking office to bolster firefighting efforts in California, but they somehow forgot to include a single word regarding the budget cuts and figures from the most recent budget.

Supposedly “excess” firefighting equipment from L.A. was gifted to Ukraine, and I believe that goes to both Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom on the malfeasance register.

Newsom, just recently, artificially capped the rates that insurance companies could charge forcing several, including State Farm to pull out of the state, or face certain bankruptcy thus leaving those who have lost everything…with nothing.

Again, I’m only scratching the surface, but I would be remiss not to get into the environmental aspects of the ongoing stupidity of California.

Gavin Newsom has had four reservoirs dismantled, and refused to build any new ones. Why? To protect the Delta Smelt, bowing to the demands of a handful of Smelt-hugging American Indian activists who apparently prefer “free-range” Smelt and salmon. Here’s Newsom just a couple of years ago bragging about removing one of those water supplies that would have mitigated the damage from last week’s catastrophic fires.

If you want to remove critical reservoirs, okay, but before you do, you need a plan in -place for where to store those water supplies however, California has not built a new water project since 1979 in spite of the fact that California’s population has risen from 23.3 million in 1979, to 39 million today. That’s just piss-poor public works planning.

And then, there’s this…

In 2022, the last year for which we have figures, the sanctuary state of California spent $22,821,903,942 (that’s nearly $23 BILLION) on providing food, housing, healthcare and whatever else they could think of to ILLEGAL ALIENS, and if that doesn’t set your hair ablaze like an L.A. neighborhood…this will. According to the California Budget and Policy Center…illegal aliens CONTRIBUTE $8.5 billion per year to California’s tax coffers. Using old-school math, California is running a $14.3 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT…PER YEAR…on the business of providing everything AND the kitchen sink to ILLEGAL ALIENS.

Naturally, by the weekend, five days into a disaster he helped create, Gavin Newsom started blaming others…local officials, Trump, and even Republicans who are criticizing him for damned good reasons. Newsom said, of that criticism, “It’s words. It’s a salad. It’s the form and substance of fog. It’s made up. It’s delusional and it’s a consistent mantra from Trump going back years and years and years, and it’s reinforced over and over and over within the right wing.”

He can run, but he can’t hide with regard to the current situation in and around L.A. because California Governor, Gavin Newsom, CUT the “wildfire and forest resilience” budget by a staggering $!00 MILLION DOLLARS while at the same time running a $14.3 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT providing benefits to ILLEGAL ALIENS and now, more than 10,000 homes and businesses have been reduced to ashes, the death toll is rising, tens of thousands of people are homeless and jobless, many don’t have insurance coverage and the fires continue to burn.

If you ask me, that’s not malfeasance, that’s criminal negligence.

Welcome to the Hell-Hole California.

Copyright © 2025 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved

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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s blog The Patriot Factor to read her latest article  Turning The Economic Page On War.

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