Journalist Bari Weiss is not a conservative, but she is also not woke. She actually left the New York Times over wokeness before founding the Free Press.
She recently appeared on FOX News and talked about the California fires, describing them as a failure of government on the most ‘fundamental’ things and she is exactly right. This is part of what is so maddening about this situation.
Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and other Democrat leaders bend over backwards to focus on left wing social justice issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the role of government. Yet when it comes to the most basic functions of government, such as keeping buildings from burning down, they have failed completely.
They do not understand the role of government at its most essential level.
Transcript via Real Clear Politics:
Bari Wiess: Los Angeles is being governed and the state of California is being governed by people who have lost sight of the basics of governing. They have lost sight of the idea that we pay you a tax so that you take care of basics for us. And nothing could be more basic than preventing the burning down of, as you just said in your introduction, an area twice the size of Manhattan, right? It’s hard to conceive of how big this is.
I woke up to text messages. Almost everyone we know has evacuated their home. We know people that have lost their homes. And the reason that there’s so little trust and the reason that you saw in that clip that mother confronting Gavin Newsom with such rage is because there’s so much that led up to this moment. There was — you know, just to choose one example, in our neighborhood, you know, a middle class neighborhood in L.A., not particularly fancy, the police, if you called them for a robbery, and there were many robberies in our neighborhood, they would take an hour, sometimes two hours to show up. It had become almost like Brazil. It had become normal for middle class people, upper middle class people to pay for private security just despite the fact that they were paying enormously high taxes already.
So, was it the fact that, you know, the city cut the spending and the fire department by $17 million? Was it the fact that they were spending more on homelessness initiatives than on preventing fire?
Was it DEI? Look, I don’t know. What I know is that the broader context in which this fire is happening is a context of total incompetency and leaders who are putting their niche, luxury issues, ideological issues over and above the most fundamental things, keeping you and your family safe from crime, keeping you and your family safe from fires.
Here’s the video:
Bari Weiss on Fox News: “California is being governed by people who have lost sight of the basics of governing.”
pic.twitter.com/YP7pP6JsJY— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 13, 2025
This is one of the reasons so many people are angry about the fires. California’s entire leadership should resign in disgrace and be prosecuted.
