A pair of massive wildfires within 150 miles of each other are terrorizing thousands in northern California two years after Gov. Gavin Newsom cut resources for fire prevention efforts.

The Caldor Fire, which burned down dozens of cabins at Lake Tahoe, threatens nearly 40,000 people living in its five-mile radius. The Dixie Fire further north, billed as the largest in modern California history, poses risk to another 15,000 as of this writing.

Together, the fires that are each less than 60 percent contained have burned upwards of 2,300 structures and nearly 1.2 million acres, according to a tracker by The New York Times. Another four infernos are currently blazing through northern California with more on the way sending smoke across the western United States.

“We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing,” California’s Chief of Forestry and Fire Protection Thom Porter said last month. “This is going to take a long time to come back from.” Indeed, nearly half of Lassen Volcanic National Park has been burned by the Dixie Fire.

Yet the crisis was just as predictable as it was preventable. While Democrats and their allies in legacy media knee-jerk blame climate change, the true culprit is negligent land management.

More than 100 years of fire suppression by the U.S. Forest Service has culminated in the build-up of wood fuel powering the megafires seen today. While high-intensity blazes primarily grow on federally mismanaged lands, state agencies still play critical roles in fire prevention efforts with Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) agreements with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct cooperative forest management. Nearly half the state is owned by the federal government.

Newsom, who faces a recall election Tuesday, dramatically cut California’s budget for wildfire prevention and resource management from $355 million in 2019 to $203 million, a more than 40 percent decrease on the heels of some of the worst seasons on record since modern-day tracking began in 1983.

Lawrence McQuillan, a senior fellow at the Oakland-based libertarian think tank Independent Institute, called the lack of resources devoted to prevention efforts “deliberate” in an effort for Democrats to prove their theories on climate change are correct.

“Climate change isn’t necessary nor sufficient for this problem to occur. What is necessary and sufficient for what we’re seeing in California is the lack of proper land management and fuel reduction,” McQuillan told The Federalist.

California’s forests are now dramatically overgrown, standing as colossal tinder boxes waiting to go up in flames the moment ignition strikes, whether it be from a lightning strike or a decrepit power line, as happened with the Camp Fire in 2018 that devastated the town of Paradise. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the company that pled guilty 84 counts of manslaughter over the blaze its powerlines ignited, is also suspected in causing the Dixie Fire, but has cut backroom deals with the governor’s office to avoid full liability payments.

Overgrown forests are also susceptible to beetle infestations that kill the trees and leave the dead wood as excess fire fuel. According to the Record Redding Searchlight, more than 163 million trees were killed in California between 2010 to 2019 primarily by bark beetles, raising the risk for mega-wildfires.

Without forest thinning, prescribed burns to trim the landscape, and salvage logging of trees knocked down, all barred by successful activism from radical environmentalists opposed to any human activity in wild spaces, California’s forests will continue to wreak havoc as they have always done pre-European arrival.

According to ProPublica, between 4 and 12 million acres burned naturally in prehistoric California every year. Between 1989 and 1998, however, state bureaucrats only burned an average of 30,000 acres a year. That number fell to 13,000 acres between 1999 and 2017. More than 4 million acres still burned across the state unmanaged. The difference between the fires of pre-historic California and today is their intensity and catastrophic nature.

“Ultimately, you’re going to have to remove excess fuels from forest land in California, or Mother Nature will do it for you. There’s only two options here,” McQuillan said. “If humans do this work, we can do it without seeing these megafires sweep California and cause so much property damage and loss of life… not to mention the toxic wildfire smoke released into the atmosphere.”

Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency transition team member and founder of JunkScience Steve Milloy outlined how the pollution caused by California’s wildfires has more than offset the progress made by its expensive cap-and-trade emissions program.

“Since 2012, California’s cap-and-trade system has reduced emissions by 180 million tons extrapolating through 2021 (at the 2019 level),” Milloy wrote last month. “But since 2012, approximately 12.35 million acres have burned. At 23 tons per acre, that makes 280 million tons of emissions.”

“If you blame the government for not managing forests,” Milloy told The Federalist this week, then “perhaps the greatest emitter in California is the government.”

So how responsible is Newsom in today’s wildfire crisis? After cutting the state’s prevention resources by nearly half in the face of an entirely predictable disaster, the governor misled the public about its readiness to confront the seasons ahead.

According to an investigative report published by CapRadio in June, Newsom overestimated the number of acres treated with prevention efforts, including fuel breaks and prescribed burns by 690 percent, when he repeatedly touted 35 “priority projects” by executive action at the start of his first term.

“Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres,” the paper wrote. “But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.”

When he claimed mission accomplished in a 2020 press release touting completion of his 90,000-acre goal over 35 projects, he was way off. Meanwhile, the governor’s unfinished target of 90,000 acres treated remains far, far below what is necessary for effective prevention efforts to keep fires from developing into high-intensity infernos.

“We need to be doing a million acres a year, for a long time,” Stanford Professor Michaele Wara explained to the paper. “That’s the scale where you start to achieve… strategic goals like fewer structures lost.”

In other words, Newsom needed to up the goal and meet it, not oversee aggressive divestment.

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The U.S. Department of Education is opening an investigation into whether a ban on mask mandates for schools by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis discriminates against students with disabilities. 

The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will probe the Florida rule which currently allows parents to decide whether to have their child wear a mask to school.

DESANTIS’ FLORIDA SCHOOL MASK MANDATE BAN BACK IN EFFECT AFTER APPEALS COURT ORDER

The investigation was announced in a letter sent to Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran from Suzanne Goldberg, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights for the education department.

“I write to inform you that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is opening a directed investigation into whether the Florida Department of Education may be preventing school districts in the state from considering or meeting the needs of students with disabilities as a result of Florida’s policy that requires public schools and school districts to allow parents or legal guardians to opt their child out of mask mandates designed to reduce the risk to students and others of contracting COVID-19 in school,” Goldberg wrote.

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Goldberg also stated in the letter that the investigation will “focus on whether, in light of this policy, students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education, in violation of Federal law.

“OCR is concerned that Florida’s policy requiring public schools and school districts to allow parents to opt their children out of mask mandates may be preventing schools in Florida from meeting their legal obligations not to discriminate based on disability and from providing an equal educational opportunity to students with disabilities who are at heightened risk of severe illness from COVID-19,” Goldberg added in the letter.

On Friday, one day after a Florida state judge ruled against a ban on school mask policies, Florida’s 1st District Court reinstated the stay and upheld DeSantis’ ban preventing rules requiring face coverings from being implemented in schools across the state.

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The corporate media and Democrats are treating Larry Elder, a black man, with a double standard, says the Republican California gubernatorial candidate.

“You know, I don’t want people to vote for me because I’m black or vote against me because I’m black. But there is a double standard,” Elder told The First’s Buck Sexton.

The New York Times, Elder recalled, recently demonstrated this divide on their front page.

“It was just a front-page article [in the] New York Times, it was negative about my candidacy. And it never once mentioned I’m black, never once mentioned that if I were to be elected, I’d be the first black governor of California,” Elder said. “Again, I’m not making a big deal out of that, I want to be the first Larry Elder governor of California.”

“However, on the very same front page, The New York Times, it was an article about the first female governor of New York. A woman by the way, who became governor because the previous one resigned, not because she got elected. That was a big deal for The New York Times, that first,” he continued. “But Larry Elder, because I have an R at the end of my name, I’m not a first anything. It’s just a double standard that I think we ought to be talking about.”

A similar blind spot in the media appeared, Elder said, when members of his security team were assaulted by unnamed attackers and a woman dressed in all black and in a gorilla mask with pink hair threw an egg at him. The left largely ignored the attack, which Elder said would not have happened if he wasn’t a Republican.

“Well you know what the reaction would be, they’d be talking about this in Bangladesh. And if I were a Democrat and some white woman wearing a gorilla mask threw an egg at me, they’d be talking about systemic racism, enduring racism, foundational racism, whatever kind of racism you can come up with. I’ve never played that game,” he continued.

Elder noted the corporate media’s efforts to cover up Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s failures, including California’s homelessness problem.

“Bernie Sanders cut an ad for him. Senator Warren cut an ad for him. Kamala Harris has weighed in. Joe Biden has weighed in. I will tell you what they never said though. They never said and I’m quoting, ‘Governor Gavin Newsom has done a good job for California.’ They’ve never said that,” Elder said.

“They’ve talked about this being a Republican takeover. They’ve not praised him on what’s done about the cost of living. They’ve not praised him on what he’s done about the homelessness problem. They’ve not praised him on the fact that crime is up 41 percent — shootings and homicides in Los Angeles,” he added. “They’ve not praised him on the fact that for the first time in our state’s 170-year history, Californians are leaving. It’s never happened before.”

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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(Watch the video for the monologue and an interview with the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard on what’s wrong in Washington and how to fix it.)

Washington Republicans are excited for the 2022 elections, and they have reason to be — they’re going to do well. They’re heavy favorites to take back the House of Representatives; and despite a very bad Senate map, it’s a coin flip they’ll retake that too.

None of this is too shocking: First-term presidents usually face a backlash, and often it’s a bloodbath.

President Barack Obama crushed Sen. John McCain, then lost 63 House seats two years later; President Donald Trump lost 42 seats in 2018; President Bill Clinton lost 54. In fact, the only first-term president to not lose House seats in the midterms in the past 55 years was President George W. Bush, in the post-9/11 2002 midterms.

This is the nature of politics: A new man is swept in and carries fellow party members with him, then two years later enthusiasm has waned, the president’s promises have turned into a more frustrating reality, and opposition voters are angry and fired up. So what happens? They punish the party in power.

All of that figures to be even worse for President Joe Biden. Nobody is passionate about Biden himself, and in 2022 Democrats won’t be turning out to vote against Trump, so even if Biden were doing a bang-up job he’d still be in for what his old boss called “a shellacking.”

But Biden is not doing a great job — he’s doing terribly. He ran on solving COVID, but COVID is, of course, still here. Even worse, so are the absurd restrictions COVID has placed on our lives: Our children are still masked, flying is still miserable, big businesses are being coerced into injecting their employees with a leaky vaccine, and small businesses are still being executed at the decree of state and local health officials.

Biden ran on bringing humanitarian values to the border. Instead, he has virtually abolished the border. By the end of the year, 2 million people may have arrived there, and hundreds of thousands more will have crossed undetected or simply arrived by flying here and then overstaying a visa.

Many of those arrivals have already disappeared into the U.S. interior, and some of them have been picked up by sex and labor traffickers. It turns out when you stop enforcing laws and backing the men and women on the line, crime takes over and people suffer.

Inflation is setting in because of course it is: You can’t go out and complain about setting $2 trillion on fire over 20 years in Afghanistan, then try to more than double it in one go right here at home.

Crime is rampant, and why wouldn’t it be? Just like on the border, stopping crime doesn’t require any complicated dissertations on root causes — it’s been with us forever, and it’s always been stopped by arresting and punishing the bad guys. That’s it. So naturally, that’s the one tactic it’s now unacceptable to deploy.

It’s all gotten so bad even corporate media are beginning to wonder if the semiconscious man they’ve spent nearly two years now essentially holding upright might not be all there. Who would have guessed?

And hey: If the old man decides to step down today, his replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, who is somehow even less popular. So all in all, Washington Republicans have reason to be happy.

But here’s the bad news: Conservatives don’t have reason to be happy — or at least we have just as much reason to be happy as we do for basically any Republican congressional majority.

Why? To explain, let’s take a step back first and look at the budget fights raging right now: Trillions of dollars in spending on what? “From Cradle to Grave,” The New York Times headline blared, “Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net.”

“The $3.5 trillion social policy bill that lawmakers begin drafting this week,” it reads, “would touch virtually every American, at every point in life, from conception to old age.”

It’s amazing: The Times is so excited they’re actually admitting that unborn children are alive.

True, there’s no guarantee Democrats will get everything they want in this fight, although if they don’t it will be because of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, not Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But that’s not the point: The point is they’re choosing to pick this battle in the first place, and damn the torpedoes. They know it’s dangerous and they’re doing it anyway. Why? Therein lies conservatives’ problem.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 81 years old. She’s worth tens of millions of dollars at least. She owns a vineyard. She has a refrigerator filled with expensive ice cream. And every single day she comes to work with the full intention of changing this country.

What did she say about the Democratic budget? That, “This legislation will be the biggest, and perhaps the most controversial, initiative that any of us have undertaken in our official lives.” And then she did it.

You see that in a lot of places. Do you think the public is happy that the military is giving out free transgender operations and having generals learn about “white rage”? Do they like their children being fed critical race theory? Do they like COVID relief being handed out based on skin color rather than need?

Of course not, but Democrats know that if they can get those policies implemented now, many of them will remain forever. They’ll lose Democrats in the process, but so be it — there will be more Democrats in the future. It’s impossible to watch politics professionally for over a decade, through some of its liveliest battles in a long time, and not come to the understanding that Democrats in general do politics differently.

Modern liberal politicians often come to Washington as activists — they want to change the world. Republicans, on the other hand, most often come to Washington because it’s prestigious. They want a feather in the cap of their successful career in business or law.

Here’s how this dynamic plays out: When Democrats are legislating on something major, they look around the field and say to themselves, “Yeah, we’re going to take some casualties on this one, but we’re going to change America.” And then they blast right through it. Pelosi is going to lose members for this overhaul of our country and she knows it — she’s just decided that given the trouble they’re already heading into, it’s worth it.

She’s thrown away a House majority before, back in 2010. But guess what? Before she did, she changed the entire country with Obamacare. That was her exit bomb; that was the sacrifice she made. And now she’s back, Obamacare is still the law (because of the Republicans and the legacies), and the temptation is going to return to laughing at her when she loses again in 2022.

But if she gets this budget through, well then who cares. Her legacy will be remaking the role of government and its interactions with an increasingly dependent class of citizens in the most major way since President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society 60 years ago.

Now, what do Republicans do when they’re in charge? And not just having the House — when they get to pass whatever they want without consequence — but when it matters.

When it matters, Republicans look around and say, “Oh no we can’t do that, we’d lose a man. The Democrats would take seats.” They are virtually a majority for the sake of being a majority. They just want to polish it up, put it on the shelf, and look at it. “Border? Abortion? Woof, those are tough fights, we’ll lose members. It’s an election year, after all, or if it isn’t, it will be soon.”

To put it simply, Republicans approach politics like America fights wars: They don’t want to lose a single man. Democrats, on the other hand? They look at politics like the Russians looked at Stalingrad: The congressman in front votes now; when they fall the next man gets elected and he will vote too.

So you see a repeating pattern to American politics: There isn’t a true back-and-forth. Instead, Democrats change the country a lot while they’re in power. Then Republicans hold power and push the pause button. There’s no rollback that a new executive order can’t undo.

Maybe they cut taxes; bring back the Mexico City policy; junk a regulation that Democrats created but didn’t manage to implement; but that’s about it. When was the last time Republicans passed a huge law — one that changed America forever the way Democrats do every time they hold serve in American politics? You don’t see it.

This is how you use politics to remake the country. This is why it always feels like conservatives are fighting a rearguard action — because they are.

The problem is multiple-fold in Washington, where calcified think tanks lack both the faculties and vision needed to defeat an enemy they’ve been losing to for so long, and where politicians are either lazy, risk-averse, easily led by corporate interests, or a combination of all three.

Hopefully this is changing. The intelligentsia of the city is disrupted, with new and interesting people and organizations rising to the occasion. At the same time, there are also more active, populist, hard-hitting Republicans coming to the fore — Republicans who want real change, not just the promise of one.

It’s a culture shift and it’s long needed, but like anything so entrenched as culture, change takes time — time that we don’t really have.

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Originally Appeared Here