On January 7, 2025, the modern California experiment collapsed once and for all, obliterated by flame

Bookends to failure: Left, an LAPD officer on patrol on Melrose Ave. in L.A.’s Fairfax District on May 30, 2020 during the George Floyd riots. Right, the sun sets through the smoke in Pacific Palisades on January 9, 2025. Photographs by Christopher LeGras.

On January 7, 2025, the modern California experiment collapsed once and for all. It had been teetering on the brink since May 2020, when the George Floyd riots nearly tore the city apart as officials largely stood inert and watched. The final collapse was catastrophic. The politicians and officials who’d spent the last 25 years assuring the populace that big government was the solution, that, to steal from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “the warmth of collectivism” could solve all of our problems, failed in the worst imaginable way.

Like the 2020 riots, it wasn’t just the official response to the Los Angeles wildfires. It was the preparation, which was nonexistent. It was decades of underinvestment in and neglect of basic public safety. To take just one glaring example, the Los Angels Fire Department (LAFD) has fewer fire stations today than it did in 1970, despite the fact that the city’s population increased by 70% over that 55 year span. According to one estimate, LAFD needs 60 new stations to meet demand. Despite the fact that L.A. is particularly prone to the California trifecta of natural disasters — wildfire, landslides, and earthquakes — we rank second to last among the nation’s 50 largest cities in the ratio of firefighters to residents.

Over the last two decades in particular, our city’s and state’s political class have preferred to lecture and finger wag rather than govern and lead. We’ve heard endlessly about racism, even as those selfsame officials allowed our public schools to devolve into cauldrons of failure and despair.  Those schools, of course, are overwhelmingly attended by non-white students, millions of whom have graduated barely able to read, write, and reckon.

The failure of our public education systems is a perfect microcosm of the failure of the California Model. Thanks to the iron collectivist fist of the teachers’ unions — which like the rest of the political class never tire of lecturing and finger wagging — those millions of young people are barely qualified to work as Door Dash drivers. The failure of public education is a direct precursor to the failure of the California Model. Those millions of young people are living lives of quiet despair that every few years explodes in the form of riots or gang turf wars.

The analogy to the explosion of the January 7, 2025 wildfires is impossible to miss. Just as the California Model failed to prepare those students, it failed to prepare the city, county, and state for natural disasters that are part of the natural cycle in Southern California. Last year the city of Los Angeles spent 40% more on a homeless population that comprises barely 1% of the city’s total population than it did on its fire department.

L.A. can’t build new fire stations, but it can spend millions on politically correct “road diets” that impede emergency response, in order to placate a tiny minority of bicycle activists. Google Maps screenshot of a road diet in front of LAFD Station 9 in Skid Row, one of the busiest stations in the world.

Above all, the California Model prizes words over deeds. So long as you hew to the correct articles of faith, so long as you recite the proper incantations, particularly on race and the environment, your actions are secondary. Even if your actions lead directly to mass suffering and death, your rightspeak and rightthought will ensure your exoneration in this one party state. Some animals are more equal than others.

If our failed education system is an analogue to the wildfires, the wildfires are an analogue to the California Model. In the year since the fires exploded, the very people who failed so mightily to prepare and respond have spent more time and exerted more effort covering their own asses than assisting those who were most affected. On Tuesday, new LAFD Chief Jamie Moore — who frankly just looks like a political hack — told the city’s Board of Fire Commissioners, “It is now clear that multiple drafts [of the Palisades after action report] were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report. This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief.”

Read the last two sentences of his statement again, and allow me to translate: “Even though I’m Chief, I am not responsible. And I can assure you I will make no effort to remedy the situation.”

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with California’s political class, of which Moore is most assuredly a part. He speaks the language of failure, which is the language of the California Model.

Here on the one year anniversary of the fires it is beyond dispute that they were preventable. The L.A. Times has reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses on January 2, despite evidence that the January 1 Lachman Fire was still smoldering and historic Santa Ana winds were inbound. 

If true, it’s an example of how failure and neglect at the top trickles down through the ranks. When an Assistant Chief declares, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire,” a very specific tone is being set. Kristine Larson is the black lesbian head of the department’s Equity and Human Resources Bureau, which, unfortunately, is all you need to know.

Words, not actions, indeed.

Acolytes of the California Model will howl racism and homophobia. To which the only reasonable response is, bullshit. There are plenty of competent black lesbians out there, just like there are plenty of competent gay Asians, transgender Latinos and bisexual Pacific Islanders. It just happens that this particular black lesbian clearly is unsuited for a leadership role in a fire department. Carrying people out of burning buildings is central to a firefighter’s job description. It’s why the rest of us look at them as heroes. This particular black lesbian not only rejects her responsibility for that part of the job, but tosses in some victim blaming to boot.

This is how you set up a city and its populace for disaster. This is how you make disaster inevitable.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, in the face of historic fire warnings, helped make disaster inevitable by jetting off on a literal ego trip as part of a presidential delegation attending the swearing in of the new president of Ghana, despite the fact that during her campaign she promised to never leave L.A.

Former LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley helped make disaster inevitable by failing to pre-deploy resources to the most fire prone areas even as winds kicked up to 80 miles per hour. She released 1,000 firefighters she could have ordered to stay on less than 12 hours before the fire.

The breakdown was complete. It was total.

It was also entirely predictable.

Hewing to the California Model, L.A. has spent billions to not solve the homelessness crisis, erecting a massive, corrupt, utterly unaccountable Homelessness Industrial Complex that preys on the very people it purports to help. Words, not actions. Meanwhile, with vanishingly few exceptions like Councilwoman Traci Park (disclosure: Park is a friend), city leadership failed to push for compliance with a state law that requires cities to identify and evaluate evacuation routes. Meanwhile they passed ordinances declaring L.A. a sanctuary city for some that, when it mattered most, provided sanctuary to no one.

Words, not actions.

I seethe with rage when I reflect on January 2025. I shake with fury when I reflect how much destruction and suffering could have been avoided had city officials taken a few small, common sense steps that the average fifth grader could have figured out. It’s the same on issue after issue after issue.

The California Model has failed. The question, then, is what to replace it with.