The old media logjam has broken: Even the left is now getting its news from new media
Sara Foster sees the light
In my essay yesterday describing how the wildfires in the Los Angeles area appear to finally be making conservatives out of a lot of partisan knee-jerk Democrats, I used a quote that I think is important because it illustrates a major cultural change in a way that is not obvious at first. It also demonstrates a new political reality that the Democratic Party has not yet grasped.
The quote was from a tweet on X by actress Sara Foster. This is what she wrote:
We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits. @MayorOfLA @GavinNewsom RESIGN. Your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party.
Note the facts this clearly partisan Democrat cites.
- Empty fire hyrdants
- Uncleared brush
- Reservoirs emptied by governor
- Fire department budget cut by LA mayor
Every one of those facts were things that were reported widely and extensively on X and across the entire conservative news spectrum. Some, such as the uncleared brush, have been reported by the conservative press outlets for years.
At the same time, it is almost certain that these facts were reported poorly or not at all by old media alphabet outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. Even if these outlets were interested in reporting these facts (which they generally are not because the facts make Democrat politicians look bad), their reporting methods and presentations are so outdated and inefficient that they make it difficult if not impossible to report a lot of hard data. Instead, they focus on feel-good interviews, videos of their “reporters” standing in front of buildings talking, and loud bombastic panel discussions that provide no information at all.
In the past, this contrast would create an impenetrable bubble among leftists like Sara Foster. Conservatives would know these facts, but she would not, and because the sources generally came from news outlets perceived by her to be conservative, she would dismiss them as irrelevant or non-existent.
Now however she not only is aware of this information, she cites it confidently in expressing her opinion.
In other words, the logjam has broken. Even partisan Democrats are now getting their news from alternative new media outlets, and they are accepting what they are learning because they have found it is much more reliable than the lies they have been fed by those old media sources for the past ten years.
The consequences of this change are beyond profound. It means that the old media of pro-Democratic Party propaganda outlets like NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, etc. can no longer protect Democrats from their failures. Instead, the party’s own supporters are now reading alternative and often conservative news sources that loudly and plainly bare those failures out for all to see.
There is nothing bad here. To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, shining the light of truth on things can only lead to good things. And to finally get partisan Democrats to see the long-standing corruption and incompetence of their party is the best thing I can imagine happening in many years.
The world of American politics is about to experience an upheaval not seen since the 1850s, when the Whig Party vanished, replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party.
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Suggested Edit: Replace “conceived” with “perceived”.
In the past, this contrast would create an impenetrable bubble among leftists like Sara Foster. Conservatives would know these facts, but she would not, and because the sources generally came from news outlets conceived by her to be conservative, she would dismiss them as irrelevant or non-existent.
F: Change made. Thank you.
This is why I let my Ground New subscription lapse: It’s a great idea, but they’re limited by their source material. Almost anything in the formerly mainstream media is suspect and most of what they report on, I’m not interested in, anyway.
Clarifying a few things:
The situation with the supposed “cuts” in the LA firefighting budget is complicated: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/how-much-did-the-l-a-fire-department-really-cut-its-budget
Response to wildfires in California is an all-hands on deck affair. There have been fire crews from other cities and counties from throughout the region and abroad including Canada and Mexico. I’ve seen evidence of this first hand. When there was a fire near Mojave there were crews from all over the area.
Sarah might be referencing a lie Trump told that connected endangered fish in Northern California to the fire storm suffered in the LA basin. These issues are not connected because LA gets its water from different sources. California’s water supply system is a very complicated. It would have been nice if Trump learned something about it before lying about it.
There was one reservoir near Pacific Palisades that was empty and offline. I haven’t seen an explanation for why, but Newsome has ordered an investigation into it.
That being said, most of the fire hydrants went dry because they ran out of water fighting the fires. How much that one reservoir contributed to the problem will be evaluated. As will the lack of vegetation cutting and what that contributed to the fires.
It’s not clear how much of this disaster could have been avoided. The region had virtually no rain for eight months. The Fall and Winter months when we normally get rain have been very dry. Then LA got hit with hurricane force winds. We got hit here in Mojave with winds gusting to 60 mph during a storm that lasted for 33 hours. I don’t know how long the storm lasted down in LA, but it went on for quite some time.
I haven’t been personally affected by the fires, but I know two families down in Altadena who lost their homes. I’m close to one of the families; I’ve house sat and taken care of their cats and dog many times. I was down there house sitting three weeks ago. I feel awful for them. And everyone affected. It’s exasperating to see Trump, Musk and others immediately casting blame with lies, half truths and besides the points without expressing an ounce of empathy for those affected.
Give it a year and they will forget all about this.
Unless they are directly effected by it. And I mean actually effected, For a few of those Hollywood stars this was their second or third home and it meant nothing to them.
What a difference a third of a century makes.
Back in 1991, there was an out-of-control fire in the hills behind Oakland, California. It was shaping up to be just as bad for Oakland and the surrounding cities as any of these fires. The winds were high that day, and eucalyptus trees were everywhere. But this was before California started draining lakes and removing dams for environmental reasons. It was before California stopped using water for agriculture or city use in favor of letting it drain to the ocean to keep from stressing the fish in the rivers or the Sacramento Delta. This was before the State forbade PG&E from trimming vegetation from its power lines, thus it was before mandatory Safety Power Outages, thus the water pressure in the Oakland hills remained strong despite all the flow through the pipes. And the fire roads through the wilderness areas were still cleared of vegetation and free of erosion, making them accessible for the emergency equipment.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/a-look-back-at-the-1991-oakland-hills-firestorm/
The Democrats had only just taken over the state, so they had not yet caused the cascade of damage that has doomed the state today.
California is lost. Doug Messier’s comment is one reason why this is so. It may look like the people are beginning to see the light, but they still blame all the wrong things and wrong people. They still are just as emotional and are still just as committed to their feeling that they are right and we are all wrong. They still form their feelings from what the Democrat leaders say, and until those leaders admit to being wrong, they are still the parents to their Democrat constituents/flock/3-year-old-children. They still refuse to think for themselves and still follow their leaders. California is lost.
Apparently, Governor Newsom has been busy “Trump-proofing” California. Who could have imagined that he would feel that the best way to do it is to burn down Los Angeles County? I especially like the soundbite in which the lady who has lost her house is begging him for help, but he is busy being on the phone to Biden, because Newsom has no idea how to handle an emergency and hopes that Biden is smarter than him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkvdDVnkeiw (4 minutes)
I will aver up front that Doug Messier makes some worthwhile points.
Now, they don’t add up to a case that Karen Bass or Gavin Newsom are good at their jobs, or that they weren’t net negative contributors to this crisis, because they really were. But they do point to the hard reality that most of what made this fire so destructive must be sought in environmental and development policies that go back decades, well before either politico ever reached their present office.
The water management issues and Green Gaia land policies are bad enough, and yes, those go back decades. But….looking at a photo of a crisp shirt-and-tie-clad Richard Nixon hosing down his roof to battle a wildfire in 1961 that has gone viral on X the last few days has brought a few sharp observers to note just how different these areas of Los Angeles County looked back in 1961. Much of it was still agricultural – a lot of it, orange trees – and because it was, it not only limited wildfires by elimination of underbrush, but functioned as fire breaks against residential areas. Well, almost all of that is gone now, isn’t it?
So, how much misinformation are Donald Trump and Elon Musk peddling? I think the problem for Doug is that it’s not a question that will be very relevant to many votaries, because the real underlying message is a valid one: This fire is the result of grave misgovernment of California over many years, and most of that misgovernment has been the work of liberal Democratic (or, hardly better, liberal Republican) establishment officials. This isn’t just tribal narratives at work (though yes, that exists); there are a lot of ferociously angry people in Pacific Pallisades, and most of ’em were not exactly instinctive Trump voters, to put it mildly.
Let us use the wayback machine….
LAFD: “Design for Disaster” (1962)
The Story of the Bel Air Conflagration
https://youtu.be/UxnC1WW95XE
26:42
“1962 documentary film produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department, describes the historic Bel Air / Brentwood wildfire that started on November 5, 1961 in the Bel Air community of Los Angeles. Over the course of three days, the wind-driven fire destroyed 484 homes, damaged 190 others, and burned over 16,000 acres. The then $30 million disaster led to new laws in the City of Los Angeles to eliminate wood shingle roofs, and to clear dry brush away from homes.”
Recently, Governor Newsom and the California legislature cut the wildfire 2024-2025 fiscal year’s budget by one-hundred million dollars. Also, this link is from MSN. They do report the news from time to time… I think that this recent willingness to report is also due to competition with less censored outlets.
Regarding Trump and the water supply.. It is true that this is a more complicated issue with Newsom destroying dams vs building reservoirs and favoring letting the snow runoff into the ocean vs provide more water to the farmers… This shows the same brilliance as getting rid of fossil fuel vehicles and equipment while needing to import energy and suffer brown-outs. Germans and Californians are of one mind. Glad that I left this authoritarian state..
https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/fire-and-rescue/gov-newsom-cut-fire-budget-by-100m-months-before-lethal-california-fires/ar-BB1rg3RM
“The Story of a Firefighter”
Los Angeles Fire Department (1962)
A David Wolper Production
https://youtu.be/dYu7n_kwbWM
25:35
“For 3 years he’s been studying to be a Fire Department Captain. He knows only 1 out of 10 will pass the promotion exam…”
My how times have changed.
D. Messier – I’m pretty sure that Trump is not our president yet, so his lying or truth-telling is irrelevant.
Although there were reports of a fat, orange-haired guy running around several LA neighborhoods with a propane torch. Or was it a small model of a Falcon 9, sent up from Boca Chica? Video yet to be reviewed. (That was from a press release today from the White House – no lying there of course.)
To Richard M,
Doug Messier does have good points—the problem is that both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of the sin of being anti-infrastructure.
Folks on the Right don’t like paying for dams and levees—Lefties because of misplaced ecological concerns:
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-snail-darter-revisited-famous-fish.amp
Libertarians need to get it through their thick heads that we don’t live in the age of parchment and powdered wig sporting fops—and Greens don’t need to act like the Unabomber Manifesto should be our next Constitution.
The GOP gave us the Flint water crisis—but they did try to warn against this:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-divisive-link-fluoride-childhood-iq.html
It used to be everyone who worried about this were considered to be like Johnny Carson’s Red Stater spoof “Floyd R. Turbo.”
Just like the Channeled Scablands critics and impact-theory supporters were spoofed.
You know what I think America needs?
A forth branch of Government—the Infrastructure Branch that ONLY consists of civil engineers—they have open access to federal funds and the greens in th DNC and the Mitt Romney types are just going to have to work around them.
A pox be upon both parties.
This is fleeting. I’m with pzatchok, they’ll revert in the next month or so when this slips into the past. And for the intransigent, “choice” will compromise them to the high price this right has.
For this tragedy, the Democrats greatest regret is it occurred while Biden was still in office. We should expect the braying donkeys to be out in full force after the inauguration. They will blame climate change, just as they did with the crumbling pier in Santa Cruz California and demand money to fix the problem they created via neglect, obstruction and incompetence.
The Mayor of L.A. was planning a quiet vacation before the new President took office. Reality stepped all over her plans and highlighted just how unqualified she is. Imagine how a 7+ earth quake will completely shatter the infrastructure in Los Angeles. Would you want this person in charge during that crisis?
The FEMA money has been criminally misappropriated to transport illegal aliens, overwhelming the infrastructure of most cities. Hurricane victims still don’t have necessary aid, less so if you are identified as a Trump supporter.
Despite both hard and soft deflection, this crisis lands squarely on the shoulders of Democrat “leaders”.
Again—infrastructure has no friends. Fiscal hawks gave us the Flint water crisis..but the war against dams is also a problem coming from the DNC.
Were I Trump, I’d nix the idea of shuttering Ames and instead propose that all foreign aid/UN/NATO funding go to rebuilding California–and that includes the dams.
The red staters better not utter one word against this seeing lots of California dollars dug them out of hurricane/tornado outbreaks.
This is an opportunity to show why America First matters.
D. Messier:
…lie Trump told that connected endangered fish in Northern California
——
Delta Smelt. Look it up.
—–
LA gets its water from different sources. California’s water supply system is a very complicated.
——–
Are you playing matte and bailey? “Different” as in “different than N. CA” as the Motte, then “different” as in “various” as the bailey. It sure looks like it with your “complicated” line.
“The California State Water Project (SWP) …. spans more than 705 miles from Northern California to Southern California”
https://water.ca.gov/Programs/State-Water-Project/SWP-Facilities
Lawsuits about the Delta Smelt have required the state to pour millions of acre-ft of water that could be impounded out the SF Bay. That has impacted water deliveries from N. CA to Socal. If you think that the lack of water, exacerbated by the reduced N. CA flow had no effect on these fires, you should check your nose before you start throwing the word “lie” about.
California is prone to wildfires even with normal rainfall. LA has had a long drought and then got hit with hurricane force winds gusting to 100 mph. Fighting fires in those conditions is very, very difficult if not impossible. I’ve been through many windstorms in the High Desert, including one with hurricane force winds. I can well imagine how the fires overwhelmed the response.
This is not a California only phenomenon. There have been wildfires in places suffering from similar conditions all around the world. Australia has suffered greatly from them. There have also been large fires in Europe. The Earth is warming, and weather is becoming more extreme. This is a fact of life. It’s not going to get any better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia
What I really object to very much is how everyone piled on while the fires were still raging to trash the state, often with inaccurate information or half truths. Trump and Musk showed no empathy for anyone affected by the fires. This happens much less (if at all) when a hurricane with wind and rain hits red states. That’s basically what happened to LA, minus the rain. This is one country; when one part of it gets hit with a natural disaster, we empathize and rush aid to it.
There’s going to be plenty of reviews of the fires and firefighting operations with lessons learned. Hopefully we will rebuild better and smarter. And that they will correct the mistakes that were made. If we’re smart we’ll move ahead with a commitment to never let something this catastrophic happen in LA again.
As for the fact that California can be better governed, I would tend to agree. We probably disagree on precisely how. But, I’m going to leave that for another day. I would point out that California is not unique in needing better governance. There are red states that lag in many indicators — size of their economies, education, health, poverty rates, etc. Some of these states are get much more back from the federal government than they contribute. California’s economy contributes more than it gets back.
I said that people like Doug Messier blame all the wrong people and things, and here he is, proving me right again by blaming global warming, as though the globe has warmed so much that it makes a difference.
The real reason is that environmentalists don’t let anyone control the trees or underbrush, so fires are able to easily get out of control very fast. Too fast to respond quickly enough. Another aspect is that the fire departments are being understaffed and poorly equipped, so those who can respond quickly enough are already overwhelmed.
People here corrected Doug, yet he still insists that we only have misinformation or half-truths, then he spouts off his own, again blaming the wrong people. And talk about not caring, what about that 2019 video in which the Los Angeles firefighter declares that if she has to rescue someone, then he was in the wrong place to begin with. Rescue is the sole purpose of any fire department, but those in the L.A. fire department and in the L.A. city hall have forgotten that. Or is everyone in L.A. in the wrong place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY2tGRROksw (Babylon Bee: LAFD’s First Paraplegic Firefighter: 3 minutes)
The lessons that will be learned from this fire were learned half a century ago in a similar L.A. County fire. Those lessons were ignored by those in charge. Unfortunately for Doug, those in charge were his favored Democrats and liberals. Yet somehow, Doug expects that perfection in governance is possible. Of course every state, nation, city, and workplace could be better governed. Even lessons learned tend to end up with some other aspect receiving too little attention. This happened here in California, when Illegal aliens took precedence over fire preparation and forestry management. The attention went to caring for the flood of illegals and went away from fire management. Wouldn’t we have had the resources for those two if we hadn’t allowed more than ten million beggars cross into our country, draining our resources instead of adding to them, as our legal aliens do?
Back in 1912 era, there had been a major fire in a U.S. forest in which a dozen fire fighters were killed when they could not escape the shifting wildfire. The Department of the Interior vowed this would never happen again, and began a program of putting out all fires in National Forests as soon as they started. Half a century ago we already knew that this was the exact wrong thing to do, because it allowed the underbrush to grow too much, sending fires into the crowns of the trees, where it was impossible to stop them. We knew this by the time of the great Yellowstone Park fire, half a century ago. About that time, the California Conservation Corps was clearing underbrush in many of California’s forested areas, in hopes of preventing out of control wildfires. (Come to think of it, the adults were in control of California, at the time.)
It seems that this is no longer being done where the Santa Ana winds pose annual hazards. As I said: California is lost. Doug is an example of why.
No A/C for you—we need juice for cat videos
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-big-tech-centers-power-fair.html