Newsom Is On Fire

Burning Down The house

Below is an opinion piece I have just written for an Irish/British Newspaper THE NEWSLETTER (it’s the oldest English language newspaper on the planet). To see the full article go here.

My state governor, Gavin Newsom, has left California to jet off to COP30, the climate change junket in Brazil. There he is delivering speech after speech, blaming the recent Los Angeles wildfires on “climate change” and fossil fuels.

The Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres and destroyed roughly 6,800 buildings

​President Trump is boycotting the summit. He calls the whole exercise a hoax, and he’s right. Newsom, who sees himself as the clear frontrunner (at least inside his own head) for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president, is determined to turn tragedy into campaign fodder.

Back home, anxious for answers, Los Angeles fire victims are lobbying in Sacramento, the state capital, for a law that would let the state attorney general sue oil companies for damages from any “climate disaster.”

The fires were catastrophic. The Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres and destroyed roughly 6,800 buildings. The Eaton Fire scorched 14,021 acres and wiped out more than 9,400 buildings.

Together they killed at least 31 people and displaced more than 100,000 residents, and caused property losses estimated between $28 billion and $53.8 billion. These rank among the deadliest and costliest wildfires in California history.

Gayle Ali and her husband, Rasheed, lost everything they owned in the Eaton Fire. It happened on their 43rd wedding anniversary. Their Altadena home of 30 years – their photo and music studios where they worked, their cars, furniture, and family photos – was all destroyed. “A life erased,” she told the Los Angeles Times. She now wants someone to blame.

“What truly angers me is knowing that this wasn’t just bad luck.” She points to oil company scientists – from Exxon – who in the 1980s supposedly warned of a global warming catastrophe yet covered it up for profit.

That story has become gospel for victims desperate for someone to blame and someone deep-pocketed to pay. But it rests on a myth. Yes, some Exxon researchers studied global warming scenarios. Yet in the 1970s and early ’80s, many of the same mainstream scientists now pushing global warming catastrophes were then warning of a coming global cooling. Media headlines then blared ice-age fears.

Internal oil company documents reflected the era’s genuine scientific uncertainty – not a conspiracy. No one was certain then, and despite today’s confident models, the precise role of any single factor in any specific fire remains debatable. What is certain is that people crave a villain.

Blaming distant temperature trends or profitable energy companies is easier than confronting messy human failure. And there was a lot of human failure – with empty reservoirs, broken fire hydrants, and a fire service dedicated to pushing diversity quotas rather than actually fighting fires. (They were so proud that their leadership had so many gay women.)

And you don’t need a flight to Brazil or a hearing room in Sacramento to find the real alleged culprit behind at least one of these blazes. Just step into the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, where prosecutors are building the case against Jonathan Rinderknecht. The 30-year-old Uber driver is accused of deliberately starting the Palisades Fire.

Court filings reveal his alleged motives: resentment of the rich, admiration for terrorism, and fury over a breakup with a girl. Rinderknecht google searched “Reddit: let’s kill all billionaires”, ranted to his passengers about capitalism and being “pi**ed off at the world,” and viewed Luigi Mangione – the terrorist suspect in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO – as a Robin Hood figure. After his ex rebuffed him, Rinderknecht left manic voicemails, vented to ChatGPT, and then allegedly set the fire.

When asked why someone would set such fires, Rinderknecht said he was innocent but others could do it because of “resentment of the rich enjoying their money” and compared it to the murder of the innocent UnitedHealthcare CEO.

There is a growing pattern: overeducated, under-achieving young men raised in a culture that never told them “no”. They coast on participation trophies and moral superiority until ordinary disappointments – a stalled career, romantic rejection, the realisation the world doesn’t owe them genius recognition – shatter their self-image. Then someone else must pay.

The LA fire victims deserve real help rebuilding and honest answers, not revenge theatre in Sacramento or grandstanding in Brazil. Suing Exxon or blaming the atmosphere won’t prevent the next fire starter.

Real solutions begin with uncomfortable truths. America is in the middle of a cultural rot that justifies leftist violence against their political opponents.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere did not burn Los Angeles. A resentful man with a lighter did. Pretending otherwise guarantees the next fires – literal and political – will be even worse.