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“Dick Van Dyke, Cher and Barbra Streisand are among thousands of Malibu residents who have been forced to abandon their homes as a fast-moving brushfire rages through Southern California,” reported the New York Post on December 10, 2024. The fires, fueled by strong winds, served as a warning of blazes to come. On January 7, 2025, with meteorologists warning that fire was on track to strike Los Angeles, mayor Karen Bass flew to Ghana to attend a presidential inauguration.
On Wednesday, fast-breaking fires were turning vast swaths of the city into an inferno, with residents fleeing for their lives and embattled firefighters running out of water. When Bass returned, she refused to answer questions about the water shortage and whether she owed the people an apology for leaving the scene of a disaster. In her brief statement, Bass did not acknowledge cutting the fire department’s budget by nearly $20 million. Her incompetence was obvious to all but the willfully blind, but there’s more that people should know. The California Democrat, once on Joe Biden’s short list for a black female running mate, is a member of her party’s Castro wing.
The LA native, born in 1953, graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills and earned a master’s degree from USC in social work. In 1973, at age 19, Bass traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), keystone of the New Left, and the Castro dictatorship. Bass says that she built houses, toured the country and listened to speeches by Fidel Castro, whom she heard many times on her eight trips to Cuba during the 1970s. By that time, Fidel had made it clear what he was all about.
One generation out of Spain, the white Stalinist dictator drove a formerly prosperous nation into abject poverty and his Communist regime was more repressive than his Soviet sponsors. As Cuban cinematographer Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven) showed in Improper Conduct, Castro tossed homosexuals into forced labor camps, the fate of many other dissidents on the island. By the late 1960s, as Paul Hollander showed in Political Pilgrims, even former Castro supporters were denouncing the totalitarian regime. It wasn’t so for Karen Bass, who in 2004 gained election to the California Assembly.
In that role, Bass visited Cuba, still under Castro, who held many black political prisoners, including Eusebio Peñalver, held captive and tortured for 28 years. In her junkets to Cuba as a member of Congress, Bass never took up the case of a single Cuban political prisoner, black or otherwise, never called out the regime for human rights violations, and never called for free elections. Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008 and handed power to his brother Raul. When Fidel finally passed away in 2016, Bass said in a statement:
As Cuba begins nine days of mourning, I wish to express my condolences to the Cuban people and the family of Fidel Castro. The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba. I hope together, our two nations will continue on the new path of support and collaboration with one another, and continue in the new direction of diplomacy.
Comandante en Jefe, “commander in chief,” was the way Cubans were supposed to address Castro, a dictator for more than 50 years. Once again, Bass failed to issue any criticism of the Máximo Líder, and failed to flag any human rights violations or call for the release of political prisoners. A more servile apologist of the Communist regime would be hard to find, and that became an issue in 2020. Bass claimed she regretted the “Comandante en Jefe” statement, now wiped from the House server. Biden opted for Kamala Harris, but Bass’s experience in Cuba would still come into play.
Communist states chose people for key positions based on fidelity to the Communist Party, not on merit, experience and proven competence. Under mayor Bass, the Los Angeles fire department was headed by three lesbians, known more for woke ideology and DEI concerns than proven competence fighting fires. When the fires flared up in early January, the “historic” mayor flew off to Ghana, which should come as no surprise.
As Bass showed in Cuba, the maintenance of power overrides concern for the welfare of the people. And on the far reaches of the left, fire plays an important role. For example, in 2018, Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times recycled Mike Davis’ case for “letting Malibu burn.”
In this vision, wealthy cities were created as “thickets of privacy” against “LA’s working classes and people of color.” Such “white flight” was enabled by allowing development where it shouldn’t be and by “subsidizing those affected by the inevitable wildfire in the form of cheap fire insurance and squadrons of first responders deployed around the clock at the hint of an ember.”
So it’s “Burn, baby, burn!” all over again. As Peter Collier liked to say, the song of the sixties is over, but the melody lingers on.