It is only five months since California last burned down. That happened while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was away on a foreign jaunt, and Governor Newsom took the brilliant opportunity to have himself photographed as his state burned.

You’d have thought that the complete destruction of the Palisades and the loss of billions of dollars of property in the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles’s history would have focused minds. Perhaps someone would even have taken responsibility for the water hydrants that had no water?

But no — five months later both the mayor and governor are still in place.

And now their state is burning once again.

This time the cause is even more man-made. If you’re a politician seeking to avoid blame you can always blame wildfires as simply an act of God, lament the problem and move on.

But when the fires are as man-made as these latest ones — and encouraged — well then it’s different.

The fact is that the unrest, car-burnings, Apple-store lootings and more that have overtaken California in the past week can be placed firmly at the door of California’s leadership.

Newsom has been Governor of California since 2019 and since he came into office everything in his state has got worse.

His attacks on the rich, insane lockdown policies and encouragement of lawlessness have meant that his state has seen a record exodus.

In 2020 alone, some 725,000 people left California. The next year some 692,000 Californians called it a day. And in 2022 a staggering 818,000 people left his state.

Newsom inherited the most prosperous state in the Union. A state that is also one of the most beautiful in the country.

But he has made sure that life in California has become increasingly less livable. Not least by chasing out the people who have been following the rules and welcoming in people who break them.

Like Mayor Bass, he likes to talk about the importance of California being welcoming to immigrants. But in doing so they make sure that there is no difference between immigrants who have paid to follow the rules and come to this country legally and the millions of people just in recent years who have broken into the United States illegally.

Newsom and Bass insist that California is a welcoming state, and that to threaten the security of one Californian is to threaten all.

But why should there be zero difference between someone who has made it to California by following all the rules and an illegal migrant who broke the law to come to the US and (in the case of at least half a million people here illegally) got a criminal record while being here?

If I was a left-wing do-gooder on the make I think I’d try to draw the clearest possible line between those two things. But not Newsom and Co.

For the nation’s richest state it should be a source of shame that California has the highest rate of poverty of any state in the union.

In 2021, California’s poverty rate was 11%. After just one more year of Newsom the poverty rate rose to 16.4%. Another year of him and by 2023 the state’s poverty rate was a disgraceful 18.9%. Meaning that almost a fifth of people living in California were living below the poverty line.

And then there is the homelessness problem — the most visible example of California’s deep sickness under Newsom and Bass. Today there are almost 200,000 people in California who are living homeless.

You can call them “unhoused.” you can say they have the “right to rest” or any number of other get-outs, but if you escape from the language games the left loves to play that is a disgrace. Today the single state of California contains almost a quarter of the total homeless population of the USA. There are some 45,000 people in Mayor Bass’ Los Angeles alone.

That is the result of California’s Democrat leaders own choices. After all, if you declare yourself a sanctuary state, and welcoming to all — whatever the nature of their arrival in this country — you may make yourself look kind and welcoming.

But you will also create exactly the conditions that now exist in Los Angeles. You’ll see the routine lawlessness, lack of public safety, open drug use and the massive costs that ordinary taxpayers then have to pick up.

In the past five years alone a modest estimate suggests that California has spent a staggering $24 billion on homelessness programs.

This means that ordinary Californians pay in every imaginable way for the policies of their state. In the same way that New Yorkers have to pay through increased crime, lawlessness and housing costs (among much else) for the policies that Kathy Hochul has brought to New York.

Policies that Hochul proved utterly incapable of defending when she was questioned by Rep Elise Stefanik in Congress today.

Like Newsom, Hochul hopes to dodge the consequences of her own policies.

And so they double-down.

After federal agents, the National Guard and then the Marines were sent into Los Angeles to quell the rioting, Governor Newsom sent straight for his lawyers to get the troops out of his city. As if he had it so well under control until the National Guard came in.

Today he again condemned the arrival of the troops who are stopping the lawlessness in his state. According to Newsom the arrival of troops is “unconstitutional,” “madness” and “theater.”

Apparently hitting a cop for the cameras isn’t theater. Standing behind a podium and pretending that the detention of violent foreign criminals is an attack on every Californian is also apparently not theater.

But try to address the lawlessness and put it down? Apparently that is the real problem in the eyes of Newsom and Bass.

Well everyone who isn’t a deranged open-borders activist can see who the real actors are here.

The National Guard and the Marines, like the beleaguered LA police, are trying to put out the fires. Perhaps the once-Golden State’s political leaders could stop starting them?