The story of the Hebrew Bible is, at least in some part, the story of God punishing the wicked.
Welcome to wildfire-beset Los Angeles, or as The Post so poetically put it, HELL.A.
I don’t mean to suggest that Angelenos somehow deserve the catastrophe that has befallen them; to do so would be not only misguided but unforgivably cruel.
But as we’re reeling from one of the greatest disasters ever to befall an American city, we must be brutally honest, especially if we want to prevent this kind of calamity from happening again.
And a brutally honest assessment points to one inconvenient truth: The devastation of Los Angeles occurred largely as a result of people in power adhering blindly and madly to a very bad religion.
It was the woke religion, which judges people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character, that propelled Karen Bass to the highest office in town.
When the warnings started trickling in, days before the inferno, that LA might be looking at “the Big One,” Bass flew to Ghana to partake in some utterly meaningless bit of “diplomacy,” as if attending foreign inaugurations were part of an American mayor’s job.
When she finally returned, Bass stared silently at a British television reporter who asked a host of barbed questions, then gave a press conference in which she directed anyone seeking assistance to “URL,” a blooper that would’ve been hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.
It was the woke religion that led Bass to shave $17.6 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget so that she may have more money to coddle the city’s increasing — and increasingly unhinged — homeless population. The $23 million cut she had originally asked for was even bigger, clearly reflecting the mayor’s priorities of virtue-signaling over actual safety.
It was the woke religion that inspired the mayor, a champion of the gospel of diversity, equity and inclusion, to appoint a string of incompetents to the city’s all-important water board, and to dream up fantastic projects involving recycled wastewater and then shrug when deadlines were missed, budgets swelled and the city was left high and dry.
It was the woke religion that led California Gov. Gavin Newsom to address the United Nations about climate change and ban sales of gas-powered cars in his state by 2035, while slashing $150 million from California’s wildfire-prevention budget.
He then went on to wildly overstate the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by a whopping 690%.
And in one more mind-numbing act of succumbing to the woke religion’s fanatical environmentalist dogma, Newsom championed the protection of the 3-inch-long delta smelt fish, denying Los Angeles of at least some additional water supplies it sure could’ve used when the reservoirs emptied out mid-day Wednesday.
In the coming weeks and months, we will no doubt hear a string of pious excuses from various progressive politicians, explaining why it was a series of unfortunate events — not their own ruinous policies — that contributed to this unprecedented devastation.
But voters, as the most recent presidential election proved beyond doubt, no longer care.
They understand that the Democratic Party no longer truly thinks about constituents, policies or outcomes. All it has left are articles of faith.
Democrats continue to bray about “criminal justice reform” while crime spikes and spirals out of control in every major city they control.
They preach diversity and inclusion while actively excluding some groups — most notably Jews — from their rainbow coalition.
They drone about social justice while forging new forms of discrimination.
They condemn “the patriarchy” while destroying every institution Americans have come to trust and respect.
And they do so because they see themselves not as servants of the public — that unwashed mass made up of imperfect human beings — but as priests of a cultish ideology that must be served, consequences be damned.
The LA fires ought to come as a reckoning, but they’re not the only example that this cult is inflicting nothing but suffering on ordinary Americans.
The same ideas have turned Chicago into America’s murder capital.
They’ve turned New York’s previously safe subway system into an apocalypse on wheels.
They’ve turned Philadelphia into the leading American city in drug-overdose deaths.
Everywhere you turn, misery stems from the same set of misguided convictions, funded by the same sources and boosted by the same political organizations.
LA’s plight should be all the proof we need that enough is enough.
It’s time we reject — completely, utterly, vehemently — not only the servants of this bad religion, but the bad religion itself.
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