Newsom Hopes To Blame Climate Change To Avoid Recall

Apocalyptic global warming predictions of doom have long been fashionable, quasi-religious beliefs of 21st-century liberalism. But after the recent wildfires that have devastated the state, some California Democrats will be clinging to climate change as a matter of political survival.

The epic incompetence demonstrated both by Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass during the crisis isn’t just a matter of bad optics and some excruciatingly embarrassing moments for two career politicians. It has also created the possibility that even in a one-party state completely dominated by the Democrats, they might be held accountable for their egregious lack of leadership and terrible decisions that turned a natural disaster into an unprecedented catastrophe that has cost dozens of lives and destroyed more than 12,000 homes and buildings.

While the notion that this might be a turning point to reverse the overwhelming advantage possessed by Democrats in California might be fanciful, the two are highly vulnerable to recall elections that, especially in the case of Bass, might actually force her from office.

That’s only if the voters of the fire-ravaged state are ready to think seriously about the glaring evidence of bungling that left some reservoirs empty, fire departments not fully budgeted as well as neglect of proper water, land, and forest management practices that could have, at the very least, mitigated the suffering and the billions in damage inflicted on the state’s people.

Newsom and Bass have not gotten off scot-free when it comes to critical scrutiny from the media for their poor crisis management skills and for decisions that helped turn the fire from a bad problem into something much worse. But the response from most of the liberal chorus in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times has been to defend both of them. LA Columnists like Mark Barbarak and Steve Lopez have both decried what they call the “politicization” of the fires by President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

They prefer to blame “Mother Nature” and climate change.

Liberal pundits can be relied upon to demonstrate loyalty to their party in spite of the sorry performance of the people in charge. But the party line about the disaster isn’t so much a function of opinion slingers. Rather, it is a concerted effort throughout legacy media to shift the public’s attention away from the evidence of ineptitude, often rooted in liberal ideologies like DEI policies and extreme environmentalism.

Instead, the coverage of the fires in major outlets like The LA Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have been peppered with a steady stream of articles insisting that the fires were in part or principally the result of global warming. As journalist Michael Shellenberger pointed out, most of these articles are based on “junk science” rooted in assumptions about warming rainfall and temperature that are not backed up by empirical evidence.

Like so much of left-wing commentary, these pieces seem to be primarily a form of virtue signaling that takes it as a given that even the mildest skepticism about claims that climate change is producing more extreme weather than in the past is “denial” that must be dismissed rather than examined or debated.

This is backed up by the way leftist-controlled search engines like Google treat the subject. Searches about Newsom and Bass and the fires or how prioritizing DEI over life-saving skills or environmentalist-based management decisions impacted the fire produce page after page of articles solely devoted to “debunking” any claims about their mistakes. Readers are instructed that what has happened is merely “Mother Nature” taking its revenge on humanity for having the nerve to build houses in a dry climate.

But even left-wing outlets are starting to notice that, as with their efforts to instruct Americans how to vote in the 2024 presidential election, not all Californians are ready to parrot the propaganda the media is throwing at them.

As one Politico columnist noted with dismay, even in those areas of LA where Trump lost to Kamala Harris by more than 60 points, most people aren’t blaming their losses on the climate change mantra, preferring instead to focus on the more immediate causes of the problem, including the failures of Democrat politicians.

That’s a huge potential problem for Newsom and Bass.

Government by plebiscite, including recall votes, are the last vestige of the political progressives who held sway in California in the early 1900s. They sought to inject more democracy into government, and their earnest belief in forcing politicians to face recall votes and to be limited by statewide propositions is still part of the state’s constitutional framework.

In many instances, recalls can be a waste of time and money. But in a one-party state where voters have few options other than those provided by a Democrat Party that leans hard to the left, recalls may be the only way to create some sort of accountability from an otherwise unacceptable governing class.

Newsom, who is in his second term as governor and is prevented by term limits from running again, easily defeated a recall effort led by radio talk show host Larry Elder in 2021. But it’s possible that another try at recalling him might have better luck even though he only has less than two years left in office.

On the other hand, Bass, who is halfway through an already shaky first term as LA mayor, could be in trouble. Newsom had some cringe-inducing moments with the press during the fires that reminded voters of his mistakes that helped worsen the crisis. But Bass’ poor judgment in being on a political junket to Ghana during the height of fire season and an inability to answer questions on her return will linger in the public’s memory. So will the willingness of the fire chief, whose own conduct and qualifications are also in question, to blame the mayor for cutting the department’s budget.

Both Newsom and Bass may be counting on the leftist orthodoxy about climate to bail them out. And the help they’re getting from their media cheerleaders and some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who own the virtual public square (other than Elon Musk’s X) give them reason to hope that a majority of Californians and Angelenos will put their problems down to a sinful mankind and their capitalistic practices rather than the failures of their elected leaders. Or at least that’s what Democrats are hoping they will do.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.