Los angeles

Taxpayers subsidize LA unrest through California’s ‘protest-industrial complex’

Los Angeles has erupted into violence and at the center of it stands a cast of progressive activists and political operatives – some generously bankrolled by California taxpayers. One organization in particular has emerged as a key player: the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA. The LA-based nonprofit has long pushed radical positions on immigration – for example, in 2018, it spearheaded a campaign to abolish ICE. Its stated mission is to “build power, transform public opinion, and change policies” to achieve “full human, civil, and labor rights.” Critics might describe CHIRLA instead as a well-funded political engine for the open-borders left. And taxpayers might question the source of that funding.

LA riots

The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability

From our UK edition

As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.

LA

Can Trump have Newsom arrested for fiddling while LA burns?

A great American city is descending into chaos, and the leader most capable and concerned enough to save it is 2,500 miles away, sitting in the Oval Office. Meanwhile as they can see the smoke rise from their houses, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom are so desperate to see President Donald J. Trump fail, they would sacrifice their own constituents on the altar of political expediency rather than intervene to protect life and liberty.For his part, the President has suggested that border czar Tom Homan was right to threaten to arrest Newsom. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.

Trump should ban trans athletes competing against women at the 2028 LA Olympics

In threatening on Truth Social to withhold federal funding to California for allowing biological men to compete against women, Donald Trump was trying to restore fairness to amateur athletics. He was also setting the scene for a major showdown at the pinnacle of professional athletics: the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.The President on Tuesday cited a “transitioned male athlete” who had “won everything” as he warned Governor Gavin Newsom that funds would be cut if his executive order, aimed at protecting women’s sports, was not implemented.But in trying to make the state comply with his directive, he is also applying pressure to the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which this week signaled it would sidestep the order.

LA Olympics

The Palisades, reimagined

You’ve got to be careful what you put in your mouth in Los Angeles. In a gourmet ice cream parlor near Venice Beach, my ten-year-old daughter grabbed a small tub from the freezer. Halfway through eating it, she noticed the label indicated that it was HUMAN GRADE and featured a pawprint motif. This was a flavor meant for dogs. In a part of the world renowned for enhancement and augmentation, one finds many foods and beverages that have had a little work done: soft drinks boosted with collagen, cappuccinos laced with chaga (an anti-oxidant mushroom), granola fortified with “adaptogens” (herbs that combat stress), or salad dressings infused with CBD. “California sober” is a new phrase I learned this week from an old friend, Judd Weiss.

palisades

The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed

From our UK edition

There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles.

The magical remaking of Melania Trump

Of all the images that emerged from the new administration last week, few were as meaningful and portentous as Melania Trump in oversized aviators and snug black cap in North Carolina with her husband, Friday morning, to inspect the damage remaining from Hurricane Helene back in November.  Mrs. Trump, it seems, had actually wanted to travel to California, where she and the president later landed to perform a similarly styled wellness check on wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles. But Trump insisted North Carolina come first — both to show off his return to presidential posturing as well as to highlight the abandonment many North Carolinans believe they’ve endured at the hands of FEMA and the Biden administration.

The California fires and the reckoning on liberal governance

Fires in Los Angeles are raging and still barely contained as we go to press, with estimates of the rebuilding costs rising beyond $150 billion. By the time you read this, they’ll be under control and there will of course be plenty of time for finger-pointing — but The Spectator likes to be ahead of the curve, so we’re starting now. What we’re seeing in California is the complete failure of an experiment in one-party Democratic rule, a state level encapsulation of a party taken over by the fringe elements of its base. Given the pile-up of scandals, Californians might finally have had enough. But of the lot, which is the most ludicrous?

fires

‘God willing, we will rebuild the Palisades’: locals survey the devastation

In Los Angeles earlier this month, it wasn’t just the buildings that burned — they were homes, family businesses and places of worship. Yet, the Pacific Palisades community still stands. Sarah Peterson was at home when she got a text about a nearby fire. Fires near the Palisades weren’t uncommon, but when she opened her front door to check, she was only greeted by a wall of smoke. “I’ve been through other fires before, but I could tell this one was really, really close — and too big to ignore,” she said. Her first thought was of family. “You grow up with a feeling of community, and family, and home, So obviously your immediate thought is to make sure that everyone is OK,” she said.

los ángeles

The slow death of the California dream

Thousands of Californians have lost their homes and livelihoods to an ongoing inferno. I write this while tracking the flames approaching my property. For many of us, the fires are both a natural disaster and a deathly reminder of the catastrophic consequences of government incompetence. A government that has promised to protect and serve us has proven itself to be woefully unprepared and grossly inept in the face of crisis. Amidst the Californian ashes, anger and frustration are growing.  The consequences of the Los Angeles fires are not entirely shocking. They serve as a grim confirmation of a long-standing trend. For nearly a decade, California has been trotting down a path of self-destruction, rejecting all affinity for competence in favor of ideological dogma.

california fires
fire

When is a fire an earthquake?

The fire now engulfing whole neighborhoods in Los Angeles will soon engulf the politicians who failed to protect them. The first casualties will be Mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom. They are already “dead politicians walking.” It is important to recognize that Newsom and Bass are not being held responsible for a “natural disaster,” even one of horrific scale. Nor should they be. They should be held responsible for failed leadership, for misplaced priorities, for the misuse of high tax revenues (no one can say Californians are undertaxed), and for policy choices that failed to meet the first responsibility of any government: protecting citizens’ lives and property. Responsibility for those failures is bound to spread well beyond Bass and Newsom.

Angelenos are learning who their real friends are

Los Angeles witnessed something astonishing this week — ninety-mile-per-hour hurricane-force winds fanning the flames of uncontrollable wildfires. It is in extraordinary circumstances that the ordinary becomes all the more critical. Functioning fire hydrants, properly staffed public safety departments, an available mayor: all basics of government which citizens should come to expect. Yet Angelenos found the basics sorely lacking in response to the fires that ravaged the Palisades, Malibu and other coastal communities.   While no single person or decision could have prevented the resulting devastation, an assessment of local government’s preparation for and response to this crisis shows a litany of failures that have become all-too familiar to Californians.

angelenos

Jose Andrés’s mixed emotions

In one of the grubby little hypocrisies that have come to characterize Joe Biden’s single term, the president awarded Jose Andrés the Presidential Medal of Freedom last weekend — at around the same time as signing off on another $8 billion weapons sale to Israel. A previous lot to head off to our top Middle East ally may well have played a part in the air strike that killed seven people working for Andrés’s World Central Kitchen in Gaza. Such complex contradictions may explain Andrés’s muted reaction to receiving the honor: one of Cockburn’s sources saw the chef dining with his family and friends at Nobu after the ceremony. When the spy approached Andrés at the bar the chef was ebullient — yet upon being congratulated he turned solemn.

jose andrés

The astounding absence and silence of the LA mayor as her city burns

I’m not sure that there was ever a good time for Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass to be on a presidential diplomatic mission to Ghana. But if there was, it certainly was not this week. As wildfires raged across Southern California burning over 15,000 acres and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate their homes, word spread that the mayor of the City of Angels was missing in action.  Her former mayoral challenger, LA realtor Rick Caruso, spoke to Fox LA about the city’s mismanagement and the scale of the disaster: “We've got a mayor that's out of the country, and we've got a city that's burning.

los angeles mayor

The unfulfilled life: Ask Me Again, by Clare Sestanovich, reviewed

From our UK edition

Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’, to journalism in Washington and nannying in Los Angeles. Despite her probing of everything (it’s no accident that all the chapter headings are questions), Eva receives few answers and doesn’t follow the usual bildungsroman path of self-discovery.

Was the left right about Emperor Trump?

Everyone wants to be an American, right? Or to enjoy our way of life anyway. So it would seem as millions continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States illegally, while others make monumental sacrifices to become naturalized. Still, things may get easier for people wanting a taste of America if President-elect Donald Trump’s imperial dreams come true.Left-leaning outlets have been panicking for a while now over the possibility that a second Trump term would result in an American Empire of sorts. Trump’s reign would be eerily similar to Julius Caesar’s, Politico warned ahead of the 2020 election; the pair’s similarities are “uncanny,” the Globalist declared in October 2024.

Saint Joan and saucy Eve: a single woman split in two

From our UK edition

Fresh out of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz introduced herself to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.’ It was 1960, and while her writing was the sheerest bliss, ‘Eve Bah-Bitz with the Great Big Tits’, as she was known, was herself a work of art. Beauty, she learned at school, was power and ‘the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty’. So it was her stack (36 DD) that opened doors for her until, in 1972, her friend Joan Didion told Rolling Stone magazine to publish Eve’s first story, ‘The Sheik’. That same year, Didion also got Eve’s art into Vogue. As a result, Eve was ‘fucked up in the extreme’ about Joan. When, in 2016, Lili Anolik wrote about Didion’s L.A.

The Californication of the Democratic Party

When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, an overjoyed Los Angeles Times boasted that his goal was to “make America California again.” Biden has fulfilled the Times’s vision, if with less than complete success. Over the past few weeks, however, lunchbucket Joe from Scranton has been unceremoniously dumped by the Golden State elite — Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, George Clooney and a passel of tech oligarchs — to be replaced with one of their own, Vice President Kamala Harris. But given the chances of a GOP win this year, the Californians have another favorite in the wings, Governor Gavin Newsom, for 2028. Harris’s elevation and Newsom’s looming challenge are but parts of what can be best described as the Californication of the Democratic Party.

California
crowd

Everything is under (crowd) control: the evolution of riot response

Worldwide unrest is great for those in the riot-gear business. Shields and batons have historically cornered the market as the cutting edge in crowd control, but in recent years it’s evolved to include robots, armored trucks and drones. Milipol Paris is the homeland security expo of all expos. This is the kind of giant showroom where you will find law enforcement and private security agents checking out the newest innovations in robot dogs, armored vehicles and unmanned turrets as if they’re going from painting to painting at the Louvre. The Milipol expo comes around every two years. In 2023, you would have seen men plugged into VR headsets killing terrorists with a pistol.

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

From our UK edition

On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and ‘rock’s most committed iconoclast’, as his New York Times obituary described him, for 27 years, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, aged 52. A year after that first, snot-filled seduction, the Zappas were married, a week before Gail gave birth to Moon Unit, the first of four children. Moon’s name is not a compound noun: Unit is her middle name, given to reflect how her arrival turned two people into a single family – Frank’s idea.