Gavin Newsom Burns His Own Firefighters, Doug Emhoff Searches for a New Secretary, and WaPo Carries Water for a Sanctioned Terror Financier
28th January 2025
Even before the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, 6 in 10 Californians said the state was heading in the wrong direction. Add in the blazes that have since exposed Gavin Newsom’s incompetent governing, and it’s clear that Newsom’s flacks have their work cut out for them.
We can almost sympathize, then, with the Newsom administration’s pathetic response to a deeply sourced report from our Andrew Kerr and Susannah Luthi that detailed Newsom’s decision to disband a volunteer firefighting unit known as Team Blaze.
The move left the California National Guard without a complete firefighting force in L.A. for 10 days. We’re not the only outlet on the story. And yet Newsom’s press team responded not by disputing the facts but by calling Kerr—an award-winning reporter—a “pizzagate peddler.” They also called the firefighting unit “inadequately trained.”
“That’s weird,” our editors write, “because the Newsom administration tapped the group to help fight the 2021 Dixie Fire, the largest single-source wildfire in California state history, according to the transcript of a September 2021 National Guard press briefing, and the volunteer unit, which was funded by generous donors, met federal standards for combating wildfires set by a little-known federal agency known as the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.”