This year’s deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary
In the weeks, months, and years to come, there will be plenty of blame to share for the lapses that let the California wildfires of 2025 get so out of hand, costing lives and tens of billions of dollars. The fact that I wrote “of 2025” to distinguish these fires from other outbreaks should make it clear that these fires are anything but unprecedented, meaning that they should have been anticipated and their causes addressed. That they weren’t points to a massive failure in policy.
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As I write on Sunday, January 12, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley is pointing fingers at Mayor Karen Bass for stripping the department of key resources and funding, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vows to find out the reason fire hydrants went dry during efforts to battle the devastating blazes, and everybody wants to know why a major reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty and offline for a year. When faced with hard questions, state and local officials including Bass and Newsom are practicing more impressive dodging and weaving than we saw during the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight.
But that dodging and weaving can’t erase the serious missteps that led to this very predictable moment.
Regulatory Delays with Devastating Consequences
“Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits,” Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. “In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it’s too late.”
For example, as I’ve written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn’t deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject—presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
Wasted Water
“From water rules that cause shortages to red tape that fuels extreme wildfires, state and federal policies have deepened California’s most pressing environmental challenges,” Regan wrote in 2023. “As a result, the Golden State now confronts the consequences of these choices, with destructive effects on its natural landscapes, its economy, and its residents.”
“Water in California is often allocated not through markets but through inflexible, acrimonious, and ineffective political processes,” he added. He called out subsidized water—especially, though not exclusively, for agricultural use—which divorces supply from demand. Also at fault are “use it or lose it” rules which discourage water conservation lest allocations be reduced in years to come.
When it comes to sourcing and storing water, “Officials have delayed or rejected proposals to build desalination plants that convert saltwater into drinking water,” even as “the state hasn’t built a significant new reservoir in more than 40 years,” leaving water from rains and floods to flow away, uncaptured. “Nearly all of the water that gushed through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta was flushed out to sea in an effort to comply with state and federal environmental regulations aimed at protecting the delta smelt.”
Badly Managed Forests
Also important, California has failed to effectively manage its forests. “Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area),” Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: “With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind.”
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California’s forest management as a serious concern.
“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California,” Weil noted. “Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.” She emphasized that “California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire.”
As Weil summarized the issue, “We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years.”
The problem is that if you don’t let forests burn in a natural and healthy way while focusing fire suppression on human communities, you’re likely to get out-of-control conflagrations. In the absence of water to fight the resulting fires, you’ve lost any ability to manage the situation.
Reforms To Fix the Mess
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America’s Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a “study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel ‘was the most important,’ accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent.” Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
They also want to expand markets for construction materials, fuel pellets, and other products that can be made from trees removed while clearing potential fuel. That would make forest restoration profitable and allow it to be handled, at least in part, by private industry. I’ve written about such efforts before, including a promising effort in Northern Arizona.
“There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts,” Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.
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I kicked off 2025 with “The Pendulum Has Swung Again,” an editorial in which I noted how the lefty/progressive pieties of yore were being swept away by the righty/MAGA pieties of the new Trump and Change regime.
It didn’t take long for this narrative shift to be confirmed in grand style by The Great Resetter himself, Donald J. Trump:
I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.
Those are the bold words President Trump uttered in his inaugural address to the nation as he returned to the White House to begin his second administration this past January. And, like the bold words of so many politicians before him, they were a bunch of hot air.
But still, just because a politician is lying (i.e., his lips are moving) doesn’t mean that a dramatic “tide of change” hasn’t swept across the planet this year.
On the contrary. A remarkable shift has taken place in popular understanding and popular discourse in 2025. This shift has changed the conversation surrounding some of the core topics the independent media has been covering for years. The shift has nothing whatsoever to do with the politicians, academics, talking heads and other bloviators who presume to be “thought leaders” and “trend setters.” And, despite the best efforts of those who look for the storm cloud in every silver lining, this narrative shift is actually something to be celebrated.
So, hopefully you’ve heard my doom-and-gloom story of the year in New World Next Year 2026. Now, let’s end the year with a little holiday cheer by examining how 2025 became the year that Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom started tuning into conspiracy reality.
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Historians of the future may very well note that 2025 was the beginning of one of the most consequential revolutions in recent history: the health revolution.
Last year the usual establishment mouthpieces were running fake news articles trying to “debunk” the fact that the Big Food cartel has been filling their products with synthetic chemicals, food dyes and other toxic crap.
But this year the gangsters of the Big Food syndicate—from Kraft Heinz and General Mills to PepsiCo to Kellogg to Tyson Foods, along with their retail accomplice, Walmart—are falling over themselves to announce the removal of those very chemical poisons from their products.
Last year, COVID vaccines were still officially deemed safe as mother’s milk and the health establishment was pushing boosters on everyone with a pulse.
Last year, the WHO passed their scamdemic treaty, and the erection of the biosecurity state seemed like a fait accomplis.
But this year, faced with a $2.5 billion budget deficit and a loss in its reputation worldwide, the WHO—and, indeed, the entire biosecurity project—is in shambles.
But as bad as things are for Big Pharma and Big Food, they’re even worse for Big Climate.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE CLIMATE HOAX
Veterans of the climate hoax have been gobsmacked by the monumental implosion of the climate change narrative that took place this year.
Last year it was business as usual, with the Chicken Littles of the Malthusian, anti-human “climate emergency” narrative furthering their agenda with little perceptible opposition. They continued to argue for killing humans and killing pets and they continued building their $100 trillion carbon market, monopolizing the world’s resources under the guise of “saving Mother Earth.”
But this year the public, alert to the politicization of science exposed by the scamdemic, has finally begun to question and even push back on this pseudoscientific scam.
We saw early signs of this narrative tidal shift in the farmer protests of recent years and in the growing awareness that the greenwashed, virtue-signalling “Net Zero” platitudes of the politicians were in fact a smokescreen for a collective death pact signed by the Green Reaper himself.
But the “climate crisis” hoax didn’t just stall this year; it burnt to the ground.
It continued with the stunning narrative about-face of climate agenda-pusher Bill Gates, who directly contradicted decades of his own fearmongering about weather gods to admit that climate change will not, in fact, lead to humanity’s demise.
And it culminated in the world-historic failure of COP30—the United Nations’ annual climate summit—which not only failed to produce any agreement of substance but which generated headlines like “The climate cult’s dissolution is inevitable.” Even theLos Angeles Times was compelled to declare that America is “finally waking up from its decades-long climate catastrophism stupor.”
If you had told the average conspiracy realist in 2024 that the climate cult would be on death watch by the end of 2025, he would surely not have believed you.
But what if you told that same 2024 truther that 2025 would also be the year that moved the Overton Window on 9/11 Truth?
9/11 TRUTH TURNS THE TIDE
January 1, 2025, dawned like every New Year since the catastrophic and catalyzing false flag attack of September 11, 2001. For New Year’s revelers in the conspiracy reality community, the thought that anyone within 100 miles of the corridors of power would be caught openly questioning the conclusions of The 9/11 Commission seemed as remote as it ever had.
And CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou appeared along 9/11 Truth researchers and activists at a three-day conference dedicated to dissecting the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory.
And, of course, the Chair of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Ron Johnson, has joined the ranks of those daring to question the events of September 11.
As Corbett Reporteers know by now, though, more important by far than the action of any of these individuals in staking their public reputation on 9/11 Truth is the narrative change that has taken place around the idea of 9/11 Truth. Today, pointing out that the US government’s explanation of 9/11 is a tissue of lies is no longer an automatic social death sentence. And, emboldened by these examples of 9/11 Truth-telling, millions more people are aware that there are serious, unanswered questions about the events of that day than were aware even a year ago.
And, best of all, an added bonus of the turning of this turning of the tide on 9/11 is that people are now questioning other false flag events and the illegal wars of aggression that those events have enabled.
CALLING OUT GENOCIDE
In years past, the default position of all establishment news sources has been to uncritically accept the Israeli narrative in any conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinians. To the extent that Palestinian voices were even allowed onto such programs, it was to mock, denigrate and dismiss them as representatives of a savage, terror-supporting people.
But it wasn’t until 2025 that that long-simmering pot finally came to a boil. After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials late last year, more and more people came out this year to denounce Israel’s campaign of carnage in Gaza. Now it’s gotten to the point where the usual grifters, bandwagon-jumpers and literal sons of CIA agents that populate the ranks of the Mainstream Alternative Media have had to completely change their views on the genocide in Gaza.
And, as usual, politicians everywhere were compelled to jump in front of that parade and pretend to be leading it. Although the establishment press is loathe to admit it, a sea change has taken place on the international stage this year, with many long-time defenders of the US/Israel orthodoxy stepping out in defiance of the imperial consensus on occupied Palestine. Mexico led the way by recognizing the Palestinian state in February of this year, followed by Canada, Australia, the UK, France and several other countries later in the year.
It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic the change in public opinion on the situation in Palestine has been in 2025. Just as in the wake of 9/11, when Bush and the neocons managed to turn a tidal wave of public support and sympathy into worldwide hatred by using the event as an excuse to wage an illegal and immoral War of Terror, so, too, has Netanyahu and his band of Likudniks managed to turn near-worldwide sympathy and support over the (similarly suspicious) events of 10/7 into a wave of condemnation for a blatantly genocidal assault on Gaza. (Israel’s 9/11, indeed.)
It seems 2025 was the year that the magical spell the Zionists have cast over the world for generations—the one that deems all criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitic“—was finally broken.
But after reading all this, we’re still left with the most important question: what does this all mean for the year ahead?
WHAT WILL 2026 BRING?
I could go on and on about the profound narrative shifts that have taken place this past year.
In fact, I haven’t even mentioned the spectacular downfall of Klaus Schwab and the utter abandonment of the “Great Reset” agenda. Who even pays attention to the WEF and their minions at this point?
And I haven’t talked about the public furor over the ongoing Epstein cover up and the confirmation that all sides of the phoney left/right political charade have a vested interest in keeping the public’s attention away from the topic of political pedophilia.
But I know what some of you are thinking: “James, how can you possibly be celebrating these narrative shifts? There are still problems in the world!”
Yes, thank you in advance to all those who will point out that:
just because the Big Food cartel are removing food dyes from their products doesn’t make their products healthy; and
just because the US government are going to review the childhood vaccination schedule doesn’t mean that they will end vaccination; and
just because Gates has admitted that rising temperatures are not an existential threat doesn’t mean he will start promoting a pro-human agenda; and
just because some politicians are promoting (partial) 9/11 Truth doesn’t mean any 9/11 perp is about to be frog-marched in an orange jumpsuit to the courthouse; and
just because people are now emboldened to call Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians out for the genocide that it is doesn’t mean the genocide is about to stop; and
just because Klaus Schwab is out doesn’t mean globalism is finished; etc.
I am well aware of all that, obviously.
But if that is your objection to the celebration of the narrative shift, then you haven’t understood the narrative shift.
The narrative shift isn’t about what politicians or academics or establishment puppets are saying or doing. It’s about what you and your neighbours and those around you are saying or doing.
Pleasse understand what it is I’m saying here.
Of course, not everyone is suddenly a super-awake Level 99 Jedi Truth Warrior who knows that the flat earth is being controlled by 12-dimensional lizard people from the planet Archon.
But more people than ever are ready and willing and able to hear about the toxins in the food and the poisons in the vaccines and concede the truth about the climate hoax and ask questions about 9/11 and call the genocide in Gaza a genocide in Gaza. This is a good thing.
The only thing the would-be rulers of humanity really fear is the idea that we—the great, teeming, unwashed masses—might one day wake up to the fact that humanity is being enslaved by a handful of people.
That we might discover that their control over us is primarily narrative control.
And, to the extent that that is what has begun happening this year—even if it’s only the thinnest edge of that giant wedge—we are in fact winning.
But even if you don’t even see the faintest spark of hope in any of this yet, there is still one thing to keep in mind: the narrative shift I speak of is what we make it.
We are not helpless spectators who are watching this shift happening with no part to play in it. Rather, we are making things happen (or not) by participating in conversation with those around us. We are informing, educating and mentoring those who are just now waking up to reality . . . or we’re standing on the sidelines critiquing the efforts of those who are trying to do so.
What happens in 2026 is not a foregone conclusion. It will be the end result of the efforts we make today (or don’t make today) to encourage this narrative shift.
I know what side I’m on, and what I’m going to continue to do. And, with your support, I’m going to continue doing it.
Let’s make 2026 the year we put the first (if not the final) nail in the bastards’ coffin.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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The U.S. intercepted and seized a vessel in international waters near Venezuela, marking the second such operation in recent weeks, multiple outlets reported Saturday.
The U.S. Coast Guard led the operation with assistance from other branches of the military, U.S. officials told CNN.
The interdiction follows on the heels of the Dec. 10 seizure of a sanctioned tanker off the Venezuelan coast. It also comes just days after President Donald Trump announced a sweeping blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers arriving to or leaving the South American nation, the ruling regime of which he designated a foreign terrorist organization.
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“The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping,” Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”
When asked following the first seizure what the U.S. would do with the confiscated oil, Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”
The operations come amid months of escalating U.S. pressure on Venezuela.
American armed forces have steadily increased their presence and operations in the southern Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, including numerous strikes on drug smuggling vessels. The buildup has fueled speculation about a potential full-scale confrontation with Maduro or even a material push for regime change.
Trump reportedly offered Maduro a deal in late November to vacate power in exchange for safe passage for him and his family. The U.S. also placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro in August, the largest sum ever offered for a sitting head of state.
In announcing the blockade Tuesday, Trump warned the “illegitimate Maduro Regime” that the “Armada” surrounding the country “will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.” He also demanded that Maduro “return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”
Despite the growing pressure, Maduro dispatched two non-sanctioned vessels Thursday carrying oil to China, Reuters reported.
The Coast Guard referred questions on the operation to the White House, which did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
