Daily Caller
Like Administrative Arson, California’s Bad Ideas Spread Like Wildfires
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Frank Ricci
California’s wildfire crisis is a result of a mix of poor public policy, excuses and administrative overreach. This crisis is not solely due to natural phenomena but is exacerbated by years of misguided priorities and policy mismanagement.
In California, regulation has often been elevated to a near-religious status, where compliance with progressive ideals sometimes comes at the expense of public safety. This regulatory environment turns practical solutions into bureaucratic nightmares, where even simple tasks require navigating an endless maze of permissions and paperwork.
The result is a state where water resources are mismanaged, from inadequate retention to failing to have sound contingency plans for pumping when power is out or ensuring the system is designed to handle the fire load.
There is an overemphasis on environmentally friendly policies without adequately balancing the needs of the population or accurately measuring their impact and effectiveness.
When your home is on fire, you need a quick, competent response, properly supported by staffing, resources and clear lines of authority.
The prioritization of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) over merit-based hiring is evident in places like the Los Angeles Fire Department under Chief Kristin Crowley. Her commitment to DEI is often highlighted, leading one to question if this has potentially compromised operational readiness.
The primary focus of fire departments should be on the priority of life safety, incident stabilization and property conservation. When diversity overshadows meritocracy, there’s a shift from equal opportunity to equal outcomes.
Across blue states, there is a trend where HR managers focus more on diversity and soft quotas than ensuring applicants have the necessary physical strength, mechanical aptitude and cognitive ability for the job, regardless of immutable characteristics.
LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson, in a recorded statement, responded to a query about her ability to rescue someone from a fire by saying, “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? Well, my response is he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
In the same clip, she focused on the racial composition of firefighters rather than their competence.
Merit should be blind to race or sex; it is about ensuring that firefighters or officers can master the skills, knowledge and ability needed to do the job.
Victor Davis Hanson has commented: “It was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI-Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.”
Moreover, fire departments in cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and New York are still dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic. There is a call for the reinstatement of firefighters who were dismissed for not being vaccinated, suggesting this was an opportunity to purge viewpoint diversity.
Elected officials should not socially engineer fire departments. True diversity comes from educational opportunities like school choice, opportunity scholarships and breaking the stranglehold of teachers’ unions while holding superintendents accountable.
Qualified personnel and proper water management alone won’t mitigate fires. Congress and California need to untangle the web of conflicting government agencies in wildland fire and forest management, ensuring clear lines of authority for public safety.
Environmentally friendly logging and cooperation with fire services for forest management could provide jobs, create fire lines, and ensure quicker response times.
Advanced technology for early detection, such as sensing fire towers, drones and satellites, should be utilized to direct air assets, allowing for a rapid response with helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft to stop or slow the spread of fire from the onset.
America does not have enough staffed air assets stationed, properly geographically deployed and on alert to respond at a moment’s notice. This means deploying air assets throughout the West Coast and in some cases changing policy to allow flying at night and ensuring availability seven days a week. The same applies to bulldozers and other heavy equipment; they must be pre-approved and ready to respond before any incident occurs, cutting through the red tape.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) and the federal government have not met expectations, offering excuses rather than solutions. The public demands accountability not just promises. It is time for California to adopt common-sense wildfire management, focus on merit, manage natural resources wisely and reduce the bureaucratic hurdles that hinder effective action.
Only then can we address this crisis with the urgency and efficiency it demands.
Frank Ricci is a Fellow at Yankee Institute and was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Ricci v Destefano. He retired as a Battalion Chief in New Haven CT. He has testified before Congress and is the author of the book, Command Presence.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The global war business scored record revenues in 2024 amid multiple protracted proxy conflicts across the world, according to a new industry analysis released on Monday.
The top 100 arms manufacturers in the world raked in $679 billion in revenue in 2024, up 5.9% from the year prior, according to a new Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) study. The figure marks the highest ever revenue for manufacturers recorded by SIPRI as the group credits major conflicts for supplying the large appetite for arms around the world.
“The rise in the total arms revenues of the Top 100 in 2024 was mostly due to overall increases in the arms revenues of companies based in Europe and the United States,” SIPRI said in their report. “There were year-on-year increases in all the geographical areas covered by the ranking apart from Asia and Oceania, which saw a slight decrease, largely as a result of a notable drop in the total arms revenues of Chinese companies.”
Notably, Chinese arms manufacturers saw a large drop in reported revenues, declining 10% from 2023 to 2024, according to SIPRI. Just off China’s shores, Japan’s arms industry saw the largest single year-over-year increase in revenue of all regions measured, jumping 40% from 2023 to 2024.
American companies dominate the top of the list, which measures individual companies’ revenue, with Lockheed Martin taking the top spot with $64,650,000,000 of arms revenue in 2024, according to the report. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems follow shortly after in revenue,
The Czechoslovak Group recorded the single largest jump in year-on-year revenue from 2023 to 2024, increasing its haul by 193%, according to SIPRI. The increase is largely driven by their crucial role in supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine.
The Pentagon contracted one of the group’s subsidiaries in August to build a new ammo plant in the U.S. to replenish artillery shell stockpiles drained by U.S. aid to Ukraine.
“In 2024 the growing demand for military equipment around the world, primarily linked to rising geopolitical tensions, accelerated the increase in total Top 100 arms revenues seen in 2023,” the report reads. “More than three quarters of companies in the Top 100 (77 companies) increased their arms revenues in 2024, with 42 reporting at least double-digit percentage growth.”
Daily Caller
Tom Homan Predicts Deportation Of Most Third World Migrants Over Risks From Screening Docs
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
White House border czar Tom Homan predicted Sunday the Trump administration will deport the majority of Third World migrants due to vetting challenges.
Two National Guardsmen were shot Wednesday, allegedly by an Afghan national brought into the U.S. under the Biden administration. The attack prompted President Donald Trump to announce in a Thursday post on Truth Social that his administration would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” Homan said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Third World nations could not be relied upon to provide accurate information for vetting migrants.
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“[T]hese Third World nations, they don’t have systems like we do. So, a lot of these Afghanistans, when they did get here and get vetted, they had no identification at all. Not a single travel document, not one piece of identification,” Homan said. “And we’re going to count on the people that run Afghanistan, the Taliban, to provide us any information [on] who the bad guys were or who the good guys are? Certainly not. And many people need to understand that most terrorists in this world, most of ’em, aren’t in any database.”
“And the same thing with illegal aliens, the over 10 million that came across the border under Joe Biden. There’s no way to vet these people. You think El Salvador or Turkey or Sudan or any of these countries have the databases or system checks that we have?” he added. “Do you think the government[s] of China, Russia, Turkey, do you think they’re going to share that data with us even if they did have it? There’s no way to clearly vet these people 100% that they’re safe to come to this country from these Third World nations.”
The president also wrote in his Thursday post he would “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” along with deporting those who do not offer value to the United States. Homan said Trump is correct to evaluate all migrants who entered under Biden.
“I really, truly think that most of ’em are [going to] end up being deported ’cause we’re not going to be able to properly vet them,” he said.
Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” the Trump administration would deport individuals with pending asylum claims.
West Virginia Army National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, perished Thursday from wounds sustained in Wednesday’s shooting. The other victim, Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition at the time of publication.
The shooting was allegedly carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the country in September 2021 after the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lakanwal previously worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA, and was admitted into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, which resettled Afghans who had helped American forces.
Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024, which the Trump administration granted in April 2025, according to Reuters. The alleged gunman shouted, “Allahu akbar!” before opening fire with a revolver, independent journalist Julio Rojas reported.
As of December 2024, over 180,000 Afghans were resettled in the U.S. following its August 2021 withdrawal, according to the State Department. After the shooting, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals” would be paused “indefinitely.”
USCIS also asserted Thursday it would conduct a full-scale reexamination of all green cards granted to individuals from 19 countries “of concern” at Trump’s direction. The agency added in a later statement that, when vetting migrants from those nations, it would weigh “negative, country specific factors,” such as whether the country was able to “issue secure identity documents.”
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