Neofascism: Literally, not figuratively: Rudi Giuliani is, in the minds of the Free Press, a successful politician not because he actually did anything or made any difference on 911 but just because he “stayed on the scene”, “leading”. The first job of the government is not to keep people safe: it is to work for the people to make them powerful—able to do what they want to do—which may involve obsessing about their safety, and may not. The second job of the government is not to pretend that “someone is in charge when crisis erupts”: it is to actually deal with the crisis and solve the problem. It is not Gavin Newsome’s job to tell lies about currently unclear aspects of the current Santa Ana wind catastrophe in Los Angeles. Yet the editors of “The Free Press” think that that is his job.

You want a definition of a fascist mindset? The idea that the government should above all “keep people safe” and “pretend to be in charge and have the situation under control” is a good one:

The Editors of “The Free Press”:’The first job of the government is to keep people safe. Failing that, its job is to show that someone is in charge when crisis erupts. On 9/11, there was nothing then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani could do to keep the World Trade Center from falling. Yet he became, in that long-ago era, the most popular person in America by staying on the scene and leading at his city’s moment of greatest danger.

That brings us to the fires in Los Angeles…. Aauthorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand…. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state that was once a model of good governance came to prioritize the boutique concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government must do….

California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad…. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.

Los Angeles has the same problem with nonessential spending, albeit at a smaller scale, The city allocated $1.3 billion to combat homelessness last year, although the city comptroller found that half of that money has gone unspent. The Los Angeles Fire Department got a good deal less than that—$837 million—a budget that has since been cut by $17 million. Would that $17 million have made a difference? Who knows. Answers are increasingly hard to come by in California. When asked by Anderson Cooper why the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry, Newsom responded that “the local folks are trying to figure that out.” The buck always stops somewhere else in the Golden State….

California seemingly always has money for expensive Band-Aids and pricey, ineffective NGO grants. But they’ve neglected the basics: crime (the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office); public education (per-pupil spending has gone up under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted); and now firefighting… <thefp.com/p/paradise-lo…>

And the claim that Newsome has “neglected the basics” by increasing school funding?