Tangle - The Los Angeles wildfires.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 14 minutes.

Correction.

In Thursday’s edition on President Jimmy Carter’s life and legacy, we wrote that President Richard Nixon had resigned in 1972 — he resigned in 1974. This error resulted from an errant keystroke, and unfortunately our editors missed it during our final review. We’ve corrected the mistake in our online edition. 

This is our 125th correction in Tangle's 284-week history and our first correction since January 9. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

Grading our work.

On Friday, we looked back at 29 “My take” sections from 2024, giving ourselves grades for all the things we got right and wrong. You can read Part 1 here (partially paywalled) and Part 2 here (paywalled).

Quick hits.

1. The Supreme Court appeared skeptical that a law requiring the owner of the social media app TikTok to sell its U.S. business by January 19 violated free speech protections, raising the prospect that the app could be banned next week. (The arguments)
2. Judge Juan Merchan sentenced President-elect Donald Trump to an unconditional discharge for his conviction of falsifying business records in New York. The sentence means Trump will receive no jail time, fines, or probation. (The sentence) Separately, Special Counsel Jack Smith formally resigned from the Department of Justice on Friday. (The resignation)
3. Job growth in the United States exceeded expectations in December, with a 256,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls. Additionally, the unemployment rate decreased from 4.2% to 4.1%. (The report)
4. A federal judge struck down President Joe Biden’s proposed Title IX reforms, which would have expanded protections for transgender students and changed rules governing sex discrimination in schools. The judge ruled that the Education Department had violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns. (The ruling)
5. The U.S. Department of State increased its reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to $25 million. Maduro is wanted for his alleged involvement in drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. (The announcement)

Today's topic.

The Los Angeles fires. On Tuesday, a catastrophic wildfire began in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In the days since, multiple fires have caused widespread devastation in the region; as of Monday morning, at least 24 people have died and over 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the fires. The disaster has prompted debate about the primary cause of the fires and whether their impact could have been mitigated.

The largest is the Palisades fire, which has burned 23,713 acres and is 14% contained as of Monday morning. The fire already ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history. Additionally, the Eaton and Hurst fires continue to burn in the area with 33% and 89% containment, respectively. Overall, roughly 150,000 people were under evacuation orders on Saturday, and hundreds of thousands more were without power during the week. 

The fires have been exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds that persisted throughout the week and have severely hampered firefighters’ efforts to contain the blazes. On Friday, firefighting helicopters and airplanes rapidly deployed to the Brentwood and Encino neighborhoods after a change in the winds shifted the path of the Palisades fire, which grew by 1,000 acres between Friday night and Saturday morning. Meteorologists expect another wind surge early this week. 

A lack of accessible water has also hindered containment efforts. In particular, all water storage tanks in the Pacific Palisades area ran dry on Wednesday morning, and water flow to hydrants in higher elevations was significantly reduced. City officials said the extreme demand for water strained the city’s system, but some lawmakers, including the Los Angeles city councilmember representing Pacific Palisades, blamed a lack of investment in fire mitigation resources. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) has faced scrutiny for her handling of the crisis. Bass, who said in 2021 she would not to travel abroad while mayor, was on a diplomatic trip to attend the inauguration of Ghana's new president when the fires began and left the event early to return to the U.S. Some critics suggested she should have cut the trip short once the National Weather Service began forecasting destructive fires in the area. Bass said she was in "constant contact" with city officials during the onset of the fires and took the fastest route back to Los Angeles. 

Separately, Bass has been criticized for a 2.7% spending cut to the Los Angeles Fire Department, mostly focused on reduced equipment purchases. However, the equipment cuts coincided with a pay raise for city firefighters, along with $58 million for new firetrucks and other department purchases. With those items added to the budget, the city said the fire department’s operating budget grew by roughly 7% from the year prior. 

The disaster has also prompted many to examine decisions made by insurance providers in the area in the months before the fires broke out. Over the summer, State Farm canceled hundreds of Pacific Palisades homeowners' policies, citing the financial risk of insuring homes in the area amid increasingly frequent and severe wildfires. On Friday, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced a one-year moratorium on insurance companies canceling or not renewing policies for homeowners affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires — backdated to October 9, 2024.

Today, we’ll share perspectives from the right and left on the Los Angeles fires. Then, Ari Weitzman — Tangle’s managing editor, an environmental studies major, and a former California resident — gives his take. 

What the right is saying.

• The right frames the impact of the fires as a failure of leadership, arguing that California needs to overhaul how it prepares for these threats.
• Some say state Democrats’ focus on climate change and social justice left Los Angeles unprepared for the fires. 
• Others say a multitude of factors are to blame for the scale of the disaster. 

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about “California’s climate time for choosing.”

“The Los Angeles wildfires are awful to behold, and perhaps they are bad enough to cause some rethinking by California’s political class. Instead of trying like Don Quixote to change the climate, they could spend their money on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change,” the board said. “The evidence doesn’t support the climate explanation since (among other reasons) California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds, even with hurricane-force gusts on occasion, for centuries.”

“Water tanks were filled to capacity before the fires, but three that supplied the Palisades were quickly tapped out. Huge demand caused a loss of pressure, which made it harder to pump water uphill to refill the tanks,” the board wrote. “If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities. And California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.”

In The New York Post, Jonathan A. Lesser argued “bad leaders — not climate change — are the reason the LA fires are burning California.”

“The most common causes of recent wildfires in the Golden State have been human activities (including arson) and poorly maintained power lines, such as those belonging to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which caused the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people. Another likely culprit: bad forest management,” Lesser said. “Last April, Los Angeles County unveiled its Community Forest Management Plan. The plan is heavy on buzzwords about the need to ensure an ‘equitable tree canopy’ and ‘environmental justice’ but light on strategies to reduce wildfire risk. Though some good work has been done in that regard, such as by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the latest wildfires demonstrate the ongoing failure of Gov. Gavin Newsom to manage the problem.”

“California’s Mediterranean climate, with its historically wet winters followed by months of dry conditions, heightens the likelihood of wildfires. But instead of removing dead and diseased trees and undergrowth, the state, following environmentalist restrictions, has allowed that natural fuel to build up, creating the conditions for explosive wildfires,” Lesser wrote. “Whether sparked by fireworks, power lines, lightning, homeless encampments or arson, the conflagrations devastating Los Angeles are just the latest result of decades of ill-conceived policies.”

In The Deseret News, Jennifer Graham asked “are politicians to blame for the California wildfires, or does it all come down to wind and water?”

“The Los Angeles wildfires were still raging uncontained when the finger-pointing started. The devastation was caused, not by prolonged drought or the Santa Ana winds, according to President-elect Donald Trump and others, but by Democrat politicians whose priorities allowed the fires to spread,” Graham said. “But it wasn’t just Trump. Questions were flying from Los Angeles residents, including Hollywood celebrities whose homes were destroyed, about water availability and evacuation routes and why authorities weren’t better prepared for danger that the National Weather Service had warned about the week prior.”

“The devastation is, in part, the result of a drought that had turned vegetation into kindling, and the Santa Ana winds, which threw embers that ignited new fires and which inhibited firefighting efforts. The devastation is surely also a failure of foresight and leadership, made evident by reports of water tanks and fire hydrants running dry,” Graham wrote. “Authorities don’t know how the LA wildfires began, and there will doubtless be years of inquiries about how — or if — the widespread destruction could have been prevented. Accountability is needed. But for now, it’s about coming together to serve those who need help.”

What the left is saying.

• The left argues that both human and environmental factors are responsible for the fires’ destruction. 
• Some say the disaster is a preview of what’s to come without a concerted effort to address climate change. 
• Others worry about the downstream consequences of the event, particularly for homeowners. 

In The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells wrote about the “human failure” behind the fires.

“On X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits… the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief,” Wallace-Wells said. “Global warming has already remodeled the risk landscape in California and indeed well beyond, making gigafire burns and urban firestorms like this one so much more likely. But so has housing policy, which has directed much more development into the path of fire across the vast tinderbox of the American West.”

“What would that hardening look like, enacted at the scale of not just a community but a megalopolis, perhaps a whole state or even a continent? The job is in ways both forbidding and banal,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “On the urban side of what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, we probably need a program of systematically reducing risk to property by property — retrofitting homes and roofs, eliminating flammable flora, ensuring homes sit clear of anything flammable. Beyond that, some way of overcoming longstanding NIMBYish resistance, explained less by partisanship or climate denial than a more quotidian mix of lack of urgency, homeowner libertarianism and simple wishful thinking.”

In The Guardian, Eric Holthaus said “the Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded.”

“An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week. The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events,” Holthaus wrote. “These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.”

“The greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California. As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly,” Holthaus said. “These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance.”

In Bloomberg, Mark Gongloff suggested the “California fires expose a $1 trillion hole in US home insurance.”

“The wildfires terrorizing Los Angeles this week have been like something out of a movie: vast, fast-moving, unpredictable, merciless. Their scope and nature have surprised even fire-jaded California. They are also evidence of the sort of consequences that can be expected as the planet continues to heat up, consequences for which traditional risk-management tools — like, say, home insurance — are increasingly obsolete,” Gongloff wrote. “The glut of homes in increasingly fire-prone places has created an insurance crisis in California, with many big insurers pulling out of the state to avoid more losses.”

“This isn’t just a California problem. Other states on the front lines of climate change are underinsured for fires, floods, hurricanes and other disasters that are becoming more frequent or intense or both as the planet warms,” Gongloff said. “At some point, policymakers and the people living in risky places will have to decide when enough is enough. How many times should we pay to rebuild a home on a wildfire-prone California hillside or a flood-prone North Carolina beach? How many first responders’ lives are worth risking so people can have beautiful views? When does insurance become a Band-Aid on a gushing wound?”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• A lot of blame and criticism is going around, making it hard to understand why these fires started and why they’re so dangerous.
• I see three main causes: fluke events, cultural changes, and infrastructure failures.
• California is no stranger to fighting natural disasters, and I’m hopeful that the state can respond to increasing wildfires with bold solutions.

I lived in San Francisco for four years. In that time, I saw first-hand how the western edge of our country has struggled to respond to wildfires. In 2016, I volunteered with some coworkers to plant trees in a burn scar in Nevada left by the Little Valley Fire (which was caused by a prescribed burn gone wrong). That fire showed how hard it can be to prevent windstorm fires, which utterly destroy some homes while leaving others eerily intact. Residents I worked alongside described the hopelessness they felt watching embers carried by the wind for over a mile across the Washoe Valley, just hoping their homes wouldn’t be hit.

The number of lives upended by the burning of the California coast is heart-wrenching. I’m writing this editorial from my almost-finished home in the Vermont mountains, reflecting on how devastating its loss would be, and thinking of all the people in California having to flee their homes now.

Before we talk about the causes of this fire, I want to clear the air by listing a few things that are easy to criticize, but whose importance is being overstated or invented.

1) The Delta Smelt. You may have seen accusations, led by President-elect Donald Trump, that efforts to conserve this little fish caused the failure to contain these wildfires. The smelt lives in brackish estuary zones — its habitat doesn’t have much to do with Los Angeles’s water access strategy. 

2) Dam removals. Environmentalists would do well to consider the trade-offs required in local conservation at the expense of hydroelectric power and water access. However, criticism against Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) for his massive dam removal initiatives is also not relevant here; California worked with Oregon to remove dams on the Klamath River, which is nowhere near Los Angeles.

3) Mayor Bass’s trip. It was terrible optics for Los Angeles’s mayor to be on a diplomatic trip to Ghana during the fire, especially after promising not to go abroad as mayor. I’m sure the mayor’s absence during the emergency made matters worse, and her response to criticisms has been disappointing; but the mayor’s comportment is pretty far down my list of contributing causes.

Lots of blame is going around, causing a great deal of confusion about what happened in Los Angeles County. The full story isn’t that hard to tell, it just requires that you take the time to understand it.

Let’s start at the beginning: Parts of California, including Los Angeles, are just hazardous places to live. Some of the most beautiful places in the world, Los Angeles included, are constructed on the precipice of nature’s wild edge, where civilization can look off into the dangerous wild from relative safety. But the price of that proximity is a greater risk of calamity.

Southern California is home to the Santa Ana winds, a periodical reversal of normal wind patterns that brings hot and dry air inland from the desert in gusts that can reach over 60 miles per hour. These winds can stoke wildfires and make them hard to fight. The list of the state’s deadliest fires spans the decades, and many of them occurred during natural dry wind events like the Santa Anas. 

However, an obvious trend emerges when you sort California’s fires by “most destructive” and list the years they occurred, starting from the top: 2018, 2017, 2025, 2025, 1991, 2003, 2020, 2015, 2007, 2018. Simply put, these fires are getting more common, and they’re getting worse — and there are three reasons for that. Part of it is flukish, another part is climate, and the third part is infrastructural. 

First, the flukish. Last year, California had an incredibly rainy wet season with historic rainfall that filled the state’s reservoirs. This wet season has been rainy again in Northern California; however, Southern California is experiencing an incredibly dry winter. When you put a year of high rains causing productive vegetation in front of a dry year that turns that vegetation into fuel, then add the Santa Ana winds, you get a tinderbox. We still don’t know what caused these fires, but in that kind of environment, a small spark can grow into a racing inferno with terrifying speed. Wind gusts at the start of the wildfires reached 100 miles per hour, which not only made the blaze expand but also made it impossible to fight.

Second, the patterns. When “flukish” events, like a huge wildfire in January, become common, they’re no longer flukes. The state’s weather patterns are changing, regardless of whether or not you believe climate change is causing them. However, if you don’t think that increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere resulting from human emissions are driving these changes, I urge you to interrogate that belief for bias. When climatologists tell us for decades that global temperatures will get warmer and cause wilder swings in precipitation and more extreme weather events (especially in the south and west of the United States), and then average global temperatures increase and extreme weather events become more common, their models are validated.

Third, the infrastructure. Our national infrastructure is failing to adapt to meet the trend of more dangerous wildfires — California, and Los Angeles in particular, are part of this failure. California experienced record rainfall last year; where is that water now, when firefighters need it to combat a blaze on the doorstep of the country’s second-largest city? The answer is simple: It’s in the ocean. 

The state’s reservoirs filled up to their capacities, and excess rainfall has flowed into the Pacific. At a state level, why have the reservoirs’ capacity not been increased? Why was the Pacific Palisades reservoir offline and empty before the fire? What exactly did the budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department affect, and how much did they impact the emergency response? Why hasn’t Los Angeles County invested in pumping stations to get water uphill and service the fire-prone Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities in their time of need? Pumps are expensive, but you could argue that investing in that kind of infrastructure would be partially offset by decreasing the insurance costs that are causing private insurers to flee the state. 

Lastly, why didn’t Los Angeles County introduce some buffer between the local vegetation and the nearby neighborhoods, as required by state regulations? While cutting and buffering wouldn’t have prevented the windstorm fires, it could have greatly mitigated the damage. California’s leaders — from Gov. Newsom down to local boards in the Palisades — are responsible for these failures.  

California is capable of extraordinary responses. Since an earthquake leveled San Francisco in 1906, the state has written the book on how to develop seismic-safe buildings. As it faces a future likely to be filled with more dangerous wildfires, the state once again has an opportunity to lead the way with improvements in civic infrastructure and wildfire fighting and prevention. Hopefully they answer the call.

Take the survey: What do you think is responsible for the Los Angeles wildfires? Let us know!

Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.

Your questions, answered.

Q: Elon Musk has been tweeting (if that's still a word) about Pakistani rape gangs in the UK and the failure of "woke" UK law enforcement to investigate/prosecute the gangs.  Sounds outlandish. What's really going on?

—Jon, Los Angeles, CA

Tangle: Earlier this month, Elon Musk criticized the decision of Jess Phillips, the UK’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, for declining to investigate “grooming gangs,” groups of Pakistani men who groomed and sexually abused young girls in cities in the Midlands of England. Elon Musk tweeted his criticism, suggesting UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is implicated in a massive coverup and obstruction of justice related to immigrant crime. Starmer responded, calling Musk’s claims “lies” and “disinformation.” 

First off, these crimes are real. South Asian men had groomed and sexually assaulted girls in the Midlands for decades; even Nazir Afzal, a chief prosecutor of Pakistani heritage in North West England from 2011 to 2015, said South Asians were “disproportionately involved” in the kinds of street grooming Musk is talking about. Furthermore, law enforcement was woefully negligent in its response to these crimes, and the individual accounts are harrowing. In the context of police responding to young girls reporting being raped by calling them “tarts” and dismissing them, it’s easy to understand how this story — which had been going on for years — would stoke an anti-immigration response.  

Critically, though, Afzal was talking about crimes in this specific region. Extrapolating a national trend from the very real stories about these gangs of South Asian men, generally Pakistani men, is just old-fashioned cherry-picking. A 2020 Home Office report found that, at a national level, there was no evidence to suggest that a racial subgroup had been committing these crimes more often than another. In fact, a 2022 report found the opposite — that South Asian men were under-represented in child sexual abuse crimes.  

I can understand how anyone just learning about these stories would be furious — I just learned about them recently, and I’m furious, too. The improper response by governments in the Midlands is a really big deal, and it does seem like it was encouraged in part by racial sensitivities as well as old-fashioned misogynistic belief that these young girls were just sexually promiscuous — not victims. But it isn’t exactly breaking news in the UK. Musk is fundamentally criticizing Phillips for declining another investigation into these crimes, but learning the full context of the years of reports in response helps to explain why she doesn’t think this is all worth re-hashing.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

Newly released documents by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) revealed that the agency secretly monitored Mexican American and Puerto Rican civil rights activists in the 1960s and beyond. The documents, released in late December, show that the CIA surveilled members of several major Latino civil rights movements, even using undercover agents to infiltrate student activist groups. The release confirms, in part, Latino civil rights leaders’ suspicions that the federal government was monitoring their activity during the civil rights era. "This document release is an important window into the government's efforts to surveil and disrupt peaceful Latino organizing in the 1960s and 1970s," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) said. Axios has the story.

Numbers.

• 106. The number of Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) stations within city limits. 
• 3,510. The number of uniformed LAFD personnel. 
• 5,300. The estimated number of structures (homes, businesses, and other buildings) destroyed or damaged by the Palisades fire. 
• 7,000. The estimated number of structures damaged by the Eaton fire. 
• 18,804. The number of structures destroyed by the 2018 Camp fire, the most destructive fire in California history. 
• 1,360. The average amount of acreage burned by wildfires in California in January between 2013 and 2024. 
• 38,629. The approximate amount of acreage burned by the Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires in January 2025 to date. 
• 1,930. The number of home insurance policy non-renewals for residents of the 90272 ZIP code area — which contains Pacific Palisades — between 2019 and 2024, approximately 28 out of every 100 policies. 
• $458 billion. The total exposure for California’s FAIR home insurance program, a 61.3% increase since September 2023.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written about Republicans and Democrats striking a budget deal.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was Jimmy Carter’s crisis of confidence speech.
• Nothing to do with politics: Why Belgium had to tell its citizens not to eat Christmas trees. 
• Thursday’s survey: 2,585 readers responded to our survey on Jimmy Carter’s legacy with 66% approving of him as a president and ex-president. “Not perfect as president but very significant accomplishments. He followed his own path rather than being poll driven,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released its annual report on homelessness, revealing a hopeful new statistic: in 2024, veteran homelessness dropped to an all-time low. Compared to the previous year, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness dropped by 7.5%, and has fallen 55.6% since 2010. Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough noted the report was encouraging, adding that “we still have a long way to go, but we will not stop until every veteran has a safe, stable place to call home.” The VA has the data.

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