Jan. 8: California Burns

IDF on 'high alert"; RSF accused of genocide; Pentagon blacklists Chinese tech firm

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The Big Story

Thirty thousand residents of the Palisades in Los Angeles were forced to evacuate their homes on Tuesday as a windstorm transformed a seemingly average brush fire into an apocalyptic blaze, engulfing 3,000 acres of land. Two fatalities have been confirmed as of our writing. In the panic of the evacuation, many residents were forced to abandon their vehicles near Sunset Boulevard because Panic Coast Highway had gridlocked rapidly. Many of those cars had to be bulldozed away to make way for fire trucks that had been blocked out.

Actor James Woods was one of the 30,000 residents who lost his home in the fire.

In 2022, the Los Angeles Fire Department hired its first openly LGBT chief, Kristin Crowley, who declared in an interview that her primary goal as chief would be “diversity, equity and inclusion,” a statement that is garnering attention now that the LAFD is being widely criticized for what many say is a disorganized and chaotic effort to get the fire under control, which the LAFD hasn’t yet achieved. Many have reported that the fire hydrants in the area have failed to work, for instance.

An evacuated Palisades resident who drove back to his neighborhood this morning to survey the damage messaged The Scroll to tell us what he saw.

“The windy conditions are totally extreme,” he said. “Low visibility, tons of embers. Some homes in my neighborhood are on fire. My block was untouched but scattered homes around are burning.”

On the city’s dysfunctional response, he said, “I saw lots of police but very few actual firefighters. I will say there was very little warning. We got out early because we were watching the news closely but surprisingly no news alerts came through on the phone.”

In a piece published by The Point in 2021, Tablet’s literary editor David Samuels wrote about living through a wildfire while on a writing retreat in Malibu—and on what causes wildfires, which is distinct from what the media blames for them. Recent scapegoats for California wildfires, Samuels notes, include “science-denying” Donald Trump, a QAnon-enthusiastic Trump supporter who was accused (in 2018) and eventually acquitted (in 2023) of arson charges and who had written about “Agenda 21”—a theory of the wildfires that posits that elites and environmentalists are behind them—Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and the all-encompassing blanket explanation “global climate change.”

Pointing toward climate change as the be-all reason for wildfires might be prohibiting us from learning how to prevent the worst of the destruction that they have wrought. Similarly, it might be too convenient to place all the blame for the Palisades wildfires on the DEI practices of a recently appointed chief. Instead, it appears that a two-fold, multi-layered process of failure can be pointed towards. There are destructive corporate practices of course, like the Forest Service’s replacement of recently cut Douglas Fir trees that had grown over centuries with Douglas fir seedlings bred for rapid growth to maximize timber harvest. There’s the convenient green ideology among the elite class that can always blame climate change for the wildfires and pass off climate change reduction policies as solutions for wildfire spread. And there’s the abandoning of the hard reality-based look at solutions to mitigate the damages caused by the fires.

“Humans naturally look for individual human culprits to blame for wildfires, whether that’s in the form of migrants or homeless people or foreign gang members or cigarette smokers or greedy power companies,” says Samuels today, in response to the Palisades wildfires. “We want to turn natural disasters into moral fables, and suggest that they are the results of identifiable moments of laziness, greed, or some other vice. It is natural for these areas to burn. Our fault is in building homes and communities in places that naturally go up in smoke. For nature, wildfires are often a healthy source of renewal. What’s unhealthy for humans is adopting public policies that encourage people to live in fire belts, while ensuring that fires are as large and powerful as possible—and then blaming society’s most marginal members or nature itself for the result.”

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The Rest

→Iranian state media has announced that the world will witness “extraordinary scenes and developments” soon, placing the IDF on high alert in anticipation of a possible military event with Iran on the horizon. Chief of General Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi issued the order amid growing concerns that Iran may launch a surprise attack following “visible escalation” in Iranian military, political, and economic activities.

→The United States has officially accused the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of genocide for its actions during the rebel force’s conflict with the Sudanese military in 2023. Before war broke out between the two groups, the RSF, which grew out of the nomadic Arab Janjaweed militias and adheres to an Arab-supremacist ideology dedicated to vanquishing African tribes from the territory, previously fought beneath and was commanded by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). In 2019, when the SAF overthrew former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the SAF relied on the RSF to violently crack down on pro-democracy protests, but conflict erupted between the previously allied military forces in 2021, after the groups jointly overthrew a civilian reform government. SAF general and de facto ruler of Sudan Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, both believe themselves to be the rightful ruler of Sudan. As of now, it is reported that the RSF has the upper hand in the conflict. The United States has imposed sanctions on Hemedti, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that the RSF is responsible for atrocities such as the murdering of civilians and “brutal sexual violence against women” during the conflict. Blinken, however, was careful to indict both groups involved in the war: “Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in the war.”

→The founder of the Chinese multinational social media and gaming conglomerate Tencent, which as of this past week has been blacklisted by the Pentagon over what it says are the technology firm’s ties to the Chinese military, is facing scrutiny due to his role on the Yale Center Beijing advisory committee, where he and “other business leaders advise the university how to develop business relationships in China”—a role that the founder, Ma Huateng, has held since 2015. Ma, who goes by the nickname “Pony Ma,” is the second-richest man in China. According to The Washington Free Beacon, Ma and his company have also donated millions of dollars to other elite American universities, among them MIT, Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has accused Tencent of Chinese Communist Party espionage. In a Spring 2024 Wall Street Journal article, James T. Areddy looked at the inconsistency between Chinese companies being shut out of U.S. markets yet welcomed as customers at American universities: Between 2012 and 2024, Chinese companies handed over $2.3 billion to American universities in the forms of contracts, leading some in American government to be concerned that these contracts pose a national security risk. Chinese pharma firm AppTec, for instance, has three contracts with the University of Arizona for $1.5 million. Among them is an agreement in which a services arm of AppTec, on behalf of another Chinese drugmaker, agreed to pay the university’s hospital $36,977 for each subject enrolled in trials of a drug designed to treat tumors. “The medicine has FDA approval for treatment during the trial of certain rare cancers. Now, out of concern Beijing could harness commercial biological discoveries for military purposes, members of Congress want the government to classify AppTec an ‘adversary biotech company of concern,’” writes Areddy. Tencent’s Pentagon blacklisting further confirms Areddy’s theory.

→We mentioned yesterday Trump’s press conference comments about his red line concerning Hamas’ release of Israeli hostages. Bizarrely, Trump posted a video to social media in which Jeffrey Sachs, shortly after the conference, called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “deep, dark, son of a bitch”; accused him of being responsible for the wars in Syria and Iraq; and blamed him for pushing the United States into war with Iran. Some interpreted this move as a maneuver made by Trump to distance himself from Netanyahu, whom he accused of disloyalty for congratulating Joe Biden on his 2020 victory. Others saw it as a more calculated step by Trump to manage the relationship between him and an allied leader. In the post accompanying the video, Trump doesn’t mention Netanyahu by name, instead pointing to the other part of the video, in which Sachs alleges that Obama conspired with legacy media to overthrow the Assad regime—the precise opposite of reality, as The Scroll explained on Dec. 18.

→Underscoring the absolute necessity of recovering the Israeli hostages from Hamas, the bodies of Youssef Ziyadne, 53, and his son, Hamza Ziyadne, 22, have been located in the Gaza Strip. Youssef was kidnapped on Oct. 7 alongside all three of his children. His two other children were recovered alive in November of 2023 and, until now, Youssef and Hamza were presumed to be alive. Their bodies were recovered from a tunnel in Rafah.

→After a couple months of signaling that he will be the rare Democrat willing to work with the Trump administration, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman seemed to put some words into action by becoming the first Democrat to support the Laken Riley Act. Named after the 22-year old student who was murdered by an illegal migrant while jogging at the University of Georgia, the bill will ensure that illegal migrants convicted of crimes can be detained and deported.

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