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Joel Pollak’s reporting ahead of the California Post’s Jan. 26 launch has ripped the veneer off the official story about the Palisades wildfire, and it reads like a smoking-gun revelation for anyone who has watched California’s leaders talk big and fail big. Pollak, brought in as opinion editor to give Californians a voice against the media monoculture, has forced attention on documents and eyewitness accounts that the entrenched local press has been all too eager to downplay.
The Palisades Fire itself was a catastrophe that should never have happened the way it did: exploding on Jan. 7, 2025 into one of the most destructive blazes in Los Angeles history, killing a dozen people and leveling thousands of homes. The scale of the disaster — thousands of structures lost and communities traumatized — demands answers, not platitudes and press conferences from elected officials looking for the next camera.
Newly surfaced footage and investigative work suggest a far more damning sequence: a smaller blaze in Topanga State Park on Jan. 1, the Lachman Fire, that was declared contained but may have smoldered and later erupted into the catastrophic Palisades inferno. That rekindling theory is backed by multiple investigators and video evidence that undermines the comfort of the “we did everything right” narrative offered by bureaucrats.
More troubling still are internal plans and local agreements that openly contemplate leaving brush to burn in parks and restricting aggressive mop-up in certain “sensitive” areas — language that effectively institutionalizes a form of “let it burn” management under the guise of ecological stewardship. Those documents don’t read like missteps; they read like policy choices that prioritized ideology over the safety of neighborhoods below.
Firefighters on the ground weren’t blind to the danger: multiple reports say crews warned superiors that hotspots remained and that it was reckless to leave, only to have those warnings minimized or omitted from official reports. If true, this is not merely incompetence — it’s a cover-up that cost Americans their homes and, tragically, their lives. The public deserves an independent, teeth-bearing inquiry, not more spin.
Joel Pollak has been blunt: there has been no real accountability so far, and that vacuum is precisely what the California Post intends to fill by holding politicians and agencies to account. Californians tired of the same old excuses should welcome a media outlet that isn’t afraid to name names and demand reality-based solutions from a state that too often rewards slogans over safety.
This is the moment conservatives have been warning about for years: when woke environmental orthodoxy and administrative cowardice meet in a smoke-filled canyon and ordinary people pay the price. We should be clear-eyed about the culprits — series of bad policies, political theater, and a culture that punishes practical land management — and relentless in demanding reform, federal oversight where state authorities fail, and criminal accountability where negligence or malfeasance is proven.
Hardworking Californians deserve better than bureaucrats who write policies that sound noble in a lecture hall and deadly in a canyon. Support the journalists who are doing the work to expose the truth, press your elected officials for honest answers, and never let the elites rewrite this tragedy as unavoidable. The next election and the next firefighting season depend on us not looking away.
