There is no one to blame for the fires ravaging Los Angeles—and in a sense, that’s the problem. Effective organizations and governments have direct lines of authority and accountability ensuring that, whether things go well or catastrophically wrong, assigning credit or blame is straightforward. That’s essential, both for common-sense notions of fairness and for institutional learning—whom to promote or dismiss, to invest with more or less responsibility, and so forth.

In a state like California and a city like Los Angeles, this basic principle of organizational competence is turned on its head. The state and city’s fractal forms of mismanagement ensure that everyone shares a piece of the blame for these devastating fires, which is to say that no one does. It is the same effective strategy employed by looters in evacuation zones: strength in numbers. Indeed, as with firing squads and mob rule, one job that California’s dysfunctional bureaucracies seem to do well is obscure moral responsibility.

Of course, no individual was to blame for the dry weather or powerful windstorms that contributed to the intensity of these fires. These were genuine acts of God. On the other hand, the failures of prevention and containment that let the fires balloon into one of the most expensive natural disasters in American history were acts of man and man alone.

The first of these was the decision to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades, with its 117-million-gallon capacity, offline, due to previously scheduled maintenance. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which made this call, effectively ensured that the basin was empty in the middle of wildfire season.

Then there is the question of how the fire began. While that is still under investigation, a spark from a downed power line or other electrical equipment is surely a leading candidate, given that Pacific Gas & Electric company equipment has been linked to five of California’s ten most destructive fires in since 2015. Most of the L.A. area’s power is provided by Southern California Edison, which now faces four lawsuits, alleging that the company failed to de-energize their electrical equipment and clear brush near Pasadena, leading to the ongoing Eaton blaze.

A spark still needs fuel, which raises the question of prevention. Controlled burns, also known as “fuel reduction,” can greatly reduce the breadth of forest fires’ spread. While controlled burns are a common technique for forestry management worldwide, environmental laws—and lobbies—have made executing them unnecessarily hard. In 2007, for instance, the Sierra Club successfully sued the U.S. Forest Service to prevent it from exempting controlled burns from needing Environmental Impact Statements under the National Environmental Protection Act. (The median time to complete such statements is 3.5 years, at which point environmental groups may sue again and force the process to start anew.) More recently, in 2021, the Center for Biological Diversity challenged the Trump administration’s Great Basin fuel-reduction plan, from which the Biden administration promptly backed away.

The legal barriers to controlled burns are particularly pronounced in California, given its redundant environmental laws, like the California Environmental Quality Act. Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent decision to suspend permitting and review requirements to facilitate rebuilding is a tacit admission of the CEQA’s impracticality. Yet the costs created by the Golden State’s infatuation with red-tape and bureaucracy are nothing new; they explain, for example, why the state has the nation’s largest homeless population. The difference now is that the consequences of these permitting nightmares are about to be felt by thousands of wealthy liberal voters all at once.

Even with this much blame to go around, the buck must stop somewhere. In Newsom’s case, however, any suggestion of fault is dismissed as “misinformation.” Instead, the governor has taken to spinning the fires as an “opportunity” to rebuild an “LA 2.0” under his stewardship. So far, this includes enacting an anti-“price gouging” measure all but guaranteed to create shortages in materials and construction services, compounding an already deadly tragedy of errors.

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Newsom is so full of good intentions, among other things, that much of L.A. County now looks like a piece of hell. The damage they caused was significantly the result of California’s progressive governance and its myriad failures. Fixing them requires reestablishing clear lines of authority, accountability, and merit at every level of government.

As the man at the top, it follows that the best thing for Newsom to do is lead by example—and resign.

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In her first three State of the State speeches, New York governor Kathy Hochul made a point of honoring tradition. Her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, had moved the constitutionally mandated annual address from the Capitol’s historic Assembly chamber to a cavernous convention hall in Albany’s brutalist-modern Empire State Plaza, which allowed for a bigger audience, not to mention a supercharged speaker system and giant video screens. A few months after succeeding Cuomo in the summer of 2021, citing her “deep reverence for our State’s remarkable past,” Hochul returned the annual speech to the Capitol, “its original and rightful setting.”

So much for reverence: Hochul chose to deliver her latest annual message Tuesday in a 982-seat theater nestled within the Empire State Plaza structure known as The Egg. While a typical Cuomo State of the State program would evoke the run-up to a nominee’s acceptance speech at a political convention, the style of Hochul’s annual message reboot was lifted from the more performative playbooks of New York City’s last few mayors, whose State of the City presentations have been delivered in settings like the Apollo Theater, the site of Eric Adams’s speech last week.

Hochul’s theatrically staged State of the State speech program could be seen as a political distress signal—an overproduced exercise in shameless self-promotion for a governor struggling with negative poll ratings, desperate for more positive attention two-plus years after winning election by a surprisingly close margin.

To generate an atmosphere of celebration, the speech was preceded by a 47-minute program that included live performances by a high school marching band, a black Baptist gospel choir, a middle-aged interracial dance troupe best known for appearances at New York Liberty WNBA games, and a Tony-award-winning Broadway singer. The program also featured a poetry recital by a young woman identified as Buffalo’s laureate, along with separate invocations by a rabbi, a minister, and a Muslim imam; presentation of the colors by a state police honor guard; and the pledge of allegiance led by a local Eagle Scout. Two slickly produced (and, by all appearances, taxpayer-funded) videos also played on giant screens flanking the stage—both less than subtly promoting the governor’s policy agenda and her personal story. The first, involving a series of archetypal New Yorkers selected for their geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity, ended with a Long Island rabbi saying, “Thank you, Governor Hochul.”

The second video wrapped up with a virtual introduction of the 66-year-old governor herself, who walked onstage to the strains of Christine Aguilera’s “Fighter,” wearing a suit of dollar-bill green.

What followed was a nearly hour-long speech summarizing a dozen or so of the 200-odd proposals spread across her 36,000-word, 137-page State of the State policy booklet. This was not an innovation: Albany governors have been supplementing their annual speeches with increasingly thick “books” for decades now. (The record still belongs to Governor Cuomo’s 2019 State of the State volume, which used 71,222 words to describe 177 proposals backed by 126 source note citations.)

Hochul previewed most of her headline initiatives in public appearances during the days and weeks leading up the speech, including a dubiously premised $3 billion “inflation refund” giveback that would send checks for either $300 (for singles) or $500 (for couples) to all New York taxpayers with incomes below $300,000; an increase in the state child tax credit, rising to as much as $1,000, from the current peak of $330; and a promise of state-funded free breakfast and lunch for all New York State public school students. She had also spotlighted her proposal to “expand” involuntary commitment of the mentally ill—without releasing crucial details. “We cannot allow our subway to be a rolling homeless shelter,” she said. She promised to work with Mayor Adams to “surge law enforcement” in subways, and to provide state financing to “put an officer on every single train, overnight” over the next six months.

She also offered two late-breaking proposals. First, a cut in personal income taxes for brackets below $323,000; unlike the rebate handout, this would be a recurring tax cut, with a total price tag of $1 billion. The second—and potentially more ominous financially—was a gubernatorial promise to “put our state on a pathway to universal [free] childcare.” Under the legislation that advocates favor, this would cost $5 billion.

More financial specifics will be revealed when Hochul presents her executive budget next Tuesday, which will also reveal her latest estimate of state reserves. These were most recently pegged at $22 billion—a nest egg she seems determined to squander, rather than using it for less politically appealing purposes (such as paying down debt) that would yield long-term dividends. Even with all this spending, her State of the State rollout won’t satisfy many of her fellow Democrats in the legislature, who want much more devoted to practically everything—especially education and health care, which already account for more than half the budget.

In the normal Albany cycle, politicians use odd years to plant seeds of expectation among special interest groups for costly legislation they’ll be willing to pass in the even-numbered election years. Hochul’s move to start that process a year early reflects her political worries as well as the political calendar: she faces a possible Democratic primary challenge in June 2026. She’s clearly hoping that the combination of cash giveaways, free school meals, and other program expansions in her budget will produce noticeable benefits to voters by the second half of this year, boosting her poll numbers sufficiently to make potential opponents perhaps think twice.

In contrast with her previous annual messages, Hochul’s 2025 State of the State extravaganza smacked of trying too hard, a reflection of political insecurity if not outright anxiety. But while most of what she offered ranged from dubious to questionable, it’s probably too early to conclude that her free-lunch messaging won’t work.

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Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a stunning announcement. He was abolishing the company’s DEI programs and discontinuing its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accused him of embracing the MAGA agenda, and predicted a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.

Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November elections, he said, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, had become “disconnected from mainstream conversation”—and untenable.

This is no small about-face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing election programs; his role was widely resented by conservatives. And Meta had been at the forefront of any identity-based or left-wing ideological cause.

Not anymore. As part of the rollout for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in left-wing orthodoxies. On the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needed a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

Zuckerberg was not the first technology executive to make such an announcement, but he is perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley and, with Zuckerberg setting the precedent, many smaller companies will likely follow suit.

The most important signal emanating from this decision is not about a particular shift in policy, however, but a general shift in culture. Zuckerberg has never really been an ideologue. He appears more interested in building his company and staying in the good graces of elite society. But like many successful, self-respecting men, he is also independent-minded and has clearly chafed at the cultural constraints DEI placed on his company. So he seized the moment, correctly sensing that the impending inauguration of Donald Trump reduced the risk and increased the payoff of such a change.

Zuckerberg is certainly not a courageous truth-teller. He assented to DEI over the last decade because that was where the elite status signals were pointing. Now, those signals have reversed, like a barometer suddenly dropping, and he is changing course with them and attempting to shift the blame to the outgoing Biden administration, which, he told Rogan, pressured him to implement censorship—a convenient excuse at an even more convenient moment.

But the good news is that, whatever post hoc rationalizations executives might use, DEI and its cultural assumptions suddenly have run into serious resistance. We may be entering a crucial period in which people feel confident enough to express their true beliefs about DEI, which is antithetical to excellence, and stop pretending that they believe in the cultish ideology of “systemic racism” and race-based guilt.

DEI remains deeply embedded in public institutions, of course, but private institutions and corporations have more flexibility and can dispatch with such programs with the stroke of a pen. Zuckerberg has revealed what this might look like at one of the largest companies. Conservatives can commend him for his decision, while remaining wary. “Trust but verify,” as Ronald Reagan used to say, is a good policy all around.

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