When virtue signaling turns deadly

As the California wildfires began tearing through vast swaths of Los Angeles last week, a troubling reality emerged: The officials responsible for safeguarding the public were woefully unprepared, lacking a comprehensive disaster response plan to address the crisis.

Firefighters in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where the first fire broke out, faced a critical obstacle: no access to water. Many fire hydrants, which had not been tested since the previous January, were discovered to have little or no water pressure.