Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California continues to light his constituents’ tax dollars on fire.
Moreover, he has done it in the name of cultural pandering and with dubious constitutionality.
According to the urban policy-focused City Journal, the state’s “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program, overseen by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, has distributed $24 million to “tribal groups and other nonprofits” to teach American Indians, identified as “cultural fire practitioners,” how to clear brush from forests in ways their ancestors would have found familiar.
Meanwhile, taxpayers have seen no appreciable return on that expenditure. How much brush have the tribes cleared? California has released no data.
Of course, this is not meant as an attack on the tribes — far from it. After all, one could probably find $24 million between the couch cushions at the Pentagon.
What makes this expenditure maddening is that it, like most things in California, is dripping with wokeness.
For instance, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who effectively oversees the program, justified it not on fire management grounds but as a remedy for historical injustices. California, he said, originated in a “state-sanctioned policy of genocide.” Thus, Crowfoot made it sound as if the governor had a plan to return the land to the “leadership of California Native American tribes.”
Newsom, of course, has no such plan. But saying that he has one sounds good in upscale places like the French Laundry.
Worse yet, the “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program engages in discrimination by allocating resources based on race.
“As part of this commitment to ‘cultural burning,’” the City Journal wrote, “California has created separate fire-certification processes for nontribal and tribal populations. White, black, Latino, and Asian fire bosses must receive technical certifications, including a 40-hour burn-boss course and, in some cases, a federal certificate. ‘Cultural fire practitioners,’ by contrast, are certified through simple tribal recognition that a person has ‘substantial experience’ burning for cultural purposes.”
Should anyone ever make a case of it, the U.S. Supreme Court almost certainly would find those race-based provisions unconstitutional.
Again, none of this reflects in any way on the tribes themselves. Perhaps some “cultural fire practitioners” really do have “substantial experience” in clearing brush via controlled fires. After all, early American history is filled with stories of Indians skilled in that practice.
In that case, however, why do they require public funding? Why must the privileged Newsom, one of the whitest of white men who ever lived, teach them traditional cultural techniques?
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