Not Satire: Newsom Took Money That Could Have Helped Stop Palisades Fires and Spent It Teaching American Indians to Start Fires

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,