And So It Begins
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Friday, January 30, 2026
As we are witnessing, violently and vocally, in Minneapolis blue states are resistant to the changes being wrought by a Republican president, elected by the nation. Minnesota is not alone in its resistance. The rhetoric certainly matches some from just before the Civil War, but the situation is such that secession is actually quite unlikely, despite calls for it from some corners. But as blue states harden their resistance they are failing miserably, and they are being exposed as failures. Eventually the nation as a whole will have to deal with their dilapidation.
My wife and I have been married for several decades now. Very early in our marriage I took her to visit some of my extended family in Mississippi and she noted that it still appeared to be recovering from the Civil War. It was a fascinating observation and a realistic assessment. The dilapidation and destruction left by that war a hundred years earlier, and the deep south’s continued resistance and resentment, kept it from full recovery for decades, even a century.
Who can forget Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass flat out lying to the face of the President of the United States when she told Donald J. Trump, visiting just after the devastating LA County fires, that they would expedite the permitting process to enable the rebuild? Sigh. As of Monday, “Fewer than a dozen homes have been rebuilt in Los Angeles County since Jan. 7, 2025.” And so early this week:
President Trump is sidestepping thumb-twiddling California Democrats with an executive order aimed at fast-tracking the rebuilding of Los Angeles a year after devastating wildfires torched entire city blocks and left thousands homeless….
Under the order, the heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) will issue regulations to preempt state and local permitting requirements and allow builders to self-certify to a federal agency that they have complied with health, safety and building standards.
Any federal requirements should be expedited, the order states. The rule applies to those who received federal funds to rebuild.
FEMA additionally will examine what remains unspent in the nearly $3 billion Hazard Mitigation Grant Program fund given to the state to help recovery efforts.
The Trump administration will allow California wildfire survivors to bypass local permitting delays that have stalled rebuilding in Los Angeles for more than a year, allowing immediate access to $3.2 billion in Small Business Administration disaster relief funds.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler called California’s state and local permitting backlog a “nightmare” that has dragged out wildfire recovery.
“Today, with President Trump’s leadership and alongside EPA, the SBA is opening an expedited path to recovery for every borrower who has been held hostage by the bureaucracy of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass,” Loeffler said.
That, dear friends, is how you expedite a process. Two days was all it took the SBA to get things moving.
This is, in many ways the next step in the process begun by the Civil War. That war established the primacy of the federal government over the states. In many ways it utterly transformed the nation from an agglomeration of individual states united for only a few very specific purposes to an actual nation. And now we see that federal government simply bigfooting local government altogether. I am, at heart, a federalist, and hate to see this. We do not need nor want a large and powerful central government.
But as with the Civil War, what other options are there? Local government is simply abusing its citizens. (Or in the case of “sanctuary cities” asserting power clearly given to the federal government.) It may not be chattel slavery, but the squelching of an individual’s rights is pronounced and undeniable in this rebuilding mess. For all those displaced by the fires their home, it turns out, is not truly theirs – it exists and is occupied only by the grace and goodwill of those local governments. In this situation the federal government is freeing these citizens of California from tyranny as local government executes a de facto seizure of their private property – just as it freed the slaves in the Civil War.
I have visited LA County a couple of times since the fires and in the fire zones it is more dilapidated than even the post-war South. Combine them with the homeless encampments littered throughout and the place is rapidly becoming as dystopian as Detroit at its very worst. Hopefully, by acting preemptively in this fashion we can keep it from being the sort of drag on the national economy that the deep South was post war.
Undoubtedly, the local governments of Southern California will file lawsuits and make all sorts of extravagant claims about how this is tyrannical and dictatorial. Equally undoubtedly, the thousands consumed by Trump-hatred will buy into these lies and take to the streets. It’s not going to be pretty. But at least the displaced, that still possess reason, will get their homes back.
In other California “news:”
This is not the only area where the federal government is calling California’s bluff. How is California responding? With charges of racism – of course. What was it I said about “extravagant claims” again?
Among the other dystopian features of Southern California is the fact that the streets are in abysmal shape. They’re blaming the federal government, in this case in the form of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for that as well. For crying out loud – maybe if they did not pour billions into homeless programs that did not work and hiring bureaucrats to deny applications they could afford to comply with the requirements – you know, like the rest of the nation. Not to mention the utter irony of Los Angeles claiming any regulation is overburdensome is so rich as to make one ill.
