The fires in Los Angeles, tragic as they are, exist at the intersection of nature and entitlement. Perhaps nobody exemplifies this fact better than Kim Kardashian.
As perhaps everyone who’s been paying attention knows by now, Southern California is in the midst of a drought. This isn’t a matter of climate change, it simply is how SoCal works: It’s often prone to water shortages and made to burn if left to nature.
In April of 2022, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California instituted the strictest-ever water restrictions for the SoCal area, limiting its residents to roughly 80 gallons of water a day.
Back then, the Los Angeles Times reported, “average potable water use across the MWD’s service area — including residential, commercial and industrial water use — amounts to 125 gallons per person per day.”
Unfortunately for the environment, Los Angeles is also the capital of the American entertainment industry, which is to say it’s the capital of privilege and hypocrisy.
And again unfortunately — at least for some less self-aware members of that usually blessed caste — wealthier Angelenos have a tendency to eat their own for the sin of hypocrisy and wrongthink (or wrongact, as the case may be) in times of upheaval.
Thus enter the case of Kim Kardashian, her gardens, and million-gallon tanks that have run dry.
Kardashian, as the U.K. Daily Mail noted in an article on Saturday, “lives in a $60 million house in The Oaks” — an estimable number even by the inflated standards of the region. (One supposes the world’s habit of “keeping up” with her family’s scripted antics has paid off well.)
Well, according to the Daily Mail’s article, Kardashian “was fined by city authorities” back in 2022 “for using 232,000 gallons of water more than her allocation.”
At this point will Angelenos realize that having water is more important than protecting some small fish?
A rough estimate indicates that she used over 400,000 gallons of water in one year.
Nor was she the only celeb to be fined — Sylvester Stallone and Kevin Hart also faced penalties for going over their water allotments. Over 1,600 residents were fined by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, according to NPR.
Kardashian has since installed water-saving measures at her house, but that’s not saving her from backlash.
“These celebrities have a sense of entitlement,” one of Kardashian’s neighbors told the Mail.
“Everyone was told to cut back on water precisely for this situation, to preserve it to fight fires. They carried on watering because they could afford the fines.”
And of course she did. The fine Kardashian faced for using over 230,000 gallons more water than she should have? A grand total of — drumroll, please! — $2,325! She probably spent ten times more money than that on her landscaping.
Of course, this feeds into a wider anger against the celebrities of SoCal, including the fact that they’ve been hiring private firefighters to defend their properties as tens of thousands of buildings have burned, arguably due to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s insufficient staffing levels.
“My phone has been ringing off the hook. Demand has never been higher,” Chris Dunn of Covered 6, which provides the private firefighting service, told the Mail.
The wealthy defended such extravagances: “This week’s events have shown you can’t trust the city to protect your property. I have the money, so why not?” one individual said.
Yes, well, when it comes to the wildfires in Southern California, let-them-eat-cake-isms don’t exactly make for good optics, particularly when it comes to water usage.
Consider the fact that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that they were having trouble fighting the Palisades fire due to three one-million-gallon tanks running out of water.
According to the Los Angeles Daily News, Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the LADWP, said in a media briefing last week “that the first water tank in Pacific Palisades that was tapped by firefighters held about 1 million gallons of water but it ran out of water at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, and the second tank of 1 million gallons of water ran out of water at about 8:30 p.m., followed by the third tank early Wednesday.”
The fires, she said, “pushed the system to the extreme,” and she urged residents to conserve “because the fire department needs the water to fight fires and we’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
Of course, the best time to conserve water is before a fire — like the 232,000 gallons of water that could have been preserved by Kardashian had she stuck to her allotment.
But then, is it fair to Los Angeles to cannibalize the rich in this situation?
After all, were it not for environmental protections for tiny fish and budget cuts for firefighting widely criticized by conservatives in the wake of the blazes, Southern California would have a great deal more water to work with. If California just used basic common sense in damming and reservoir building, they could have enough water for people to use as much as they want. Should drought not be preventable in the Golden State, at least incompetence is.
Alas, no: These are the empty causes the brainless progressives that Californians elect tend to promote, all at the expense of safety and public interest.
Why not criticize the celebrity class for their hypocrisy? After all, if they can’t vote for pragmatism and self-preservation, they’ll end up — not wrongly — reaping their fair share of the backlash from the tragic whirlwind this vacuity has created.
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