The Power Company Started the  Fires, So Why Does the Media Blame LA Mayor Karen  Bass?

Ishmael Reed

 June 5, 2026

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Angeles National Forest firefighters during initial attack of the Eaton Fire. Photo by Christian Ruiz, US Forest Service.

Hypocritically, MSNOW and CNN express outrage at Donald Trump’s takeover of CBS. But do they serve another segment of the oligarchy? Advertisers, some of whom are cozy with the oligarch’s employee, Donald Trump?

Is this why a parade of white men on Morning Joe and CNN programs blamed the Eaton Fires on Karen Bass and not the Southern California Edison Company? Is it because Southern California Edison Company spends millions on advertising in the Los Angeles media market.

It’s bad enough that MSNOW uses the late Maya Angelou to advertise its product after firing Joy Reid, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Tiffany Cross, who said she was fired for offending Joe Scarborough. But now Bloomberg’s David Drucker, a Morning Joe regular, who said that Bass’s problems were “myriad,” failed to mention the power company’s role. They continue to blame Bass.

According to The Independent:

The federal government has filed two separate lawsuits against the Southern California Edison Company, alleging that the power firm’s infrastructure sparked two wildfires, including the devastating Eaton Fire.

In January, the Eaton Fire scorched nearly 14,000 acres in Los Angeles County and killed 19 people. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but the Justice Department says the deadly blaze “ignited from faulty power infrastructure or by sparks from faulty power infrastructure owned, maintained, and operated” by the utility company.

“But for Edison’s negligence, these fires would not have started,” Bill Essayli, the acting US attorney in Los Angeles, said at a press conference.

CalMatters commented:

Wind and brush are forces of nature, not politics, and absolve Bass of responsibility for the fires. Karen Bass is no more responsible for the Palisades fire than former mayors Richard Riordan was for the Northridge Earthquake or Eugene Schmitz for the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. They prove nothing more than that disasters are a fact of California history.

The coverage of the mayor’s race also revealed that the media bosses still make money by spotlighting circus acts like the one offered by Mayor Bass’s opponent and elected Trump. Spencer Pratt is right at home with the MAGA cult. He blew $10 million preparing for a 2012 Mayan apocalypse.

Ismael Reed is using Go Fund Me to raise money for his new play,”King Ludd.”

The Yellow Baldwin: William Gee Wong

Ishmael Reed
December 19, 2025


Ishmael Reed presenting William Gee Wong with the American Book Award for memoir. Photo: Tennessee Reed.

Reading William Gee Wong’s Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America (Temple University Press, 2024), one realizes how valuable the former Oakland Tribune publishers Robert and Nancy Maynard were to the Oakland community. However, the stress that accompanied their being overachievers killed them—the Jackie Robinson curse. Maynard, who’d worked at The Washington Post, had become the first Black publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper. One of those who thrived there was William Gee Wong. The newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize, and Wong got a spot on The McNeil-Lehrer Report, a plum for a minority journalist. While dwelling in the heights of journalism, Wong learned the different treatment accorded to white and minority journalists.

Plagiarist Mike Barnicle still has a job, a white male journalist who was suspended by The New York Times for sexual harassment, and Glenn Thrush still has a job at The Times. CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin, who exposed himself to women on The New Yorker’s staff, a criminal offense, was also suspended. Briefly. He’s the one who said that the Black jury acquitted O.J. Simpson because Blacks can’t think rationally and “shouldn’t be patted on the head.” The jury wasn’t all Black, and the criminal’s gloves never did fit. Toobin still has a job at CNN. In late December 2017, Amber Athey reported about MSNBC’s Chris Matthews as having had a track record of sexual harassment toward female colleagues and guests, including one woman being given “a separation-related payment.” He retired, temporarily,but he’s back now.

Wong’s heady media moment came to an end when one of the good old boys of the kind who still control the media, the late C. David Burgin, became the newspaper’s editor after Robert Maynard’s death. Wong’s and Black journalist Brenda Payton’s roles were limited by the new owner, Burgin, who regularly insulted Maynard’s reign at the Tribune. Payton stayed on for a while, but Wong was fired. He was escorted from the building by a bouncer. So was Barbara Reynolds, who had a column at USA Today. She had a heart attack the night of her ouster.

With the current purge of minority journalists in the name of Woke and DEI, the Burgin types are in complete control of the mainstream media. Mainstream publications like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have capitulated to Trump, and a pro-Trump family, the Ellisons, is about to buy Warner Bros., Netflix, and other media. Trump wants to control CNN through Ellison.

A media that lacks diversity attracts white readers by offering the usual stereotypes of communities that don’t have the media power to fight back. Though the corporate media believes its owners’ values are superior to those of social media platforms, social media offers a more multidimensional view of the communities we live in.

Fortunately, we still have ancient means to tell our stories: documentaries, theater, and books. Wong has chosen to write a book.

And so, deprived of the kind of space accorded to plagiarists like Barnicle, William Gee Wong has written Sons of Chinatown, and though this book is an account of Wong’s personal journey as a Chinese American and a husband with a biracial son, his story intersects with our stories. As Leonard Peltier says, the purpose of our faux Eurocentric education was to take the Indian out of the Indian. The purpose was also to take the Chinese out of the Chinese, the Hispanic out of the Hispanic, the Irish out of the Irish, and the Italian out of the Italian.

When Gay Talese, who bragged about marrying into the Anglo mainstream and denied the existence of Italian American literature, he was countered by Helen Barolini, author of The Dream Book, which documented a history of Italian American writing in the United States.

 

Wong felt this “weird insider-outsider phenomenon and ultimately came away knowing that I am an American by nationality and this indefinable cultural mix of Chinatown and American. Yet at the same time, I wasn’t sure—and in some ways, still am not—whether my broad cohort (Chinese Americans and Asian Americans), and I truly belong here in America or in our ancestral lands—or in truth, neither place, as though we are in a yellow purgatory. It is indeed an underlying weird feeling of belonging and yet not belonging.” All of us who have commuted between the worlds of our forefathers and mothers and the Anglo world have felt that way.

Wong found himself out of place in China, the country of his ancestors’ origin. Similarly, when Africans began visiting Africa in the 1960s, they discovered that the Africans considered them to be white. Wong feels uneasy about the hi-tech Chinese immigrants who speak Mandarin and look down upon the traditional Chinese Americans who speak Cantonese, who are slighted in the film “Crazy Rich Asians.” Without this book, most of us would have missed this slight just as I would have missed how Asian groups are pitted against each other in the Bruce Lee films if novelist Shawn Wong hadn’t alerted me. Traditional Black Americans complain about their treatment by African immigrants, especially the Nigerians, the most educated among immigrants. Joy Reid says her Guyanese mother and Congolese father made disparaging remarks about Black Americans. Blacks are also beset by high-tech Indian types who are even more eager to pick fights with Blacks to please white nationalists. They wouldn’t be the first immigrants to audition for white acceptance by craping on Blacks.

Vivek Ramaswamy,when a Republican presidential candidate, expressed sympathy for a White man who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Florida, Dollar General store. He didn’t think a mistaken belief in White supremacy was to blame, since he doesn’t think it exists, even though the killer had written a manifesto and had a swastika on his AR-15. Another Indian American who sought to gain the spotlight by kowtowing to white prejudices was Rina Shah, who justified Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, D.C., because of Black dysfunctional households. By doing so, she neglected dysfunction in her own community, including South Asian domestic violence, from a study: South Asian Women at Greater Risk for Injury From Intimate Partner Violence by Anita Raj, and Jay G Silverman.

“Intimate partner violence and intimate partner violence–related homicide disproportionately affect immigrant women.1–6 South Asian women residing in the United States appear to be at particularly high risk for intimate partner violence, with 40% reporting intimate partner violence in their current relationship in a recent study.” Ain’t no money or attention in Ms Raj.examining dysfunction in her community?

What Shah and Ramaswamy have in common with minority writers is that we are told that to be successful, we must attract a white audience because only whites buy cultural products. I’m sure that President Obama scolded Blacks with stern love lectures to convince white voters that he wouldn’t be a Black nationalist president. Wong writes about some deranged Black people who answered President Trump’s “Chinese Virus” smear by attacking Asian American citizens. Yes, like members of other ethnic groups, Blacks can be stupid. But an Asian American drug gang that sought to take over our neighborhood was repelled by a Black felon who’d been released from Pelican Bay. The police were of no help. In fact, at the Crime Council meetings where we met with the police, elderly Black residents wondered why the police were so chummy with drug dealers. Whites commit most of the violence against Asian Americans. Still, the media low-balls their participation because they don’t want to risk embarrassing those whom their advertisers see as their best customers. Don Lemon told me that at CNN, he was told to lighten up on Trump voters because MAGAs buy products too.

Wong writes: “Did my racial identity and/or my frequent writing about Chinese America and Asian America help or hurt my career? That question is knotty, convoluted, and difficult to grasp logically and rationally. I don’t really know. What I do know is that I have absolutely no regrets that I spent part of my journalism life writing about an aspect of American life—Yellow America—that few, if any, other mainstream journalists bothered to examine at the time I was doing it.” While many mediocre white journalists dominate the opinion industry highly qualified journalists William Gee Wong and Emil Guillermo were losttheir positions as commentators by PBS and NPR. (NPR fired me for my commentary about how the Willie Horton campaign would backfire on President Bush and Lee Atwater.)

Both Wong and Guillermo ascended to the heights of American journalism only to be cut down. But without their sacrifice and those of others, there would not have been a Yellow Renaissance in literature, because when members of the younger generation saw them use writing as an expression, they began writing themselves. Despite the setbacks Wong has encountered,he is still hopeful.

Wong writes: “America is no longer a place where only straight white Christian men are all-powerful and preeminent. Make no mistake: Many still are, but an increasing number of ‘others’ are making their marks, too—yes, including some of us yellow people. America’s challenge now and into the foreseeable future is to find ways to fit its many disparate identities into a more cohesive whole (i.e., a More Perfect Union).”

Like Baldwin, Wong writes about a corner of the American experience that exists in the shadows and about which Baldwin’s “Chorus of Innocents” is ignorant. William Gee Wong does the same with Sons of Chinatown, with equal eloquence. He is the Yellow Baldwin.

Reed’s latest play is “The Amanuensis.”

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Calling Kamala Harris a Whore Won the Election for Trump

Ishmael Reed

 June 20, 2025

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Photograph Source: Nathaniel St. Clair

I don’t know which is worse. The former Vice President’s defeat or the commentary that’s followed, monopolized by men of similar backgrounds.

Did German liberals appease the 3rd Reich as upscale liberals in our country are appeasing this American 4th Reich? Why do I call it the 4th Reich?

Members of the Trump administration, like Musk and Bannon, enjoy hoisting Nazi salutes, and Vice President Vance, on a trip to Germany, embraced the AfD, considered by some to be a Neo-Nazi party. He told German politicians they should “abandon their policy of maintaining a ‘firewall against the far right,’ a statement which received “murmurs from the audience and a backlash from German officials,” according to Jewish Chronicle, Feb.16, 2025.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is the epitome of soppy upscale liberalism; he says Democrats shouldn’t talk down to the (white) working class, a charge against the Democrats that has been endlessly repeated. This line ignores the former president’s commitment to unions and that the former Vice President received the majority of votes from union households.

Kristof says that Democrats shouldn’t call Trump supporters racists and bigots. Millions of them are racists and bigots, and if they had succeeded in overthrowing the government on January 6th,, given the MAGA hostility towards The Times, he might find himself in an El Salvador prison where there ain’t no two hour five-star Manhattan lunches.

Like other Timesmen who believe that San Francisco is a scene from “The Last of Us,” he couldn’t resist taking a dump on San Francisco, defining the entire city by focusing on one section,which is how the president and his media buddies are defining Los Angeles. East Coast columnists know as much about San Francisco as we know about the ocean buried beneath the ice of Enceladus.

Kristof made his statement on May 28. On the same day, Robert Reich also attributed the former Vice President’s loss to economic discontent.

A serious study disposes of this theory. In January, political sociologist David N. Smith and his University of Kansas colleague, Associate Sociology Professor Eric A. Hanley, published a 47-page paper deconstructing the Republican president’s appeal. They write that “75% of Trump’s voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically.” Sharing his prejudices means an intense paranoia about a DEI takeover led by Blacks, who are seen by the right as the group that puts other groups up to mischief.

It was left up to El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, to print my assessment of the election, where I wrote that the Vice President lost the election because of Racism and Misogyny. Trump got the locker room vote by defining the former Vice President in antebellum-old South terms as a promiscuous slave wench. It was his vile assertion that Kamela Harris achieved her status not by hard work but by using sex. He retweeted a post that the Vice President rose to power by giving blow jobs, which must have sent guffaws throughout the locker room. With this strategy, he got the locker room vote.

The present Vice President embellished Trump’s slander of the former Vice President when Vance referred to the then-Vice President as “trash.” Millions of white men believe that minority women are sluts who are available to them. That’s why Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, believed that Nafissatou Diallo, a 33-year-old former housekeeper at the upmarket Sofitel hotel in Manhattan, was available to him for sexual assault. The good old boy Media of Manhattan took his side. They called her a whore. Strauss-Kahn, however, settled with Diallo for an undisclosed amount of money. Trump got the locker room, a locker room that holds millions of men. He reached back to the old antebellum South image of the Black woman as a promiscuous slave wench, the kind of lurid image of Black women one finds in the books of pro-slavery writers Thomas Nelson Page (In Ole Virginia) and Thomas Dixon (The Klansman) who represent the most shameful period in American literature.

Did Trump’s final argument during the campaign focus on economics? The price of eggs? No, as The Washington Post noted on October 29, 2024, “Donald Trump’s closing argument: Vulgarity” during a rally.

 “Businessman Grant Cardone likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute. ‘Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,’ he said. “David Rem, billed as a childhood friend of Mr. Trump’s, called Ms. Harris the ‘‘Antichrist’ and ‘devil’ while waving a cross onstage. Elon Musk, who also spoke at Sunday’s rally, (in October 2024) posted on X, referred to Ms. Harris as the c-word. He opened a rally this month in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Ms. Harris has been a “sh*t” vice president, and everything she touches turns to “sh*t.”

The Associated Press, October 27, 2025, reported that Trump called Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris “the devil” and “likened the former California attorney general vying to become the first woman and Black woman president to a prostitute.”

A group called the “Speaking with American Men” project received twenty million dollars to study why young men didn’t vote for Kamala. I could have told Democrats for free why Kamala Harris lost.

The commentators didn’t recognize this ante bellum connection because they were educated to be copycat Anglos and have little knowledge of American history. Even TV’s official historians make omissions and mistakes.

The commentators continue to note that some Black and Latino men have abandoned the Democrats. Maybe Black and Hispanic men recoil at the thought of a woman president? Especially a woman of Indo-Black heritage with a Jewish husband, fodder for conspiracy theories.

Whites explained the alienation of Latino men from Democrats in economic terms. Victor Martinez, a Latino broadcaster and not one of the green room vagrants who are disproportionately white, said his Latino callers were opposed to a woman running things; the majority of Latina and Black women voted for Harris—Hispanic whisperer David M. Drucker failed to mention their vote when, appearing on “Morning Joe” on June 9, 2025, he explained why the Hispanic vote is trending right. Of course, some might have regrets. Some Cuban and Venezuelan Trump supporters have been threatened with deportation.

Sixteen rappers endorsed Trump as a nod to a fellow felon, including Curtis 50 Cents Jackson, who fronts for Starz network—a network which specializes in sleazy Black pathology dramas. Snoop Dogg performed at his inaugural. In an attempt to moderate the feud between Trump and Musk, Kanye West said he loved both of them.

Given that millions in Africa and the United States will die as a result of Trump’s policies, and Black and Brown women who will suffer the most from his abortion bans, the possible curtailment of Medicare and Social Security, the rappers’ endorsement of Trump has to be regarded as the biggest blunder in Black history. The headline of a story that appeared on the front page of The Times on June 19, 2025, read “Trump’s Cuts to South Africa Threaten Global Medical Progress.” On the editorial page was the statement: “Global malnutrition risks getting worse because of Trump’s cuts in humanitarian aid.”

In my interview with Don Lemon for Tar Baby magazine, for which I am editor-in-chief, he discounted the influence of rappers. I disagree. These rappers have millions of followers.

How did white women react to these lewd lowlife attacks against their sister? The majority voted for Trump for the third time. Maybe they admire Trump’s antebellum style. In the old South, White men ruled women and minorities. Perhaps they suffer from the political version of the Stockholm Syndrome.

There’s a scene in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans where a Native American voices his objection to a white settler as a lookout for an encampment because he might misinterpret some signals. He might confuse the noise of the enemy with that of an animal.

This is the problem with an American commentariat that lacks diversity. There are signs that they miss.

Progressives had issues with Kamala Harris, mostly having to do with her stance on the genocide in Gaza. Like Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon because he could not stray from President Johnson’s position on Vietnam, she was compromised because of her loyalty to President Biden. (Forgotten is a statement attributed to Humphrey, when discussing poor living conditions in urban ghettos. Humphrey stated: “I’ve got enough spark in me to lead a mighty good revolt under those conditions….”)  But even with her equivocating about Gaza, where daily war crimes are committed, progressives should have expressed more outrage about the nasty treatment of this woman by white men like Trump and Vance, who view all Black women as “trash,” loose and available.

In October, Ishmael Reed’s play “Life Among the Aryans” which predicted the Insurrection, will have a repeat performance at the Black Rep. Group.

BEFORE ILLUMINATUS THERE WAS MUMBO JUMBO

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