“When merit is replaced with ideology, fires rage unchecked, killers walk free, and fragile systems collapse—leaving lives and cities in ruin.”

Why Our Systems Collapse

When merit is replaced with ideology, fires rage unchecked, killers walk free, and fragile systems collapse—leaving lives and cities in ruin.

By Victor Davis Hanson, September 22, 2025:

America has a lot of built-in safety backups and redundancies.

But every once in a while, when tradition, science, time-tested protocols, and common sense are ignored, a fragile system utterly collapses.

Usually, an iconic event reveals how vulnerable the entire country has become, and predictably occurs when suicidal ideologies and nihilism, in perfect-storm fashion, wreak havoc.

The media, academia, the bureaucracy, and higher education can mask the dangers of their political agendas—at least until their sheer incompetence or toxicity can no longer be hidden or excused, and a predictable disaster ensues.

Take the January 4-5, 2025, Pacific Palisades fire that destroyed an entire historic neighborhood of Los Angeles. The embers had not even cooled when we were lectured that “climate change” was responsible for the historically predictable annual autumn and early winter Santa Ana winds that whip up horrific fires before the first winter rains arrive—a phenomenon documented for over two centuries.

The media, in reporting the conflagration, downplayed human culpability. But over the next few weeks, outraged former homeowners and independent journalists began cataloging the real symptoms of a total system failure that turned the normal end-of-year fire season into a catastrophic inferno.

A lot of things had to go wrong to utterly destroy an ancient, coveted neighborhood. But DEI managed to do all of that with ease.

First, we learned that the incompetent mayor, Karen Bass, had cut the fire budget. Then, despite warnings of dry hillsides, underfunded fire protection, and predicted high winds, Bass was nowhere to be seen during the most dangerous weeks of the year.

Why? She was junketing in Ghana, an African nation rarely considered vital to the running of the third-largest city in the United States.

The now-convicted felon, Deputy Mayor Brian Thompson, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat to the city hall. So a mayoral apparatus did not exist.

Next, the clueless and vastly overpaid Janisse Quiñones, the CEO and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, was likely hired based on diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria despite a prior uninspiring record in her administrative roles at PG&E. She was utterly unprepared for the fire.

When the fires swept in, a key reservoir that might have saved the community had been bone dry for months while under superficial repair. Dozens of fire hydrants were nonfunctional.

Unhinged environmental mandates had prevented homeowners from clearing nearby combustible brush on the hillside, the proverbial fuel of the Santa Ana wind-powered fires.

The chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Kristin Crowley, had bragged about her diversity hiring but had done little to ensure her firefighters had enough water to put out the fires.

In other words, the wages of electing, appointing, or selecting officials on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, or making policy on the basis of radical green orthodoxy, rather than proven meritocracy and empiricism, finally came due in a systems collapse of the city government, utilities, fire protection, and prevention.

There have been lots of Palisades events in the past. And there will be far more to come in the future, as our ever more complex society that requires meritocratic operators cannot afford social engineering and ideological agendas at the expense of lives and property.

Similar to the Palisades disaster was the train of events that led to the needless murder of a 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina.

DeCarlos Brown, a 14-time felon, was out on cashless bail, despite his lengthy record of violent offenses that should have ensured imprisonment. He was homeless with a lifelong record of recidivism.

Who let him out? And why? A magistrate, Terese Stokes. She had never passed the bar but seemingly enjoyed impunity from apparent conflicts of interest by sentencing the convicted to an alternate treatment center in which she and her partner had financial interests.

Why would the state allow those with little legal certification to become de facto judges? Why would their records of freeing dangerous criminals not come under scrutiny?

The result of those unanswered questions was that DeCarlos Brown entered a train with a knife, silently jumped up, and lethally slashed the throat of Ms. Zarutska in the seat ahead. She had no idea she was sitting in front of a career, violent, and released felon from a family of violent felons—and was now to become the prey of a cold-blooded, racist killer.

Four passengers sitting adjacent to, ahead of, and behind Brown did nothing as he attacked Zarutska. Nor did they render her aid, as they callously sidestepped her in her death throes. He seemed to have muttered, “Got the white girl,” as he walked away from that lethal attack and got off the train.

The system was now breaking: why did riders not have to buy tickets to enter the train? Why was there no security on the train? Why did not one nearby passenger intervene either to stop the attack, render assistance to the dying Zarutska, or seek to apprehend Brown for the police?

And then the broken system utterly collapsed—as happened in Los Angeles, where fires raged, no official either cared or had any solution, and nine months later, the charred ruins sit mostly untouched.

Once disgraced Mayor Bass tried to restore her reputation by hogging TV microphones and blasting the Trump administration for arresting and deporting violent and criminal illegal aliens, living exempt and free in her city, as the ruins of an entire neighborhood sit mostly untouched.

Almost immediately after the Zarutska murder, the left-wing media nexus was confronted with a dilemma. The light rail video had already been released by the police. Yet left-wing mayor Vi Lyles immediately lectured the public not to blame the homeless Brown. She urged the video not be seen so it would not stir up animosities. She called the evil work of Brown a “tragedy” and pontificated that arresting people would not be a solution.

North Carolina Governor Josh Stein was silent too long about the murder, despite posting all sorts of extraneous news stories. In contrast, he had earlier been quick to editorialize upon the death of George Floyd.

Once popular rage forced his public statement, Stein blabbered about all the anti-crime bills he introduced, but the former Attorney General of North Carolina kept quiet about his state, which allows an incompetent Stokes, with zero legal training, to release lethal criminals onto the public.

Add up the systemic failures to find the common denominator.

An “honor system” that requires no paid ticket to ride the public train is a prescription for disaster, especially when there are no nocturnal security officers on it. No city official seemed concerned about it.

It does no good to bar passengers from carrying concealed weapons if they are never at least superficially searched as they enter the train or surveilled by guards while on it. No city official cared about that either. In a climate of defunding the police, cashless bail, and the ending of stop-and-frisk, no such preemptive action apparently was warranted.

Stokes should never have been a magistrate. She was untrained, unqualified, and had possible financial conflicts of interest that should be investigated. She will not be because she feels her DEI status got her a job without the requisite qualifications and will ensure it when evidence argues otherwise. Anyone who tries to fire her will be demonized as a racist, homophobic bigot.

Brown should have been in prison for the rest of his life for the string of felonies he had committed. He was not because university-spawned, foundation-funded, and politician-empowered “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory” argue, as the mayor alluded, that arrest, conviction, and incarceration do not work and are somehow unfair and not the answer to crime. His freedom can be seen as a symptom of reparatory justice, as was the fate of his inevitable future victims.

The four nearby passengers together might have stopped Brown from murdering Zarutska, or they could have at least rendered first aid, even if in vain. Yet they knew well the unpredictable nature of inner-city crime, and the recent demonization of the heroic Daniel Penny. The nearby passengers also represent a societal moral collapse. If they were fearful of their own safety in letting Brown murder Zarutska, then they had no such reasonable subsequent fear of the departed Brown when they got up and walked by the dying young woman.

Mayor Lyles does not care about innocent passengers murdered by career criminals. She is assured instead that she had been elected and reelected by DEI/woke/leftist orthodoxy. In this case, she accordingly on spec claimed arrests do not work, the homeless bear no culpability, and videos that show reality lead to politically incorrect conclusions. Those orthodoxies overrode any humane concern for the victim or future innocent victims to come.

She correctly understood that any moral outrage expressed against freed felons, the homeless epidemic, or rac