Fire season is ramping up across California, with the Sandy Fire in Ventura County and the Bain and Verona fires in Riverside County raising new concerns about wildfire preparedness and prevention. In Sacramento, the Daily Signal spoke with state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil about whether California is doing enough to prepare for another dangerous wildfire season. “I know we’re not doing enough. … We know that fire risk is all year long, there’s no more wildfire season. It doesn’t matter whether you live in rural areas or urban areas, you’re at risk,” said Alvarado-Gil, whose district includes some of the most fire-prone communities in the state.  Despite her warnings, Alvarado-Gil’s wildfire mitigation legislation failed to make it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee, something the senator blames on Democrats in Sacramento.  “We’ve been ruled by a single-party state here in California for quite some time, so we know where to place the blame. … The Democratic supermajority consistently makes decisions on policy priorities and funding priorities that do not put wildfire management, or even risk reduction, at the top of that,” she said. The senator is calling for prescribed burns, a technique that fire agencies can use to clear dead brush and reduce the buildup of flammable vegetation. Critics argue the burns can harm native plants and wildlife. However, Alvarado-Gil says the burns are necessary and that avoiding them prioritizes animals over human life.  “Our forests are meant to endure prescribed burns, and what happens is it rejuvenates the flora and the fauna,” she said. “So, we’ve gone too far to the left in terms of prohibiting prescribed burns that we know work. Right now, the policies are more in favor of different animal species than human species.” In 2024, Alvarado-Gil left the Democratic Party and registered as a Republican. She said the Democrats’ policies are causing residents to flee the state.  “I’ve been able to see on both sides what is working and what is failing California,” she said. “For decades, the Democratic supermajority has been failing California. If you look at the cost of gas, insurance, home prices, you name it … the increase of unaffordability in California has driven people out of our state and has closed businesses.” Alvarado-Gil continued, “This is about overregulation, unfunded state mandates, and frankly, Californians who are just sick and tired of the same old programs squeezing our pockets with programs that don’t benefit us.”

The Supreme Court determined that a U.S.-based company—Havana Docks—can recover damages from four major cruise lines that used its docks previously confiscated by the Cuban government. Havana Docks, a U.S. company, built docks in Havana’s port before the Cuban Revolution. The Castro regime revoked the company’s legal right to the docks, and the company later sued cruise lines that used the docks, claiming they were liable for trafficking in confiscated property. The cruise lines argued that the company’s legal right to the docks would have expired by then, regardless of confiscation. In an 8-1 ruling issued on Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas found that Havana Docks “did not have to prove that the cruise lines interfered with a property interest that would have existed in the counterfactual scenario in which the Cuban government did not confiscate it.” “The cruise lines’ use of the docks is sufficient to establish that they used ‘property which was confiscated by the Cuban Government’,” Thomas wrote. Justice Elena Kagan dissented. In 2019, the docks company sued four cruise companies that used the confiscated docks from 2016 through 2019. The companies were Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line, and MSC Cruises. The companies argued they followed the U.S. government’s lead on reopening travel to Cuba as part of the Obama administration’s overtures to the island nation. Thursday’s ruling reverses an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that determined the company could not recover damages. Before that, a lower court found the cruise companies liable for $440 million. The question before the court was whether a plaintiff must establish a present-day property interest if the assets in question were not monetized.

After Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez claimed that “despite the (U.S.) embargo, sanctions and threats of the use of force, Cuba continues on a path of sovereignty toward its socialist development,” several Republican lawmakers dismissed his remarks as disconnected from reality. “Ha, ha, ha,” Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., said sarcastically in response. “Ha, ha, ha.” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal that Rodríguez should “keep going—that’s not going to go well.” Salazar and Rep. Carlos Giménez, R-Fla., argued that Cuba’s foreign minister lacks real authority in shaping the country’s policy, pointing instead to the influence of GAESA, a military-run economic conglomerate. “The foreign minister of Cuba is not part of the ruling establishment of Cuba,” Giménez said, referring to GAESA. He described Rodríguez as a “figurehead.” “A foreign minister can say whatever, the president can say whatever—it doesn’t matter,” Giménez added. “It only matters, really, what Raúl Castro and GAESA are saying.” Both lawmakers emphasized what they described as a contradiction in Cuba’s leadership, noting that GAESA reportedly controls billions in assets while ordinary Cubans struggle economically. They accused the institution of prioritizing investments in hotels and other profit-generating industries. “They are thieves, disguised as revolutionaries,” Giménez said, adding that Cuba’s leaders “don’t even believe in communism.” “Everybody suffers, and them and their children and relatives go off in a jet-set world, date Hollywood stars, while the people of Cuba are suffering,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what the foreign minister says—he really has nothing to say, because he doesn’t govern Cuba.” Salazar also contrasted Cuba’s leadership with that of Iran, arguing that the Castro regime lacks comparable resources. “The difference between the Castros and the ayatollahs is that the Castros do not have resources,” she said. She further contended that Cuba no longer enjoys the same level of support from allies such as Russia and Venezuela, and pointed to Mexico’s past involvement with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., in providing oil to the island. “President [Donald] Trump sent a very clear message that [Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum] could not be helping these thieves any longer. We very much appreciate the fact that she stopped,” Salazar added. Cuban Military Action? Salazar argued that the Cuban military’s financial reserves could pose a potential concern for the United States, questioning how those funds might be used. “Let’s find out what they are going to do with that money,” she told The Daily Signal. “If they are going to indeed attack, or if they are going to create a military problem for the United States.” “We know exactly how we are going to respond, but that is up to the secretary,” Salazar added, without elaborating. Rep. Giménez nodded in agreement. Salazar also spoke about accountability for Cuba’s leadership, saying that many of her constituents want to see consequences for members of the Castro family. She said her constituents “would love” to see former leader Raúl Castro and his relatives face justice, adding that “I’m sure that my constituents would be OK with that.” On Wednesday, the Department of Justice unveiled criminal charges, including murder, against Castro and five others.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler: All right, here’s the headline, Victor. Kamala Harris torched for progressive wish list. Here’s the first few paragraphs of this article: Harris said during a Wednesday night livestream on the “Win With Black Women” podcast that Democrats need, quote, “an expanded playbook and need to consider radical positions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including abolishing the electoral college, packing the Supreme Court.  “Look,” she says, “this is a moment where there are no bad ideas. A no bad idea brainstorm is what I’d like to call it,” Harris said in the video, which quickly went viral on social media.   I know Kamala Harris and the word brain in the same sentence are –  Victor Davis Hanson: It’s an oxymoron.   Fowler: Yeah, yeah. So, Puerto Rico statehood, neutralizing red states. She says they’re cheating on the maps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.   Victor, your take.   Hanson: Yeah, I mean, she goes through these metamorphoses depending … she has no real ideology. I know she’s a black woman, half Asian black, and she uses that, but she has no deep-seated beliefs.  In the ’80s and ’90s and at the millennium and after, there was this sort of Bill Clinton democratism, and so she tried to distinguish herself as a tough prosecutor. She would prosecute parents whose kids were tardy to class or truant. She would go after marijuana possessors. She was the consort of Willie Brown, and she was trying to be the moderate voice.  And then when the Obama years came, she radicalized, and then her bathos point was when we had that five months of 2020 looting, killing, arson, and she got on CBS News and she said it’s not going to end. It shouldn’t end. I think it was with [Stephen] Colbert. It’s gonna go on, and it’s gonna go on to the election.  And then it was very funny because all the Left was trying to get Trump, Jack Smith, on insurrection because he had, you know, supposedly egged on the crowd, but he did say assemble peacefully and patriotically. She didn’t even have that out. And yet they all said, “Well, she wasn’t mentioning…” And that day in Washington, of course, they had tried to storm the White House, and Trump went into his bunker, and The New York Times said he was kind of a coward for doing that.  I suppose they wanted him to go out and fight with the protesters. But the point I’m making is they all said it was just nothing.   And then she reincarnated herself again under Biden as vice president as open borders, borders are all this left-wing. And then she ran and remember she said that she didn’t really know whether she was for deportations or not.  She had that clip came out where she was going, No deportation, no deportation. And so she tried to tack to the center. She wasn’t even…  Remember, she had said she’d eliminate fracking, but now she wasn’t sure. Pennsylvania was important. So now she’s going to go hard left because that’s where the Jacobin Party is.  And then if she gets the nomination, which I pray that she does, then she will go back to left-of-center. She doesn’t believe in anything.   As I said, I didn’t want to be cruel, but it is true that when she starts talking and the word feelings, empathy, any metaphysical term, time, being, come up, her eyes start to go like this, you know, like “Twilight Zone” music.  And then she starts to babble. And then when she sees that nobody is, everybody’s going, “Is this person sane?” Then she starts cackling. And that’s, she knows she can’t do that and yet she can’t resist or maybe it’s some affectation, but it’s sad. It really is.   Fowler: Well, she knew enough as a candidate, a forced-on America candidate, to not talk to the press for, what was it, like 35 days or something?  She didn’t answer a question.   Hanson: Yeah, she didn’t do it the first … I want to ask the Democrats, you had power for eight years with Bill Clinton. You had power with eight years with Barack Obama, and you had the Congress at the beginning. Why didn’t you get rid of the Electoral College then? Why didn’t you bring in two states then?  Why didn’t you pack the court and get your, I don’t know, your six liberal judges then? Why didn’t you end the Senate filibuster? Barack Obama tried to filibuster Sam Alito.   And the answer is that as long as they have power, they put those things off. Then, when they get out of power, the system’s not fair.  The system’s fair that got them power. Right. And then when they’re enjoying … They’re like little adolescents, you know what I mean? 13-year-olds. If everything is my way, then the whole world is wonderful. And when I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum and are mad at my parents. And the parents in this case are the Constitution and 250 years of tradition.  Yeah. You didn’t get me my power. You didn’t get me elected, so I’m mad at you. I’m gonna get in two states. I’m gonna get rid of the filibuster. I’m gonna get rid of the Electoral College. That’s what I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna … It’s like, well, look … it’s childlike.   Fowler: Yeah, along those lines, Victor, we didn’t talk about it, the Virginia Supreme Court ruling and rollout, but between the rejection from the state Supreme Court and then the bungled application to the U.S.  Supreme Court that had misspelled Virginia—even misspelled the word Senate and other things, misspelled Virginia, there was talk of an effort to remove all the Supreme Court justices from the Virginia court. I saw that. By the age of 53. Yeah. So right. Yeah. They don’t get their, “Well, we’re gonna do whatever we can to, to shoehorn in” —   Hanson: And I think a lot of this is when you’re looking at even the left-wing analysis, you know, Nate Silver or Cook or whatever report.   Fowler: Yeah, that’s Charles Cook, yeah.   Hanson: You start to look at it, and they’re gonna pick up about 10 to 14 seats probably, the Republicans are, in this redistricting war, and they’re gonna pick up maybe four or five in the racial gerrymandering wars, and that’s not counting this, as I said earlier, this census.  It’ll be long term. But when you look at the actual seats that are up that are contested, there’s only about 25, if you don’t count leaning left or leaning right, and it’s about 50/50 in those 25, 11. So I would say that the Republicans have, right now, a 30% to 45% chance of holding the House.  And it’s gonna be contingent on … There’s such little adolescents on the left. They really do believe that the war is lost. In fact, the president of Iran came out today, Jack, and he said, “It doesn’t do any good, essentially, for us to lie to the Iranians,” said, “We haven’t hurt … We’re not hurting. We’ve suffered a lot of damage.”  He is more accurate than the Left is. They’ve said that, you know, Iran is winning. And my point is whether it’s, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have an instinctual gut feeling that sometime Tuesday night to Friday, we’re going to go back into kinetic operations and it’s going to be quick and there’s going to be a, you know, a tumult and prices will up, but I don’t think it’s going to last.  I think it’s going to solve the problem. They’re going to open the Gulf and there’s going to be a lot of speculators with high priced oil that want to unload it.   We said last time there’s 250 freighters out in the seas full anywhere from a half a million to 2 million barrels, and they’re going to be unloading it.  And if Trump can by June or July get back on the economy, the indicators are all strong. And I think the Left knows that. And then when they look at the redistricting, it’s not, it’s not a done deal for them. And they like, also like little kids, they just get in these temper tantrums or wild enthusiasm.  Here in California, when they redistrict, they were just wild. Like, “Well, we did. It’s gonna be … ” And then when Virginia did, “Oh, that’s the icing on the … Oh, and then we’re gonna impeach these people.” They go from like this, this, this. And I don’t, I don’t know. Yeah. This is not a democratic party.  It isn’t. These people are really weird. They’re full of anger and hate. And I don’t, I don’t know. It’s a weird mixture of Islamicism and socialism, communism, and then DEI. It’s got all of these in, these clouds that make a perfect storm.   Fowler: And grifting. Yes. Stalin and the boys all needed their dachas, and these people—   Hanson: Well, there’s a good article today in The Wall Street Journal about champagne socialist and about all, like Bernie Sanders’ lifestyle that he leads and a lot of these billionaires, the Soros people, and all the nice things that accrue to all.  Hasan Piker and his $200,000 Porsche. Yeah. They surely don’t live the life they advocate for others.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Matthew Mehan, author of “The American Book of Fables,” joins Bradley Devlin on a new episode of Signal Sitdown to discuss the “moral imagination” of the Founders and on the need during America 250 for the nation to have a “shared memory.” This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Bradley Devlin: Why did you write this book? Matthew Mehan: So I am a weird—I’m an odd duck in that I have both a lot of political training—political, philosophical, history, and civics training—but I also have literary training, and the two of those things kind of bounce back and forth, and so you start to think about what is the role of a man of letters in a republic. And it turns out that it’s a very sort of underpracticed art to give the right kinds of images that bring the right sort of ideas, habits, customs, principles, ways of being, and memory. That’s a major task that today’s poets don’t really do. And if they do it, they’re usually doing something wrong, or in error or deliberately subversive, which we can talk about later, I guess. But that just basically—I kind of wanted to come to the defense. Blood rushes to a wound, and this is something that needed doing, and so I did it. That’s the simple answer. And then A250, the Semiquincentennial—go big or go home for America’s 250th. I wanted to basically, you know, drop a major heirloom, a kind of celebratory monster coffee-table epic, on the American family. Bradley Devlin: Why fables? What’s important about a fable? Matthew Mehan: So one of the things I did to prep for this is I actually did study fables. I went to conferences like a good little nerd and read—you know, read up on—They have conferences— Bradley Devlin: On fables? Matthew Mehan: Very rarely. And sometimes you have to organize them yourself. But yes, I did. And then also I wrote for The Heritage Foundation, actually. I did a white paper on the founding imagination. What does the founding generation—what was in their imagination? And it turns out what’s in your imagination is very much the ingredients for whatever stew of a decision—i.e., your prudence. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna found a new nation? Are you going to have a revolution? What are you gonna do? And it turns out that what is in your imagination is a lot of what is the constituent parts of those acts. So if you have a poor imagination, you have an empty pantry, you will not cook a good dish, as Seneca says. So it turns out the founders and the founding generation—they had these incredible Caxton’s Fables, Avianus’ Fables, LaStrange. These were on the shelves. They would greedily buy copies of them. They read them and studied them. Why? Fables are not just—we think of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, right? Simple, straightforward—The Boy Who Cried Wolf. It’s basically if you lie, people don’t believe you, and then you get eaten by the wolf. Great, right? That’s a very good fable. But that is, in a certain sense, the exception to the rule. It’s known because it’s the most simple today, and we tend to be morally a little too simple. Most fables have a moral that’s basic, but then inside it, you feel that there is a lot more to think about—about how to be a good person and how to identify a bad person and how to react to evil so that you don’t become evil. There’s actually the moral technology of fable. It’s a very witty, wise genre that is meant for a free people. And so that’s why I really focused on fable. And why, even though there’s nursery rhymes and there’s short stories and there’s primary sources, there’s a lot going on here. The central core is this beat of American fables—retold, adapted, and told wholly new. Bradley Devlin: What’s the difference between mythology and fable? How does fable play into mythology and the relationship between those two things? Matthew Mehan: Fable starts with the ridiculous—talking animals. It doesn’t give you any kind of easy ramp to slowly agree that, yes, the trees should talk. And it’s a kind of just instant absurdity, and that gives you a sort of distance from it to think about it as a fun kind of a game, a moral play. Whereas myth is weaving history, the cosmos, angels and devils, gods and goddesses, naiads and dryads. You’re making a full cosmic claim for your country, your nation, your republic inside of a wider providence of Jupiter or of God himself. You know—like it’s a much sort of bolder statement. And myths can be true and myths can be false, right? They can be misleading and need purification. I mean, I think that’s Homer’s job—there are all these wacky myths in Greece at the time, and he’s like, “OK, I’m gonna—all the crazy ones, I’m gonna have this guy who’s crazy save them, and then we’re gonna put him in his place and tell a new one,” right? So he was trying to purify the myths of Greece to make the godhead of Olympus more reasonable. Now, as a Christian, we might go, “Yeah, that’s also bad,” but it was certainly philosophically better. So myth, to my mind, when you get to that level of complexity, it presents real dangers. But it’s fundamentally—every city, every founding, every country needs one, and so it better be really good and really true. Bradley Devlin: America 250—you could have written a political book. Why not a political book? Why not a philosophical treatise? Why not another deep dive into the history of the Declaration? Matthew Mehan: For a number of reasons. One very practical. First, not everyone is very patriotic. And if you actually want the entire country to be formed with a common memory of the principles and goodness of Judeo-Christian, Western, Greco-Roman—you can pick your hyphenated way of talking about what we have as a culture and as a people, right? You need to find a way to attract them that isn’t only for those who are already kind of inclined in your direction, which is why there’s all these beautiful discourses on nature and the national parks and the ecology. Because even people who aren’t very patriotic still love the national park system. They like backpacking. They like the buffalo. They want to protect nature. So, in one sense, we have to always be struggling for a national book, right? For a national dialogue, a national memory—or we’re gonna tear apart, right? That’s gonna happen. And this is part of what I’m trying to do: give the country a shared memory again. And then through that, they come to know some of the things that we sort of—more patriotic, more kind of conservative, whatever term you want—that care about these things: the morals of fables, right, the moralists, which I’m all about. One thing I learned is the Founding Fathers were so—and the founding generation—their moral imagination was so much more intense than ours. Everything was moralized. But it was actually joyful. It wasn’t this sort of frowning misery of, like, lectures. It was this hilarious wit and wisdom that was downright funny. But they could judge very carefully … … The American founding is different. It’s all written down. Like, we have the letters. We know what the—Numa, the king of Rome, wasn’t, like, magically talking with a nymph, and we don’t really know what happened there, right? Like, these are letters between Abigail Adams and John Adams, and then between Jefferson and Washington and Adams. Like, we know what happened in a funny way, and we’re also from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the droit écrit, the written law. So we actually like to write things down. We like things to be clear, which presents a challenge for myth, because we’re not going to accept some fake godhead. I think we love The Song of Hiawatha, and I have a kind of nod to it. But we rejected a lot of what Longfellow was doing with this strange sort of foreign gods, new mythology for America—Hiawatha on the mountain with these … No, we’re Christian, right? We’re Western. We’re sort of rational. And so humanity winds up having a lot of primary sources in history, and the mythos winds up being a kind of true mythos of the moral wit and wisdom of the people. And the mystery of the myth actually is the numinous reason of the American people. Like, we are a mysterious thing, right? And it’s amazing that we produced what we produced, yes, through our representatives. But I try to get past—yes, the Founding Fathers. I focus on them. I raise them up as heroes and show some of their strengths and even some of their weaknesses, such that we can even learn from their mistakes. But also I try to get past that to the American people and the settlement of the country, which is why the book doesn’t just do the founding and the Revolution. It does that, interspersed with an account of the settlement and all these other sort of very moving lesser biographies and stories of the settling of the country.