Twenty-five years ago, when Bad Religion released “Los Angeles Is Burning,” fire prevention was considered, thanks to the political valence of (then) global warming, an almost revolutionary act. The hills at that time were not yet the sole province of the city’s ensconced elite. Fifteen years ago, I would post up in a coffee shop in Eagle Rock, nestled on the other end of Devil’s Gate from Altadena, and share a back room with Rage Against the Machine’s Zach de la Rocha and his funemployed associates.

Now the spirit of city preservation in Los Angeles has, it seems, gone straight to a reactionary one. The counterrevolution against the corrupt and feeble regime has begun. You may not see it on the ground or in the news yet. But the fires that obliterated Altadena and Pacific Palisades and blanketed vast stretches of the LA Basin with toxic chemicals—that left thousands unable to go home yet unable to leave town, unable to rebuild yet unable to sell—brought with them the irreversible beginnings of regime change.

Already—like Moonshadows in Malibu, like the Palisades, like Hollywood itself—the political regime in LA is irreparably damaged. The statewide party is in crisis, and all of Washington is agog at Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s burndown of the administrative state. No one is coming to save LA, and its ruling class now rules over a city brought to its lowest ever, a fact now sinking in for Angelenos of every age and generation.

The one way out LA’s elite could opt for is off the table: they can’t go back to the now-halcyon ‘90s and ‘00s and, even if they could, they wouldn’t. Just as I and millions of others lost, instead of our homes, pieces of our lives attached to our souls: haunts, getaways, landmarks, history, memories—the most precious things in LA because of how precious their connection is to the city’s origins and early years, remains of a civilization that itself no longer exists outside the fading memories of those too old to mount any kind of crusade, least of all a reactionary one.

But even Americans who’d rather never again hear of the Golden State and its fall from Paradise need California to climb back from rock bottom if they want to live out a new Golden Age. Some pessimists—some optimists—now insist the closest we’ll ever get is a simulation, the logic being that having the simulation of a thing is better than going without it. The problem is that technology has now laid out an infinite-until-further-notice automated buffet of simulations on demand. From tech to art to media to politics, many jobs put people to work simulating someone or something. For humans to lose these relatively sophisticated roles to automated machines would be extraordinarily painful. And because of our addiction to simulation, many people now fear that humans might lose the role of artist altogether.

Fortunately, that’s wrong—art concerns not imitating the irrecoverable but picking back up where someone or something left off. That’s why I started off the year putting out my LA novel set in the Jeffrey Epstein-verse, an excerpt from which you’ll find in this issue. And that’s what LA, California in general, and America must do, too: pick up where they left off, weaving a new timeline that still feels like home. A new kind of home, on a very new kind of frontier.

James Poulos, Founder and Editorial Director, Frontier