Consultants usually agree that dry climate, sturdy winds, and local weather change are in charge for the catastrophic firestorms in Southern California, which since Tuesday have roared throughout greater than 25,000 acres and displaced tens of hundreds of individuals. President-elect Donald Trump, nevertheless—collectively together with his merry band of sycophantic right-wing pundits—is insisting that Democratic wokeism is one way or the other at fault.
“Now the last word value is being paid,” Trump wrote on Fact Social. “I’ll demand that this incompetent governor permit lovely, clear, recent water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!”
The politicization of the California fires, and the maelstrom of misinformation swirling round them, carefully mirrors the damaging, fantastical discourse that surrounded Hurricanes Helene and Milton within the fall. Then, as now, Republican politicians and media figures have sought to attain partisan political factors, downplay the function of local weather change, and sow doubt amongst observers internationally and on the bottom.
The baseless conspiracies and rumor-mongering usually fall beneath two thematic umbrellas: range and inclusion and environmentalism. Beneath that first heading, right-wing media figures, celebrities and Trump allies—together with tech billionaire Elon Musk and the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr.—have railed against LA’s fireplace chief, Kristin Crowley, and her said dedication to reforming LAFD’s demonstrably poisonous tradition. Crowley, a 25-year veteran of the division and the primary girl and homosexual particular person in her function, took over the division in 2022, following a spate of discrimination and harassment scandals.
Conservatives have used her id—and her biography on the LAFD web site—to argue with out proof that she prioritized various hiring over wildfire preparedness. “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and houses,” Musk wrote in a single publish, amidst a volley of anti-Crowley reshares. “Can we rename DEI to DIE since that’s what appears to occur to the folks downstream of those that place woke advantage signaling far above competency?!?,” Trump Jr. echoed on Fact Social. Matt Walsh, a well-liked podcaster within the Ben Shapiro media empire, claimed on X that “Los Angeles intentionally got down to exclude white males from turning into firefighters, and now they don’t have sufficient firefighters to stop their metropolis from burning to the bottom.”
The conservative actor James Woods, whose house was destroyed on this week’s blaze, has additionally been significantly vital: “Refilling the water reservoirs would have been a welcome precedence, too, however I suppose she had an excessive amount of on her plate selling range,” Woods posted Wednesday, referencing reviews that fireside hydrants ran dry in components of Los Angeles.
However that isn’t attributable to reservoir points, the LA Division of Water and Energy has defined. As a substitute, the fires have put unprecedented strain on town’s assets, utilizing up water reserves quicker than officers can refill them once more. In truth, there is no such thing as a water scarcity in southern California at current, and there may be “nothing to be performed with water that might have modified the course of those fires,” according to one senior fellow on the non-partisan PPIC Water Coverage Middle.
Nonetheless, the topic of water administration or mismanagement has fast-become a right-wing hobbyhorse. On Fact Social, Trump himself claimed that Gov. Gavin Newsom selected to divert water provides away from Californians to guard an endangered fish, the Delta smelt. “That is the fish Gavin Newscum burned California down so as to save,” the Republican operative Roger Stone wrote on X. Elsewhere, MAGA posters have dubbed Newsom an “ecoterrorist” or mocked up AI pictures of him kissing a fish whereas a home burns behind him.
Water coverage in California is, after all, each wildly complicated and controversial—and it’s true that Republicans and Democrats have traditionally tangled over water priorities. However Newsom by no means refused an settlement that might have directed extra water to California, on behalf of a fish or in any other case, one water coverage knowledgeable told MSNBC. On Wednesday, Newsom’s workplace responded to Trump with a fair blunter assertion: “That,” they wrote on X, “is pure fiction.”
