I live in Santa Monica, California and as you can imagine, the last few days have been traumatic. We are lucky to live a couple of miles from the fire zone and are not currently in any danger. But I know many people who were evacuated and some are still waiting to go back to their homes because the danger is still acute. Everyone I know knows someone whose house has burned; one of my closest friends lost everything and literally escaped with just the clothes on his back. We’re all still on alert here waiting to see if the winds pick up as predicted next week, praying that the worst is behind us.
All natural disasters are frightening. I’ve been through a few earthquakes and one big hurricane. But I have to say that watching a firestorm threaten America’s second largest city right on my own doorstep is a particularly terrifying experience. These are the scenes we saw on every local television station in Los Angeles for the first 24 hours:
A friend of mine texted me asking what it was like to be in the middle of all this asking, “is it like 9/11?” I wrote that nothing can really compare to the shock of watching those two skyscrapers come down in the middle of America’s premiere city but I don’t think it’s entirely dissimilar. The difference is that the perpetrator of this particular horror isn’t a foreign terrorist — it’s us.
The existential threat of climate change has become very, very real — a slow-rolling “War of the Worlds,” relentless and seemingly unstoppable. We know what to do, but we just won’t do it and the consequences have arrived. Yes, these fires will eventually be tamed and people will pick up their lives and carry on just as New Yorkers did after the attacks. But this isn’t going to end with that. These extreme weather events are happening with increasing intensity and frequency not just here but all over the planet and anyone who pretends that this is normal is either fooling themselves or is lying to everyone else.
And when you’re sitting in front of your TV waiting to find out if you have to run for your life, once again realizing that we have just empowered an ignorant, mendacious cretin who’s planning to not just dismantle every attempt to mitigate the damage but actually exacerbate the threat, you just dissolve into despair — and anger. How can we just let this happen?
Californians are used to being bashed by Republican politicians and some of their supporters. It’s always popular to mock us and use us as the poster children for everything that’s wrong with America. I don’t think most of us really care much about that which is probably one reason they’re so frustrated with us. We know that despite our problems, as any place that has nearly 40 million people in it would have, it’s really pretty great and those who don’t care for us are welcome to their opinion.
But I confess that I am shocked at the monumental lack of grace, empathy and compassion coming from the right as this horrific emergency unfolded. I know that it’s human nature to point fingers and there are no doubt many mistakes that we will find as the city recovers. It is also natural in such fast moving emergencies that wrong information will be disseminated even by officials you rely on. (At one point an evacuation notice went out to all of LA County by mistake!) But no disaster operates perfectly and a thorough after-action investigation, reforms, accountability etc are all to be expected. If heads have to roll then they will, I’m sure. But the right wing media, influencers and Republican politicians have been stunningly callous about this ghastly event, even for them.
It’s way beyond the usual social media trolling, although that’s been relentless and cruel. And even the sexist and racist “DEI” catcalling, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about, isn’t the worst of it. It’s the misinformation and climate denialism that’s the most chilling. The consequences of this intentional crusade to mislead the public on this subject are going to have repercussions far beyond this one firestorm.
President Trump has said that we had no water because Gov. Newsom refuses to “turn on the water”, that the hydrants were all dry, there was no preparation and yes, that the whole fire department is a bunch of “DEI” hires who know nothing about firefighting. All of it is wrong. (Here’s thorough fact check from the Governor’s office.)
Newsom addressed some of the lies and delusions in this podcast:
Everyone who knows anything about California fire hazards and water (or even if you’ve ever seen the movie “Chinatown”) knows that there are issues in this drought prone area. We’ve been fighting over water for decades. But as Newsom says in that clip, Trump is convinced of some delusional nonsense. Just take a look at this “weave” from the last California GOP Convention. (Starts at about 19:03)
Where does this madness come from? As historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in this piece from back in 2016, he likely got it originally from conspiracist Alex Jones. More recently, as you can see from that speech it was former congressman and current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social media platform, Devin Nunes, who apparently filled his head with a simplistic tale about a big “valve” that Newsom (and Gov. Jerry Brown before him) refused to turn on to fill Southern California with all the water it could ever want because they want to save a “little fish.” (This piece at Vox lays out what this is really all about if you’re interested but suffice to say that nothing Trump, Jones or Nunes said applies to Los Angeles or these wildfires.)
There was enough water in the reservoirs but the system was overwhelmed by the sheer, unprecedented scale of the fire so they lost water pressure for a time. The air tankers (which can scoop water out of the nearby reservoir called “the Pacific Ocean”) couldn’t fly because of the hurricane level winds. One fire department chief told Katy Tur of MSNBC they could have had an army of firefighters and they wouldn’t have been able to stop those houses from burning because they were all going up at once from the flying embers in 80 mph winds. It was literally a perfect storm.
Yet, here’s a small example of the grotesque commentary spewing forth from Donald Trump’s social media feed as the crisis was unfolding:
Not one word of sympathy for the victims of the fire or any promise to follow through on federal help for the area. And one lie after another.
He’s already got Republican politicians vowing to demand that California follow Trump’s orders about how to deal with wildfires if we expect to get any help once Biden is gone.Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming had this to say on Sunday Morning:
Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Oh., also weighed in:
I presume that if they deign to help out we undeserving Un-Real Americans, we’ll all be out raking the forests and watching helplessly as they demand that we uselessly seed clouds when there is 5% humidity And they’ll turn that big valve on to release the 2% of water that’s not already diverted to the farmers and watch the Sacramento delta turn to salt water and destroy the entire ecosystem and the salmon fisheries. But that’s a small price to pay to prove that climate change doesn’t exist, own the libs and make sure the fossil fuel industry is well protected.
Meanwhile, there will be more and more extreme weather events. Here in America virtually every climate change mitigation program will be reversed. There will be more destruction and death increasing in frequency and intensity. Fingers shouldn’t be pointed at brave firefighters or political leaders in the trenches who are tasked with saving lives and helping people recover from catastrophes caused by an existential threat to the entire planet. They should be pointed at the people who refuse to do anything about the real crisis we’re facing.
Salon
They just can’t say it: