Throwing Gasoline on the Los Angeles Fires

Disasters are fuel for assholes.

Nothing left in these Pacific Palisades blocks

If somebody drove by your burning home in [insert San Diego neighborhood here] and yelled epithets about local politicians, I’m fairly certain you and your neighbors wouldn’t consider that helpful.

So it is with trolls who used the fires in Los Angeles to spread falsehoods, rumors, and hatred. The cheerleader-in-chief of this noxious stream has been none-other than the incoming President of the United States, backed by his billionaire buddy. The reasoning behind this is plain and simple: pettiness. Nothing has been said that might offer comfort to those negatively impacted or the front-line fire fighters (a percentage of whom are prison inmates).

Via The New Republic:

• “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration.… He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this.”

• Elon Musk retweeted a conservative account attacking Newsom, while presidential envoy Richard Grenell tweeted, “The far left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground. Stop voting for people who won’t use common sense water management and forest policies. I’m pissed off. You should be, too.”

Gov. Newsom responded to Trump’s social media misinformation. Via Politico:

• Newsom is girding for a fight. He hit back at Trump on Wednesday, calling the “water restoration declaration” Trump cited “pure fiction” in a post on X.

• “The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Newsom’s press office said in the post.

• Newsom has also poured billions of dollars into better forest management and firefighting technology since Trump first suggested Californians “rake” their forests in his first term. But the governor’s efforts made little difference as hurricane-level winds upwards of 100 miles per hour fanned the flames through canyons in dense urban coastal neighborhoods.

The response of public agencies has been criticized by the not-very-closeted-racists who beat their drums about DEI.

Via Parker Molloy:

• The same people who spent years telling us climate change isn't real are now trying to blame the fires on the fact that the LA Fire Department's chief is a woman. Never mind that Kristin Crowley worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. Never mind that the department's leadership is still predominantly male. The right has found a way to combine their favorite bogeymen: diversity initiatives, California governance, and climate science.

Trust me on this, even the most Aryan Heritage Foundation superhero couldn’t have stemmed fires driven by hurricane force winds consuming vegetation dried out by just .16 inches of rain over the past eight months.

Try as they might, their MAGA firehoses aimed at destroying the government’s infrastructure wouldn’t have saved a single building. We had a preview of what their imagined future would look like, when Keith Wasserman, co-founder of real estate investment firm Gelt Venture Partners, took to X to (since deleted) request “access to private firefighters” to “protect our home.”

• “Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning. Will pay any amount. Thank you,” wrote Wasserman, whose firm estimates the value of its current portfolio at $1.59 billion.

There have been other disasters where politicians have suffered the consequences of poor judgement or policy decisions; the failure of FEMA during hurricane Katrina’s was rightfully blamed on poor decision-making in the Bush administration. The difference in criticism between disasters in those cities was that it mostly occurred after the fact for New Orleans.

As I write this, the LA Times headline is: “5 dead, more than 2,000 structures burned as new fire hits Hollywood Hills” …and at the Associated Press 130,000 people under evacuation orders.

Neighborhoods in Los Angeles have suffered the consequences of a natural disaster. According to The Associated Press the fire in the Pacific Palisades (alone) is the most destructive in Los Angeles’ history. There were other fires, and life changing damage that will take years to repair.

According to the Union-Tribune, San Diego remains in danger as a second wave of winds starting later today and potential for a third combined with steadily dropping humidity will increase the risk of fire. The region is experiencing the driest start of the rainy season since 1850, with only 0.14 inches of precipitation recorded at San Diego International Airport since October first.

A red flag warning remains in place through today for the San Diego and Riverside mountain areas, and San Diego valleys.

***

I don’t know if repeating the lies and vitriol will do any good at this point. CalMatters has a helpful fact check of some of these claims from on high. KCRA has a point by point refutation of Trump’s claims. And Brian Krassenstein has refuted common social media fables about Los Agele’s responses and challenges.

Legacy networks ABC, NBC & CBS dedicated about 16 minutes of airtime last night to the California wildfires without once mentioning climate change. Since the networks are now apparently cooperating with messaging for the incoming administration, here's the conclusion of a paper on the role of climate change and wildfire risk from an agency due to be eliminated, according to Project 2025.

• Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions, leading to longer and more active fire seasons. Increases in temperatures and the thirst of the atmosphere due to human--caused climate change have increased aridity of forest fuels during the fire season. These drivers were found to be responsible for over half the observed decrease in the moisture content of fuels in western U.S. forests from 1979 to 2015, and the doubling of forest fire burned area over the period 1984–2015. For much of the U.S. West, projections show that an average annual 1 degree C temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year by as much as 600 %.

• in some types of forests. In the Southeastern United States modeling suggests increased fire risk and a longer fire season, with at least a 30 percent increase from 2011 in the area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire by 2060.

There are ample scientific studies (Examples: here, here, and here) quantifying how changes in temperature and precipitation influence the intensity and duration of extreme fires. The Los Angeles fires can be associated with declines in Arctic sea ice.

By the way, the decline in Arctic sea ice is one of the reasons why the Trump administration is interested in acquiring Greenland.

One topic of speculation, accompanied by misinformation, has been the response of insurance companies, who are pulling back on selling homeowner coverage for reasons associated with the change in climate.

While the trolls on social media have been seeking to whip up anger by saying companies won’t have the resources to pay claims, the real issue is the threat environmental challenges have to home ownership, a primary source of wealth for many Americans:

Via KQED/LAist:

• What has been, until now, an insurance problem could balloon into a homeownership problem, where middle- and working-class people can’t own homes because mortgage, insurance and property taxes simply become too much.

• “And [then] you have to sell your house,” Wara said. “And you find that your home value has gone down a lot because the cost of owning your home, including taxes and insurance, is a lot higher than it used to be. And that’s where we might be heading. I hope not.”

• But the chances that we are moving in that direction went up as soon as the fires broke out.

Want to help our neighbors to the North?

https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/wildfire-relief/california#/ is a hub of all verified @GoFundMe pages for CA wildfire victims vetted by the GoFundMe Trust and Safety team

WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN: Providing food and water to first responders and evacuees

***

Finally, I feel the need to reiterate how people should measure their reactions to the noises coming out of Mar a Lago. Historian Heather Richardson Cox does the honors:

• MAGA representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress, many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans’ healthcare, and repealing the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

• Bills call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; increasing oil and gas production on federal lands; abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); allowing states to spend federal education money on private school vouchers; and removing the protection of transgender rights from schools.

• Other measures would revoke security clearances for “certain former members of the intelligence community,” introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (the office that successfully charged Trump with election interference) and the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney’s Office (the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy).

• And MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for women because, the bill says, “health care should emphasize the whole woman, including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness,” and “health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”

Taking Trump's imperialist trolling seriously (for a moment) by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson at Public Notice

• Public Notice contributor Thor Benson recently connected with Paul Frymer, a professor of politics at Princeton University and author of the book, “Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.”

• “I think sometimes we think he’s a little more strategic than he actually is,” Frymer told us. “If he was going to build a Trump casino or something in Greenland, then you might get some sense of what he wants, but this just seems like the kind of language that he floats around.”

• Frymer made a case that when push comes to shove, there’s no real constituency for armed conflicts in our hemisphere, and furthermore, Republicans aren’t likely to have much interest in adding Canadians or Panamanians to the pool of American voters.

• “If Trump was thinking about it, the US would probably get rid of places. Downsize,” he added. “It’s kind of surprising, in keeping with his deportation stuff, that he doesn’t say, ‘You know what? We’re going to sell San Diego back to Mexico. Mexico is going to pay for it.’ That would, in some ways, make more sense.”

***

‘Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors by Arno Rosenfeld at Forward

• “Doxxing,” or unmasking the identity of anonymous editors in Wikipedia, violates the site’s rules and can result in users being banned, according to the site’s guidelines. Kelly, who has been a volunteer editor on the site since 2012 with a focus that includes sexuality and religion, and serves as an administrator, said that in the past, such problems have usually been rooted in interpersonal conflicts or ad hoc online campaigns

• A well-funded campaign against individual Wikipedia editors by an organization like the Heritage Foundation, which is one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country, it seems, would be a first.

• Molly White, an independent journalist and Wikipedia contributor who wrote an article last week describing “the right’s war on Wikipedia,” said Heritage’s plan to target editors was concerning: “The document is sort of vague about what they would do once they ID a person,” she noted, “but the things that come to mind are not great.”

***

Searching for Justice and the Missing in the New Syria by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept

• “International criminal law tends to be kind of, frankly, white man’s justice — it’s very European-centric,” said Crane, who also founded the Syrian Accountability Project at Syracuse University College of Law. “It approaches the law in that sense, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that we also have to be very sensitive.” He added that any process would have to acknowledge the scars left on the Arab world by Western colonialism.

• Ghazi said she is open to working with experts from across the international community to contribute to the justice process in Syria, but also emphasized that survivors of the war crimes should be at the center.

• “I prefer it to be Syrian-led, and also not just Syrian civil society organizations, but most importantly, the families of those victims, they are the most important. They should decide what they want, and we as experts, as human right defenders, as civil society organizations, we should just fulfill their needs, we should try to achieve their demands,” she said.