Flaming Lies

MAGAing While LA Burns

Wind-fed wildfires have turned swathes of the nation’s largest city into what looks like Dresden after World War II. Tens of thousands of evacuees are relying on handouts for basic needs, sleeping on cots or sleeping bags. Millions are struggling to breathe in smoky air.

Did you expect MAGAs to care? Did you expect the President-elect and his political minions to offer a word of comfort and support?

The Second MAGA Reich hasn’t even commenced and we are already peering into the abyss. The signature quality of MAGA, the sine qua non of membership in the cult, is an absence of empathy. Where the milk of human kindness exists in most people, there’s a bottomless reservoir of suspicion, scorn, and flintiness in Trump and his MAGAs. Remember Trump tossing a roll of paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico, Melania sporting an “I don’t care do u?” jacket to visit the border where children were being caged, separated from their parents. Remember Trump telling states desperate for ventilators at the beginning of the COVID pandemic to compete for them, because that’s how markets work?

Many politicians are rank opportunists. But the signature tactic of MAGA leaders is to use disasters immediately as a means to score political points, vehicles by which to spread conspiracy theories and increase distrust in government and experts.

Rather than visiting L.A. - or even dispatching one of his sketchy cabinet nominees to California as a show of concern - Trump and official MAGAs spent the first fire week taking shots at California’s leadership and progressive culture.

As far as I know, not one single Trump/MAGA surrogate has appeared on the scene to even investigate or assess needs, let alone offer a word of comfort. On the contrary, they have let their Dear Leader respond in a way that can only be called, in its utter lack of compassion and empathy, textbook sociopathic.

As hard as it is to believe, almost every single elected California Republican Congressperson trooped down to Mar a Lardo over the weekend as the city burned, so eager are these MAGA reps to clutch the fat short-fingered hand and get into a picture frame with the orange oaf attached to it.

Millions of people in America’s second largest city are in dire straits. The President-elect sees their despair and panic as an opportunity to diss the governor of the state. When Gavin Newsom begged him to come to California, arguing that the people of Los Angeles “deserve to see us working together,” Trump never responded. “I called for [Trump] to come out, take a look for himself,” Newsom said on Sunday. “He’s the president-elect. I respect the office.”

“He is the blame for this [sic],” Trump published on his “Truth Social” account while the Palisades area was being reduced to ash in real-time. “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

He proceeded to blame an environmental protection rule for a disaster that most weather experts consider to have been significantly worsened by climate change.

“[Newsom] wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump said, claiming that the water diverted to the south of the state could be used to tackle the fires. “Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! … On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

Some of this is shtick, insult comedy meant to distract and mesmerize followers addicted to grievance, primed for years with vulgarian entertainment to crave and adore witnessing abuse heaped on victims or people who think they’re smart. Spewing lies to dismiss experts and to eradicate trust is also a sinister authoritarian tactic. The “firehose of lies” was pioneered in Soviet Russia. Steve Bannon endorsed it under a different name when he suggested that Trump “flood the zone with shit” to destroy agreed-upon reality represented by mainstream media.

The tactic has been so effective that, according to Jack Smith’s final report on the criminal scheme behind the 2021 coup attempt, Trump would have been convicted had voters not narrowly sent him back to Washington, and thereby granted him ultimate immunity.

MAGA minions quickly followed Trump’s lead. Vice President-elect JD Vance, in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” rather than express concern and offer hope, accused Joe Biden of being “asleep at the wheel” with the federal response to the California fires, adding that Trump (whose stated goal is shrinking all but the armed alphabet agencies) “intends to have FEMA and other federal responses much, much better and much more clued in to what’s going on there on the ground.”

Last night, given a platform by Sean Hannity on Fox, Lara Trump took the opportunity of the fires to take her own brave stand against climate science, mewling: “I would really love for someone out there to explain to me how climate change is the reason that the reservoirs were dry.”

Donald Trump Junior, Vance’s pal and the Silicon Valley bro’s current waterboy, led the bros in blaming DEI - implying that the black female mayor, the lesbian fire chief, etc. were incompetents by virtue of their gender, sexual orientation and race - while doing absolutely nothing to assist, or even to suggest that his million followers offer assistance to people rendered homeless.

Any normal leader would be rounding up his rich friends to start the process of rebuilding. But not this classy clan. On the contrary, all Trump has done is take the opportunity to fling insults. Not to be outdone by his dad calling the governor “Newscum,” number one son Donny turned on the junior-high-bully charm, responding to Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal linking the fires to climate change and corporate policies: “You’re an idiot,” Junior posted. “As evidenced by the ratio, anyone with an IQ above 1 understands that this has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with Democrat incompetence and woke DEI policies that have failed their constituency for far too long.”

On Fox, insult comedian Jesse Watters piled on the DEI blame game and spewed lies about how the budget for California firefighting was cut, when, in fact, it increased.

The DEI smear is picked up by a legion of crypto bros who have never been closer to a fire than a Weber Grill. One online crypto investor, for example, on X: “Donald Trump Jr. calls out the LA Fire Dept for prioritizing DEI over effectiveness. With the recent wildfires, it's clear: diversity shouldn’t come at the expense of competency. Firing skilled firefighters to boost inclusivity? That’s a dangerous game. The results speak volumes—people's safety shouldn't be compromised for the sake of a social agenda! #Priorities #SafetyFirst”

On the All In podcast, where South African native Silicon Valley macher David Sacks chats with other billionaire bros, the boys generally agreed that a government focus on DEI hires - even IF Fire Chief Kristen Crowley’s stellar resume suggests the lesbian fire chief was more qualified than most white hetero males - is always wasting resources on “virtue signaling instead of public service.”

On the same podcast, they whined about California’s building codes and regulations that will stymie rebuilding great mansions along the Pacific Coast, an enterprise that, taken in the context of Pacific Coast weather cycles, whether or not you “believe in” climate change, is ultimately just adding fuel to fires.

Most sickening of all, to my knowledge, no Silicon Valley titans have yet offloaded from their personal pallets of billions any truly significant amount of money to help house, feed, and clothe disaster-plagued Caliofrnianians. But Apple’s Cook, Meta’s Zuck, and Amazon’s Bezos have each found a spare million to pour into the inauguration slush fund. And what more can be said of Muskrat, who, after donating $250 million to put a beast back in charge of America, is apparently sitting this one out (other than sending Cybertrucks to the affected areas…)

In an article over at Dropsite News that laid out what is known about L.A.’s relative firefighting preparedness, Ryan Grim pointed out the hypocrisy of the DOGE crowd now complaining that the California government can’t deliver fire safety:

It’s quite something to watch billionaires and conservative activists toggle between lectures about how the government needs to spend trillions of dollars less in the name of “government efficiency” followed by moaning that government isn’t able to respond to emergencies. The phrase “they want their cake and eat it too” has always struck me as a stupid one, because what is the point of holding on to a cake? Who wants to just have a cake? Just to look at it? These billionaires want their wealth and want the government to be free and perfect too — and they want to dump endless carbon and methane into the climate and have it not react in any way. That’s not as pithy as the cake line, but that’s what they want.

In Los Angeles, they want to build mansions on hillsides that have burned for millennia, and they don’t want to give the fire department the budget they need to hire mechanics to fix their trucks. But they want the trucks to work anyway.

Experts in weather and wildfire agree that the severity of the disaster right now is primarily a natural event, an “act of God” with no connection to DEI. But some human behaviors are at fault: urban sprawl, a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system unprepared to fight multiple major blazes at once. As climate change fuels record heat, leaving the hillsides primed for wildfires to grow swiftly into massive conflagrations, all those factors led to catastrophe, experts told WaPo.

There is certainly official blame to go around. Mayor Karen Bass seems like a hack, the state’s budget makers didn’t cough up enough cash, the local fire and water and power company authorities made some bad calls. All of that deserves to be and will certainly be investigated. Heads will roll. Careers will end.

But is now really the time to start that? While millions of victims are struggling to breathe in smoky air, and searching for food and lodging while they care for their kids? Does flinging lies and insults around help the brave men and women on the front lines, whose poignant valiant efforts display the human ingenuity that always, and too often thanklessly, tries to protect us against natural forces waiting to kill us?