The past few days have been fodder for examples of (conservative) lies, evasions, and misrepresentations, as they react to the fires in Southern California.
- Conservatives blame the LA fires on the vast world-wide conspiracy theories they are obsessed with;
- Two examples from Facebook about naive half-baked ideas about how the fires were a conspiracy, or could have been avoided;
- NYT on how the intensity of these fires is actually (of course) the result of climate change, as well as bad urban planning decades ago;
- Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on Fox News’ incoherent spin on the California fires;
- Short items about how Trump lies, and the upside-down thinking of Newsmax;
- And a quote from Bertrand Russell.
We should have seen this one coming. This seems to be the one thing conservatives are most afraid of.
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 9 Jan 2025: Elon Musk Endorses Alex Jones’ Claim That the Los Angeles Fires Were Set Intentionally, subtitled “Big if true.”
Wednesday afternoon on Twitter, now known as X, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wrote that the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires have been engineered by “globalists” in order to “deindustrialize” the United States.
Billionaire technology investor Elon Musk, who is living on the incoming president’s property while leading his commission on reorganizing the government and advising him on other matters, saw this post—and he liked what he saw!
This is interesting—concerning, even—for a number of reasons. But it may be significant at the moment given that Jones has, in the past, explained that “Jewish mafia” figures like George Soros are a key part of the “globalist” alliance. (If you’re wondering why the Jewish mafia would burn down Hollywood, which it runs, a different post of Jones’ sort of explains: It’s because globalists want to turn the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that has been devastated by fire into a “smart city.” In urban planning, the phrase “smart city” refers to the idea of using technology to gather information about traffic and wastewater and stuff, but in Jones’ mind, smart city initiatives are a kind of Trojan horse for implementing totalitarian surveillance and mind control, similar to how Bill Gates put microchips in the COVID vaccine.) The accusation also echoes Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous claim that a previous wildfire was started by the (Jewish) Rothschild family using satellite-borne lasers.
It would not be Musk’s first foray into white-supremacist conspiracy thinking: For one, he also believes that George Soros orchestrates world events in an effort to destroy “the West.” In late 2023, he responded positively to a Twitter/X post that complained that “western Jewish populations” have been “flooding” developed countries with “hordes of minorities” and encouraging “hatred against whites.” (Wrote Musk: “You have said the actual truth.”)
To promote such vast conspiracy theories tells me that these are very stupid people. They have no idea of how absurdly complex it would be to arrange such world-wide conspiracies.
\
I saw two examples of such stupendously naive thinking on Facebook today. No links; I’ll have to paraphrase.
- One post showed photos of the devastation in Lahaina, in Paradise, and now in Pacific Palisades. And said, Notice how all the trees are still standing? Don’t trees burn faster than buildings? As if implying something of vast conspiracy theory to burn down buildings while leaving trees untouched? Well, no, and there’s your evidence, in those photos. Except they weren’t untouched, they were singed. Did you ever see a forest fire in which the trees burned down to the ground? No. And so on.
- Another asked, why didn’t officials in LA see the wind event coming, and have big planes scoop up water from the ocean to drench all those threatened neighborhoods before the fires came? The post got some comments: for one, sea water would be deadly to plant life. But that’s incidental. It’s more a matter of scale. Planes couldn’t possibly dump enough water across dozens or hundreds or square miles in any amount of reasonable time; how do you decide which areas to drench?; the water would quickly evaporate; and so on.
The thing about social media is that anyone with such a half-baked idea can post something, implicitly accusing the government of being incompetent, and have their message spread, and so gradually undermine the competence and authority of government officials, about whom there is no rational reason to think they are not doing the very best they can, under difficult circumstances, to manage such a crisis.
Some people just don’t have a grip on reality.
\\
It’s the climate, stupid.
NY Times, Christopher Flavelle, 10 Jan 2025: L.A. Fires Show Limits of America’s Efforts to Cope With Climate Change, subtitled “California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough.”
This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?
California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited resources for wildfire protection. And California has mandatory statewide requirements that homeowners in risky areas create “defensible space” around their property — rules that other Western states would like to apply but can’t because it would anger conservative voters.
Yet the events of this week demonstrate the limits of those efforts, raising uncomfortable questions about whether any part of the United States — even the wealthiest, best prepared and most experienced — can truly adapt to wildfires made worse by a hotter climate.
“Climate change, and climate events, are causing us to butt up against that limit,” said Joshua Saks, the adaptation program director for Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. “The risk will always grow, and at some point outpace what you’ve done.”
I heard an NPR piece this morning about the California wildfires, which discussed the history of urban planning in LA, how so many houses were built tightly together on narrow roads, without adequate evacuation planning, because no one thought about evacuation planning 60 or 70 years ago. The current crisis is not about reservoirs so much as living the consequences of bad decisions made decades ago. (Can we make better decisions today?) This piece acknowledges this.
Part of the extensive damage from the fires in Los Angeles may reflect errors in planning or execution. Fire hydrants designed to fight house fires ran dry, as water reserves faced greater demand than officials anticipated. It’s not clear that residents had sufficient warning or that evacuation routes were well planned. The second-guessing and questions about accountability have already begun even as the fires continue to rage.
\\
But some people just want to blame people they already don’t like. They deny all the evidence for climate change.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 10 Jan 2025: “DEI is deadly”: Fox News spin on California wildfires exposes MAGA’s total incoherence, subtitled “Jesse Watters implied women are too stupid to run fire departments — most LA fire department leaders are men”
One thing no one can deny: MAGA influencers put a lot of work into pushing really incoherent talking points. Most everyone with sense understands that the fires ravaging Los Angeles are, in large part, a predictable consequence of climate change. However, it is an article of faith in MAGA circles that climate change is a “hoax” invented by the “libs” to deny gender-affirming care to cis men, in the form of oversized gas-guzzling trucks. So they quickly jumped into action during a time of immense need, seeking someone or something else to blame. And because the movement takes all its cues from a right-wing influencer named Chaya Raichik — who posts under the name “Libs of Tik Tok” — they’ve settled on blaming women.
On Wednesday, Raichik tweeted a picture while falsely implying both that the entirety of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) leadership is female and also that women’s inherent inferiority is why the fires are spinning out of control.
She makes a cute point about how “oversized gas-guzzling trucks” are a kind of “gender-affirming care to cis men.”
Watters also griped that the fire chief had marched in Pride parades and claimed, “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.” He did not explain how either being queer or female made someone less capable of doing the job of fire chief.
They won’t say, of course, because they know the claim being implied here is too embarrassingly dumb to speak out loud. The unspoken argument is that women are stupidbrains who can’t do anything right, and instead we need geniuses, who are all men like Donald Trump, running things. But they won’t come out and say that, because they know that this argument is self-refuting. So instead, they gesture in the direction of the argument, yell “DEI” a lot, and deny that they’re misogynist when someone draws the obvious inference for the sexist theatrics.
Welcome to this era of MAGA, where they have given up even pretending their points make sense.
\\
Every day, Trump lies.
Mediaite, 10 Jan 2025: ‘A Staggering Quantity of Wrongness’: CNN’s Daniel Dale Dismantles Trump’s False Wildfire Claims
Willful ignorance, and motivated thinking.
JMG, 10 Jan 2025: Newsmax: Wildfires Are “Opposite Of Climate Change”
No, they’re not. They’re evidence of it. Trumpism: Up is down.
\\
Today’s quote seen on Facebook:
”There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought. Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”
— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), pp. 219-20
But this is on a (somewhat, but not entirely) different subject.
