Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."
Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water. This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.
"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.