Elon Musk and Donald Trump share disinformation as wildfires happen in the Los Angeles area

While now LA burning and thousands of people are fleeing from their houses the usual double trouble has found new culprit for the fires in its political opponents. Subsequently, through his Truth Social account, the President-elect Donald Trump opined that, the fires could not be controlled by the firefighters; this was due to the water policies of the California Governor Gavin Newsom and his mission to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!”. On X, Elon Musk opined that the fires were the result of the city fire chief’s Diversity Equity and Inclusiveness statements.

“DEI means people DIE,” Musk posted on Wednesday evening. This is true, at least five have been confirmed dead in the Eaton fire, while over 130000 residents of Los Angeles County go in fear of their lives, said the Los Angeles times. But this has not been caused by the delta smelt, by DEI, or as Trump, Musk, and many other mainstream newspapers and magazines have blamed, by cuts to the budget of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Unfortunately, such claims come at a cost. FEMA employees were recently threatened on TikTok and other social media as fake news ran rampant in the aftermath of the hurricanes Milton and Helene last year.

The first wave of the disinformation campaign revolved around Pacific Palisades and fire hydrants: the latter suddenly ceased providing water on Tuesday night as firefighters aimed at extinguishing the first fire. The hydrants, Trump said, were running dry because of Newsom’s water policies. “I will demand that this incompetent governor let beautiful clean fresh water FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.

“He is the blame for this. On top of it all no water for fire hydrants not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” In another message, Trump said that Newsom had declined to sign the water restoration declaration provided to him, which would have let millions of gallons of water, from the excess rain and the snow melt in the North, into many parts of California daily including the areas that are burning in a nearly apocalyptic manner currently. Newsom’s office replied on Wednesday, denying that there was such a declaration, which Trump referred to in his post. “There is no document as such termed as the water restoration declaration – this part is entirely fictional,” Gardon, Newsom’s communications director noted to CalMatters. “Instead of putting on a political show, The Governor is committed to ensuring people are safe and firefighters have what they need”.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was represented by Mark Gold, a board member who said that statewide water management policies, including the attempts to protect habitat of the delta smelt, were not related to no water in the hydrants. “To link Bay-Delta management into devastating wildfires that has cost lives and properties, is wrong and irresponsible, and further, more,” Gold said, at a time when Metropolitan Water District has the most water stored in its system, in the history of the agency.

That’s not this issue of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire. It is about the further negative effects of global warming.” Failure of water in the hydrant within Pacific Palisades simply resulted from low pressure of water as the demand for water had risen, according to LA Times.

Janisse Quiñones, ceo and cio of the los Angeles Department of Water and Power spoke to the paper explaining that so much water was being consumed that the utility was unable to replenish the tanks fast enough. Water demand at lower levels was also not permitting the utility to replace water in tanks in higher grounds; the LA Times. Wednesday night, while the fires extended to Altadena, Pasadena, and Hollywood Hills, some conservative creators complained about California city authorities reducing the Fire Department’s budget and focusing more on diversity instead of fire safety measures –which Musk boosted in X.

But as Politico noted, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass never in fact cut $23 million from the fire department’s budget, as her critics—both right-wing and left-wing—some of whom said that in an effort to pay for a new police contract Bass cut fire department funding. According to Politico its budget was in fact over $52 million higher than the previous year The source however also pointed out LA fire chief Kristin Crowley called out Bass for slashing $7 million off the department’s overtime budget only three weeks prior to Palisades fire .

“The reduction … has significantly hampered the performance of the department in the areas of planning, training and actual response to major disaster incidences such as wildfires,” Crowley said in the memo dated December 4th. This nuance is, of course, being lost on X, where influencers have also begun posting AI-generated images of looters coming for the Palisades and the Hollywood sign burning. That right there is calamitous because disinformation in its myriad forms—fake news, trolling, conspiracy theories, bots, etc. is spreading like a particularly virulent strain of… well… you can imagine what.

/ The usual suspects have wanted to blame the fires on Democrats and DEI.