It was a perfect recipe for a disaster in Los Angeles: 10 months of drought after a summer of record-setting heat. Bone-dry scrub grass and vegetation — near-unlimited wildfire fuel. Hurricane-force winds barreling down from mountains, packing gusts of up to 90 miles per hour.
But apparently Karen Bass — the first woman and second-ever Black person to serve as mayor of Los Angeles — was supposed to snap her Black Girl Magic fingers and stop the massive, Santa Ana wind-driven, climate change-fueled fires in her city that have killed at least 26 people and burned entire neighborhoods to the ground.
Los Angeles doesn’t have a leadership crisis; it has a truth crisis.
Instead of mobilizing to help Angelenos, or starting an honest conversation about climate change, however, the usual lineup of right-wing trolls — including Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Libs of TikTok to name a few — are leading a misinformation-filled, racially coded pile-on against Bass.
Along with other misinformation about the worst fire in Los Angeles history, Musk has been busy boosting tweets that refer to Bass as a DEI hire. Instead of using his considerable wealth and newfound political power to help, Musk would rather use it to hurt Bass and pour fuel on a still-raging disaster.
“The absolute barrage of garbage being pumped into the brains of people is unbelievable,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes said Thursday night, slamming Musk for spreading lies and distortions about a disaster in which the death count is still rising. “It does not help when the guy who owns the so-called digital town square is tweeting about globalist plots and blaming wokeness for the fires.”
Critics also accuse Bass of slashing the Los Angeles Fire Department’s share of the city budget by $23 million, a cut that supposedly caused fire hydrants to run dry and starved brave firefighters of the resources they needed to battle the once-in-a-generation fire.
On a good day, understanding L.A.’s budget could challenge the brightest thinkers of our time. But one thing is for sure: the Los Angeles Police Department always gets the lion’s share of taxpayer money — whether it needs it or not.
The budget cuts, though, didn’t happen in the way they’re being framed.
Politico reported that the city “was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle.”
Bass’s biggest sin, though? Being in Africa when the fire erupted.
Even as dangerous flames began whipping through the air Tuesday night, razing homes and claiming lives, Rick Caruso — a billionaire real-estate developer and erstwhile Democrat who ran against Bass as a Republican in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race — was busy trashing the woman who defeated him. He phoned into Fox 11 Los Angeles’s live television coverage and complained that Bass was an absentee mayor “and we’ve got a city that’s burning.”
Bass departed for Ghana on Saturday. The National Weather Service of Los Angeles issued its warning on Monday night that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm is expected Tue afternoon-Weds morning.”
L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who is Black, was L.A.’s acting mayor while Bass was abroad. He was in constant contact with officials, monitoring the fire, taking the helm until her return.
People don’t want to acknowledge that fire is part of California’s ecosystem, our crowded neighborhoods and million-dollar homes are built right into Mother Nature’s burn zones, or that we keep using greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels like tomorrow isn’t coming. Instead, folks want to act brand-new shocked when Mother Nature calls our collective bluff.
Is Karen Bass perfect? Nope. Does Los Angeles have plenty to criticize her for besides her response to this fire? Absolutely.
But as one X user asked, “I’d like @elonmusk to explain how Republicans would fight a fire powered by 100 mph winds.”
Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier is the managing director of Word In Black, and resides in the Los Angeles area.
This story originally appeared here.