Trump, Musk and MAGA douse California wildfires with conspiracies, hate and lies | Opinion
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY
Updated Fri, January 10, 2025 at 9:15 AM CST
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While wildfires rage across Los Angeles, President-elect Donald Trump, weirdo presidential wingman Elon Musk and other disreputable characters in the MAGA extended universe are doing all they can to make things worse.
Like smart-ass school children, they’re leveraging an unfolding natural disaster as a chance to shout stupid nicknames at California’s governor, making up nonsense out of whole cloth and pointing fingers in whatever direction lunkhead conspiracy theorists tell them to point.
In other words, they’re behaving exactly as we should now expect MAGA folks to behave, with cruelty and opportunism first, and they're doing it less than two weeks before Trump starts running the country.
Elon Musk agrees with Alex Jones as Los Angeles burns
Flames rise from the Sunset Fire in the hills overlooking the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, U.S. January 8, 2025.
The cherry on the “you’re not helping” sundae came when unhinged nutball Alex Jones posted on X Wednesday: “Los Angeles Fires Are Part Of A Larger Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare & Deindustrialize The Untied States Before Triggering Total Collapse.”
To which Musk, who helped get Trump elected and is now slated to play a significant role in shaping our federal government, responded: “True.”
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Counterpoint: Not true, you soulless idiots.
That sort of gibberish should prompt people in lab coats to chase you around trying to capture you in a net.
MAGA folks blame LA wildfires on diversity because of course, they doMusk and others on the right have also trotted out their favorite thing to blame everything on: diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
Newsmax host and person-you’ve-never-heard-of Rob Finnerty assailed the fact that the Los Angeles Fire Department is led by an eminently qualified person who also happens to be a lesbian: “In Los Angeles, it’s the exact same story – death by DEI, this time with their brand new fire chief.”
For those who don’t own a MAGA-to-English/English-to-MAGA translation book, “DEI” is MAGA code for “only straight, cisgender white men are capable of doing a good job.”
The fire chief, Kristin Crowley, is a two-decades veteran who rose up through the ranks, serving as a firefighter, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, battalion chief, assistant chief and fire marshal. But facts don’t matter much when your primary objective is to be the worst version of yourself possible.
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MAGA ever so proud to learn the letters in 'DEI' can spell 'DIE'So it goes that clever fellows like Donald Trump Jr. realized the letters that make up “DEI” can be moved around to spell something hilarious.
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Futurism
The ogre-ish Trump spawn posted on Instagram: “Can we rename DEI to DIE since that’s what seems to happen to the people downstream of those who place woke virtue signaling far above competency?!?”
A firefighting helicopter drops water as the Sunset Fire burns in the Hollywood Hills with evacuations ordered on January 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. O
All of this is wildly unhelpful in a moment of human tragedy.
Not to be outdone, the incoming president has been dishonestly rage posting at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, writing stuff like this: “One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!”
Such leadership.
Trump and others spit lies at LA firesTrump and Co. are also just making stuff up, claiming Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” – a thing that doesn’t exist – and showing abject ignorance of California’s water supply system.
A home burns during the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades, California, on Jan. 8, 2025. At least five people have been killed in wildfires rampaging around Los Angeles, officials said on Jan. 8, with firefighters overwhelmed by the speed and ferocity of multiple blazes.
MoreMark Gold, a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told the independent news organization CalMatters that Trump’s inaccurate babbling about the state’s water sources “is nothing short of irresponsible, and it’s happening at a time when the Metropolitan Water District has the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency.
"It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire. It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”
Perhaps climate change is something we should discuss?Ah, there it is. The two words the MAGA king and his minions dare not speak: climate change.
You know, the thing actually exacerbating wildfires via drought, increased temperatures and dramatic weather shifts. The thing causing more extreme weather events. The thing we should be paying attention to instead of blaming deadly fires on a lack of high-ranking white, straight people or some histrionic conspiracy garble.
Alas, this is the fate voters have handed us for at least the next four years. We’ll be led by a man devoid of empathy and incapable of shame who surrounds himself with a court of infantile fools.
The handling of these unprecedented fires should and will be examined, and the preparation for such a thing – if a thing this intense could even have been predicted – will be reviewed. If anybody screwed up, by all means hold them accountable. But pinning blame with zero evidence and hurling insults as the fires rage, homes burn and lives are lost is the height of irresponsibility.
American tragedies once bred unity and compassion. For the MAGA-fied Republican Party, they’re now an opportunity to breed more hate and attack perceived enemies.
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