As Los Angeles burns, we’re seeing a conflagration of lies and disinformation

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The firestorms that have been ravaging Los Angeles and Southern California since Tuesday afternoon are nothing short of calamitous. Thanks to dry weather and a burst of high-speed Santa Ana winds—some billowing in at close to 100 miles per hour—brush fires began flaring up across Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu, spreading rapidly and forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee.

By that evening, the Palisades fire had consumed more than 1,260 acres and reached down to Santa Monica, destroying homes and schools in its wake. Another fire in the hills around Eaton County roared across 10,000 acres to Pasadena and forced even more rapid evacuations. The winds and smoke got so dangerous that firefighting airlines were temporarily grounded, and LA County officially asked any residents with firefighting experience to pitch in and help. Going into early Wednesday morning, even more fires started within the county and consumed hundreds of acres, while Palisades fire hydrants found themselves sapped of water.

As of this writing, the collective destruction has killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, including community fixtures, houses, schools, libraries, shops, and restaurants. With cell service down and electricity off for many Angelenos, it’s difficult to get the best updates in real time. TV journalists have themselves been helping residents flee, while others have been forced to evacuate from the areas where they were reporting. Cellphone footage of destroyed buildings is traveling around social media. Air pollution has reached dangerous levels. Tens of thousands of Californians are under evacuation orders, and more than 1.5 million of them have no power due to both preemptive shutoffs by utilities and infrastructural damage from the flames. The windstorms are projected to continue blasting well into Thursday, and the area along the Pacific Coast Highway lies in tatters.

So naturally, it’s conspiracy time.

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. 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.

California hadn’t even woken to its amber skies Wednesday morning before right-wing media began running with attacks on the LA Fire Department’s chief, the first lesbian woman to lead the force and already the subject of ugly attacks purely on the basis of her identity. While other area celebrities—Mark Hamill, Steve Guttenberg—either gave straitlaced updates on their escapes or even helped fire crews clear roads, conservative actor and Palisades homeowner James Woods instead denied that climate change played any role in the fires and blamed “diversity,” citing the LAFD chief’s profile.

There are plenty of worthy reasons to criticize the LAFD: for underpaying the incarcerated Californians who are conscripted to help fight these fires, and for allegedly fostering a bullying workplace while granting impunity to misbehaving firefighters in years past (an urgent issue that Chief Kristin Crowley was hired to address). But for the likes of Libs of TikTok, the fact that a woman is there at all, and that the LAFD made concerted efforts to address how L.A. firefighters from minority backgrounds were mistreated by their superiors, is the real reason these fires are overwhelming.

Others have resurfaced a Donald Trump tweet from his first presidency in which he blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom for not doing enough controlled burns to clear dry vegetation from the forest floors and, thus, leaving extra kindling behind for 2019’s horrific fires. There is some truth here: For nearly 100 years, the United States forbade the Indigenous practice of conducting prescribed burns before realizing their benefits in preemptively helping limit deadlier flames and reencouraging the practice. In fact, California had begun setting off controlled burns again by the late 2010s, making Trump’s tweet inaccurate (as usual).

Still, trauma-informed fear from the wildfires that scarred the Golden State that decade, along with budget cuts to environmental agencies like the Forest Service, led to an ill-advised pause on prescribed burns in Cali under the Biden administration (a decision I wrote about and criticized in Slate back in 2021), and once again halted Forest Service employees from deploying prescribed burns last October out of overblown fears that such practices could lead to another accidental rager. (One way to understand why these commentators are not to be trusted: Many of the same people blaming the LA government’s fire preparation have also consistently advocated over the years for slashing the city’s budgets and services.)

But the fair criticism from the right just about stops there. Trump updated his attacks on “Gavin Newscum” by alluding to a “water declaration resolution” for inflowing water supplies that, Newsom’s office clarified, never existed. Musk and his cronies have since attacked Mayor Karen Bass for supposedly fostering the aforementioned water shortages in the fire hydrants because of poor reservoir management. This is not only untrue, it completely misunderstands how water supply for firefighting works.

Water lines that feed those hydrants have been hurt by the fires, while the widespread need for L.A.’s ample water reserves outpaced the rate at which officials could refill the tanks (and their paths were obstructed along the way by the fires). Plus, water pressure has long been lower than ideal on the West Coast, especially for high-altitude neighborhoods, because of the yearslong drought crippling the region. (That climate change–fueled drought is also part of the reason why these fires spread so quickly: Barren foliage and general lack of moisture are eager fuel for fire spread.)

There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction.

The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need. https://t.co/5WnnlrP3Wl

— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) January 8, 2025

The conspiracies are also not limited to the right. A common talking point, echoed by both internet leftists and L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, also blames Bass for cutting the LAFD budget in favor of funding local police. However, L.A. firefighters’ salaries have risen under Bass’ budgets, and the overall decrease in the department’s budget this year was a tiny, tiny fraction of its overall coffers.

Here’s the real, ugly truth: This is just how every major climate disaster is going to unfold online from here on out. There will be criticisms and expressions of fury, some more fair and reasoned than others, But in an ecosystem where social media outlets have purposefully hobbled their ability to provide real-time, reliable updates to users, the people affected by those disasters are literally left in the dark.

The government is never blameless when it comes to the impacts of and recovery from wildfires and storms. Still, while it takes time and effort to extinguish flames and dispatch reliable information in favor of the public interest, opportunistic liars need no such time to push their agendas. After decades of fossil-industry-funded climate denial, far-right figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene can get away with claiming Jewish space lasers are responsible for fires and that “they” can “control the weather” in order to target North Carolinians.

One can only do so much to debunk each individual conspiracy theory as brutal fires like California’s continue to spread. And as climate change supercharges more storms, fires, earthquakes, and other inevitable tragedies throughout this year and beyond, prepare to have to deal with these ambushes as well. Climate change doesn’t just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too.