Trump

Andrea Austria / Media Matters / Trump photo credit: Gage Skidmore

A firestorm of right-wing propaganda

Written by Matt Gertz

Published

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response. 

While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars. 

Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire. 

Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against. 

As destruction spreads across Southern California, they are chiming in with a familiar cast of enemies: Democrats, environmentalists, and diversity. These claims have in turn fueled attacks on media outlets for debunking right-wing falsehoods, as well as demands that Trump threaten to hold back desperately needed assistance to the region once he takes office later this month.

None of this is going to inform right-wing audiences about the unfolding disaster, much less reduce the risk that another one strikes in the future. But that’s not the point. The commentariat knows that their audiences are united in their hatred of the left, and by providing the usual villains, they keep viewers, listeners, and readers engaged for their movement’s political gain.

  • As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

    Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up.

    The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false.

    Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish. 

    His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.”

    But none of this is true. 

    It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them. 

    The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

    And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff. 

    The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.” 

    Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.” 

    And at times, the discourse became nakedly conspiratorial with Fox personalities darkly alleging that “the homeless” or “outside agitators” were responsible for starting the fires and that the government was deliberately allowing them to burn unimpeded.

  • The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

    The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine. 

    We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others. 

    But because this is such well-trodden territory, it is disturbing when legacy media outlets are unable or unwilling to bat down the false claims. 

    The New York Times’ write-up of Trump’s remarks about Newsom’s water management is headlined “Trump Blames California’s Governor, and His Water Policy, for Wildfires.” Only in its final paragraphs does the story explain that the Trump claims detailed in its opening sentences are false. 

    Privileging the lie like this leaves Times readers poorly informed. The good news for the paper is that another opportunity for better coverage will surely follow the next natural disaster.