By Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
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 10 people and burned entire neighborhoods to the ground. On TV, in social media and in the newspapers, conservatives are blasting Bass for an environmental disaster that’s out of her control.
The devastation in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood — as well as other parts of Los Angeles County, like Altadena and Pasadena, where Bass isn’t even in charge — is unprecedented.
Even if Bass personally stood in the middle of Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades with a massive fire hose it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Los Angeles doesn’t have a leadership crisis; it has a truth crisis.
Fires don’t care about your politics. They don’t check your bank balance or your zip code before they jump across Pacific Coast Highway. And until we get real about urban planning, budget realities, climate change, and our addiction to fossil fuels, we’re just rearranging flaming deck chairs on the Titanic.
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. They paint her as an irresponsible and incompetent affirmative action mayor who was galavanting around Africa, partying on the taxpayer’s dime when the fire broke out.
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 Jan. 9, 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. (Never mind that conservatives continually accuse Bass of being “soft on crime” and a #BlackLivesMatter politician who’s down with defunding the police.)
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.”
Sirius XM host Reecie Colbert concurred on Bluesky: “Let’s not get hot takes from the right wing media in reacting to the LA wildfires. There are valid budget priority critiques, but BFFR, Mayor Karen Bass and DEI are not to blame for the difficulties containing the wildfires.”
Then there’s the lies about the lack of water to fight the fire.
Donald Trump spread that one on Truth Social, claiming there was “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS.” His right-wing minions took the hint and started dumping on Bass.
But Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a California research organization that focuses on water, told the New York Times not to get it twisted. “The real issue is that urban water systems are not built or designed to fight massive, urban wildfires,” he said.
Bass’s biggest sin, though? Being in Africa when the fire erupted.
Even as dangerous flames began whipping through the air the night of Jan. 7, 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 Jan. 4. The National Weather Service of Los Angeles issued its warning on the night of Jan. 6 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, manning the helm until her return.
That didn’t matter to Caruso. He kept his false, no-one’s-in-charge narrative going on Jan. 8, the day Bass touched down at Los Angeles International Airport.
“We have a mayor who seems to be more concerned about being at some party, wherever the hell that is,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “We have terrible leadership resulting in billions of dollars in damage because she wasn’t here and didn’t know what she was doing.”
Libs of TikTok chimed in with a tweet dripping in dog-whistle racism: “Hey @KarenBassLA, how was your taxpayer funded trip to Africa as your city burned to the ground and your constituents were fleeing for their lives???”
In other words, how dare Bass — who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations — join an official Biden administration delegation for the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama?
Should she have come back sooner for a fire no one knew was coming? Should someone from the city have held a press conference on Monday morning? Why didn’t she simply stop the fire with her mind? Woulda, shoulda, coulda.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles since 1998 and texted that NWS warning to friends and family members ahead of the fire — and they responded with a collective shrug.
Santa Ana winds, and the constant threat of wildfire, are nothing new in Southern California. Angelenos are used to downed trees, sparking power wires, drought, and, unfortunately, devastating fires. But they usually happen out in mountainous areas in the county, not inside the city limits. No one could have predicted what has happened or precisely when it would happen.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain put it succinctly: “When you have bone-dry, critically dry vegetation, 50- to 90- mile-an-hour winds, with highly flammable structures densely intermixed with the vegetation, there isn’t a lot to stop the aggressive chemical reaction that is the combustion process of an intense wind-driven fire.”
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.”
Alas, on Jan. 10, the world’s richest man was busy tweeting an attack on an environmental nonprofit that Ben Jealous, former NAACP president, now runs. Musk’s call to action: “Defund Sierra Club.”
This article was originally published by WordinBlack.com.
The post Opinion: Los Angeles burned, now they’re coming for Karen Bass appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers.
