This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 9 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Rumors, lies and hoaxes have always spread during times of disaster. That phenomenon is as old as humanity itself. Even in the best of circumstances, a crisis like the Los Angeles wildfires would be a vector for a lot of bad information.
Our polluted information environment is creating an absolute blowtorch of lies — lies being spread by the richest man in the world on the platform he owns and by the incoming president of the United States.
Our polluted information environment is creating an absolute blowtorch of lies.
For example, there is the false claim that the city of Los Angeles is out of water. Donald Trump himself posted a number of attacks against Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, including saying that Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water … to flow daily into many parts of California.”
However, as Newsom’s office noted, “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction.” One local outlet also pointed out, “Since Newsom has been in office, there has not been legislation that would do what Trump is describing.”
Elon Musk and others boosted a similar claim that Los Angeles is out of water to fight the fires and that Karen Bass, the city’s Democratic mayor, is to blame, with Musk attacking “Bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”
That’s just false. While firefighters are having trouble accessing water from hydrants, there is actually a very simple explanation for that and it has nothing to do with Bass. As the head of the city’s water department told the BBC, “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
Los Angeles has an urban water system designed, first and foremost, to get water to homes and businesses. It is not designed to fight massive wildfires. The BBC also clarified that firefighting crews “were not without water,” but rather faced issues with water pressure.
That is true for a number of reasons, including high altitude, droughts exacerbated by climate change, unprecedented demand for water to put out the blazes, and the fact that supply lines that feed the fire hydrants are being disrupted by the raging wildfires. None of that is the fault of Bass or Newsom.
The misinformation doesn’t end there, though. Musk also claimed, without any basis, that the Los Angeles Fire Department “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” which is a completely ludicrous statement.
Musk also shared a post targeting Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, who is both the first female and the first LGBTQ fire chief in the city’s history. The attacks against Crowley suggest she is unqualified and therefore somehow responsible for the fires.
Crowley has served in the LAFD for decades, working her way up from a firefighter, all the way to fire chief. She received a special commendation back in 2020 for her work saving nine homes during the 2018 Woolsey Fire, alongside her wife, who also spent decades in the LAFD. It should go without saying Crowley’s personal identity has nothing to do with department preparedness to combat wildfires. Musk wasn’t done with the gross attacks, though. He signed off on a post from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, claiming that the “Los Angeles Fires Are Part Of A Larger Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare & Deindustrialize The Untied States Before Triggering Total Collapse.” Musk replied, “True.” The Los Angeles fires are not part of an intentional plot to deindustrialize the United States. This is the same level of nonsense as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saying a Jewish space laser started the Camp Fire in 2018. This is the same level of nonsense as Marjorie Taylor Greene saying a Jewish space laser started the Camp Fire in 2018. Jones — the guy who lied about the Sandy Hook shooting being staged — got Musk’s message loud and clear. “Elon Musk responded to a post from the first half-hour of my show today, where I laid out the basic evidence that the Democratic Party, with their policies, are 100% responsible, consciously, for the historic fire destroying much of Los Angeles in the last 48 hours,” Jones said on his show. The absolute barrage of garbage being pumped into the brains of people is unbelievable. It starts to feel like collective informational suicide — and it doesn’t help when the guy who owns the digital town square is posting about globalist plots and blaming wokeness for the fires. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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