Don’t Blame the LA Fires on Billionaires Stealing Water, or Satanic Rituals
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I had a pretty bad birthday last year, if I’m perfectly honest. My partner had planned a wonderful day that included a ride on a choo choo train through the redwoods of Felton, California, but when we arrived there it was canceled due to extremely high winds. “We call redwood limbs ‘widowmakers’ here,” the choo choo train ticket taker informed us.
No problem! We drove further on until we reached Santa Cruz, where we were going to have a nice lunch. Unfortunately, the high winds had knocked out all the power to downtown so everything was closed.
Eventually we found a brewery that was open, and as we sat down and I took my first sip of beer, I got a text from a neighbor showing video she’d just shot from her car coming home on the highway. It was a nasty looking fire, but not right in our backyard so I kept drinking my beer. About twenty minutes later, nearby neighborhoods were being evacuated because the extremely high winds were spreading the fire quickly.
We abandoned our beers and hopped back in the car for a very anxious two-hour drive home, during which time I fielded several calls from neighbors and friends asking if Indy was home and whether they should break in to get him. Luckily, he was with us. We got home and loaded up the car with our emergency “earthquake” kit, our go bags, and our camping gear for good measure. Then we sat and waited, chatting with neighbors and keeping an eye on the Watch Duty app to be ready to go if the fire made it any closer.
We were very lucky. Our awesome firefighters worked tirelessly all day and night to get the fire under control, as plane after plane flew overhead dropping retardant. In the end, the winds died down, the fire was contained, and only a few houses were damaged and no one died.
We were aware that this would be our life when we bought our house. Much of the Bay Area is at a high risk of wildfire, plus of course, earthquakes. So we’ve always had an emergency plan, and honestly even though it happened on my fucking BIRTHDAY, it was a great test to confirm that we’ve prepared as best we can. Our home’s exterior is clear of fuel, we knew where all our supplies were, we had good communication with neighbors and authorities, and we were as ready as we could have been.
Obviously I’m thinking of this now because of the horrific, deadly fires in Los Angeles. I have several friends there who had to evacuate, and luckily they are all okay and their homes were spared. But I’ve heard of a lot of people who were caught completely by surprise–they had no go bags, no earthquake kit, no plan.
And so I wanted to open this video by urging you, out there in the YouTube audience, to please don’t be that person. I made a little joke on social media that I actually do sort of believe, that Alex Jones and his ilk have convinced a lot of normal people that “prepping” is something that crazy people do. And yes, crazy people DO “prep” in silly ways for scenarios that will never occur: stocking up on guns because transgender zombies are coming for your children, or filling your entire garage with precious metals because the world’s financial markets are going to crash but you’ll still be able to barter for gold somehow.
But normal people should prep for actual scenarios that might happen. Here in the Bay Area, that means wildfires and earthquakes. When I lived in Boston, that meant power outages or an inability to leave the apartment during a blizzard. When I was growing up in South Jersey it meant thunderstorms that could take out the power and create flooding. When I lived in Buffalo, New York, I was headed out on a wintery road trip with my boyfriend and was confused when he went back into the apartment and then came out with a quilt and a handful of chocolate bars. That’s how I learned that the trunk of my car should always have a first aid kit, a blanket, and a brick of chocolate because when that lake effect snow hits, people drive off the road and then freeze or starve to death in their cars.
Did I ever need it? No. Do people die all the time because they don’t have it? Yep.
So please, please please, think about where you live and what’s the worst thing that could reasonably happen, and make a plan. You can check to see if you have a local Community Emergency Response Team for information like what sort of stuff is helpful to have on hand.
Even if you live in a place with no potential natural disasters, you could benefit from a simple backpack with things like a change of clothes, an extra bottle of medications you take, and some granola bars. Seriously.
Okay, end of lecture. Let’s talk about some LA wildfire conspiracy theories.
We all know by now that whenever something big and scary happens, conspiracies start flying around social media, and we also know that that’s only going to be getting worse with a lack of fact checking on those social media networks. Gavin Newsom, the state of California’s unctious used car salesman/governor, jumped on this pretty quickly by publishing a page of simple fact checks:
No, the fire department’s budget wasn’t cut.
No, the state didn’t stop trucks from Oregon from driving in to help.
No, there isn’t a water shortage right now and the reservoirs aren’t empty.
No, California’s politicians did not purposely start the fires to hide vast pedophile tunnels.
And no, the fire did not start because of a satanic ritual.
It was just a regular secular ritual, which took place in the pedophile tunnel. It wasn’t on purpose. One of the children tried to escape and the standard punishment flamethrower accidentally lit up some cum tissues, which drifted into a HVAC unit.
Sorry, something about the governor of California needing to officially state that a devastating wildfire was not connected to a secret pedophile tunnel has really brought out my darkest humor.
There’s one sort of conspiracy I’ve seen floating around that isn’t addressed on that page, though, and I wanted to mention it. It’s the idea that one reason these fires were so devastating is because one wealthy couple has hoarded all of California’s money in order to grow pistachios.
This, to me, is a perfect example of misinformation that can really catch on, because it sounds sensible, it criticizes people who are objectively terrible, and it has a kernel of truth at its core. But in the end, it’s complete bullshit–Lynda and Stewart Resnick have no direct connection to these wildfires.
As of the recording of this video, authorities are still trying to nail down exactly how these fires started, whether it was intentional arson, or whether our state’s power monopoly PG&E had another “oopsie,” or something else. But it’s pretty well understood how and why it spread so quickly and catastrophically: the Santa Anas are hot and dry winds that occur about a dozen times a year in Southern California, usually in the autumn but they’re common at other times as well. Usually by this point, places have experienced some winter rains, which is why January is not considered “fire season.” Unfortunately, LA didn’t get any rain this winter, which is something that is becoming more common thanks to climate change. Extremely dry vegetation combined with extremely strong, dry, hot winds is a recipe for disaster. It’s what nearly burned down my neighborhood last October. It’s such a known problem that we get official Red Flag Warnings days in advance of winds like that, which serve as an important notice to double check your emergency kit, power up your devices, and be ready to run. These days, PG&E will often shut down the power in high risk areas like mine because they know their terrible infrastructure might cause sparks, which can combine with those conditions to an out of control wildfire.
And thanks to those high winds, it becomes extremely dangerous and sometimes impossible to get aircrafts up over the fires to release water or fire retardants.
In those conditions, it almost doesn’t matter how much water you have. You might save my house, and my neighbor’s house, but not the next guy down, and when THAT house goes up, those hot winds can pick up a single spark and carry them five miles away to find another house, or grove of eucalyptus trees, or whatever. Saying that more water would have stopped the LA wildfires is like saying a bigger bucket would have stopped the Titanic from sinking.
I’ll pause here to point out that despite that fact, more water WOULD help. After all, if more water would save JUST MY house, even if it doesn’t stop the wildfire, even if the rest of the neighborhood burns down, then sure, I would want more water. If a big enough bucket bails out a boat long enough to save just one extra person, then yeah, the bigger bucket is great. For that reason, I’m glad that the State is funding an independent investigation to figure out why, for instance, one major reservoir has been empty for nearly a year for repairs. Would that reservoir have stopped the wildfires? No. Might it have saved someone’s house? Maybe.
But again, that’s not the fault of the Resnicks, or any other billionaires, stealing water. But the reason why that’s so easy to believe is because the Resnicks, and other billionaires, ARE stealing our water.
I showed the first post in this thread on Xitter, from someone listing information about the Resnicks and their nefarious deeds. And that thread is largely correct. Instead of reading it, though, I’ll direct you to this excellent overview from a climate scientist at Union of Concerned Scientists, who includes links to several indigenous people and organizations who have been on this beat for decades.
That’s an important perspective because the topic of water rights in California date back to the colonization of this state, and the invention of “appropriative” rights. On the east coast, colonizers used “riparian rights,” meaning that the white man who owned the property bordering a river also owned the rights to use that river for whatever purposes he wanted. But “appropriative rights” granted people the right to nail a sign to a tree next to the river saying that the water was now theirs, to funnel several miles inland to, say, water their own crops. The first person–excuse me, the first US citizen, which did not include indigenous people–to nail up that sign got the rights to the water, provided they continued to use it.
It’s a long and sordid tale over the 150 years or so since those rights were established and I encourage you to read up on it if you’re interested, but the end result is now a system in which more than a million Californians do not have access to safe drinking water, while billionaires own agricultural conglomerates that can continue to grow water-heavy crops like almonds and pistachios even when the state is in a severe drought. And to be clear, these private corporations are using public resources to make their billions. As even Forbes has noted, back in the ‘90s the Resnicks engaged in secret meetings with officials to acquire public land for its water rights, eventually resulting in them owning a majority stake in the Kern County Water Bank, an underground water storage facility that was set up with $73 million in taxpayer money as a protective measure against droughts. So now it’s used to grow pistachios for billionaires.
So this isn’t about the availability of water to fight fires; it IS about the availability of water for people to drink, as well as the water available to our fellow friends in our food system, like salmon, which require rivers to spawn and thrive and feed us. When you drive through the Central Valley, you’ll see loads of signs the billionaires put up on their farms claiming THEY need the water to feed us, but unlike those salmon, the nuts they’re growing are mostly being shipped out of the country. The Central Valley DOES grow a huge amount of food that people across the United States eat, but there are obviously huge inequities in how the water is used, and even which farmers get to use it. Here’s a hint: if your farm isn’t owned by billionaires, good luck getting that water to your crops.
So that’s the kernel of truth at the center of the bullshit popcorn that is “blame the Resnicks for the wildfires.” We can blame them for a lot, and hell, we can even indirectly tie them back into the actual cause, which is climate change and lack of municipal readiness for the effects of climate change, because really you can tie any billionaires back to that. In case I haven’t been clear, billionaires are a plague upon Earth. But linking them directly to this particular catastrophe isn’t resulting in any increase in understanding. Instead, it’s just stoking more dangerous ideas, like good ol’ anti-semitism. Here’s one example: a neo-Nazi retweeting an anti-Resnick post to say “Cherchez le Juif,” or “Look for the Jew.” And of course, because it’s Xitter, the other anti-semites have hopped on board.
So please, just double check the posts you’re boosting on social media, especially if you don’t live here in California dealing with these problems on a regular basis. And if you DO live in California, please let your politicians know how you feel about water rights inequality AND a lack of preparation for droughts, which are only going to become more extreme as climate change marches on, AND why not also let them know how you feel about PG&E. Because even if it turns out that they didn’t cause this, I think we can all agree that they suck ass and should be destroyed. Like the billionaires.
