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LOS ANGELES BURNED, NOW THEY’RE COMING FOR KAREN BASS  
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Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
January 10, 2025
Word In Black
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_ The first woman and second-ever Black person to serve as mayor of
Los Angeles is under attack by conservative trolls like Elon Musk and
Donald Trump. _

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, center, and L.A. Fire Chief Kristin
Crowley during a news conference on the fires in Los Angeles on Jan.
11. (Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times),

 

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. 

RELATED: FIRE DESTRUCTION INCLUDES HISTORIC BLACK COMMUNITY
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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.

RELATED: IT’S THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER, AGAIN
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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
[[link removed]] 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 Thursday
night,
[[link removed]] 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.”  

Budget cuts didn’t happen in the way they’re being framed.

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 [[link removed]]”
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
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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
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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.” 

RELATED: THE END OF THE EPA’S ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ERA
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Then there’s the lies about the lack of water to fight the fire. 

Donald Trump spread that one on Truth Social,
[[link removed]] 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
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to get it twisted. “The real issue is that urban water systems are
not built or designed to fight massive, urban wildfires,” he
said.  

How was your taxpayer-funded trip to Africa?

Bass’s biggest sin, though? Being in Africa when the fire erupted.

Even as dangerous flames began whipping through the air Tuesday night,
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 Saturday. The National Weather Service of
Los Angeles issued its warning on Monday night
[[link removed]] 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 Wednesday, 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
[[link removed]].
“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.  

Is Karen Bass perfect? Nope.

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
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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 Friday morning, the world’s richest man was busy tweeting
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environmental nonprofit that Ben Jealous
[[link removed]],
former NAACP president, now runs. Musk’s call to action: “Defund
Sierra Club.”

_[Los Angeles-based journalist LIZ COURQUET-LESAULNIER
[[link removed]] is the managing director of Word
In Black. She has written about racial justice, gender equality,
education, health, and culture for several national websites and print
publications, including Ebony, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and Good
Housekeeping._

_Previously, she held the position of communications director at 826
National. She also served as the founding managing editor of
Shondaland.com, a platform dedicated to women’s empowerment and
lifestyle, spearheaded by television icon Shonda Rhimes. Prior to
that, Courquet-Lesaulnier took on the role of education and culture
editor at TakePart, the digital news arm of Participant Media, where
she specialized in coverage of equity in public schools, access to and
preparation for college, and the intersection of public health and
systemic racism. Before that, she worked as the education editor at
GOOD magazine._

_Prior to journalism, Courquet-Lesaulnier taught in classrooms in
Guangzhou, China, and Compton, California. She also worked on the
staff of Teach For America’s Los Angeles office, providing
professional development and support to first and second-year K-12
teachers in the Compton, Lynwood, and Los Angeles Unified school
districts.]_

* Los Angeles Fires
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* LA Fires
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* Los Angeles
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* California
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* California fires
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* wildfires
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* Karen Bass
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* Climate Catastrophe
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* Climate Crisis
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* Climate Change
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* Donald Trump
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* Elon Musk
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* Racism
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