As wildfires tore through Los Angeles County and beyond, disinformation purveyors saw an opportunity to push their favored narratives — no citations or proof needed.
Major disasters are always accompanied by rumor and hearsay thanks to disruptions, frustrations, and fear. However, in an information landscape that is buffeted by disinformation and propaganda with little fact-checking in sight, it has become far worse.
The tactic is known as “resilience targeting,” which means preventing a population from returning to a baseline sense of security and self-sufficiency. It is used in both climate change and disinformation studies, because in both cases, the methods are the same and can feed off each other as threat multipliers.
In practice, it looks like wild rumors flying every time a natural disaster occurs; sometimes those are hammered so long and so hard that they are folded into future policy, always to the detriment of the most vulnerable.
California is a particular target for conservative attacks such as the narratives attempting to tie the destruction caused by the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles this week to diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, also called DEI.
These types of narratives are always baseless, opportunistic, and identical to a similar vein of propaganda in 2023, which was leveled at “critical race theory,” or CRT.
CRT is a highly specific academic lens, but it is not well understood by the American public at large, and thus was easily used as a catchall term for diversity initiatives that was highly effective in dismantling or defunding many programs that had little or nothing to do with critical race theory at any point.
This week, influential right-wing public figures have gone so far as to blame “DEI firefighters,” meaning women and people of color, for the strength and severity of the fires in Los Angeles. The narrative, which falls apart with even a few seconds’ worth of thinking it through, has wended its way to outlets notorious for right-wing perspectives that rely heavily on hearsay and rumor rather than fact.
Those pushing these narratives also attempted to try to tie water shortages reported Wednesday afternoon — which has been predicted for years in the event of multiple wildfires fed by increasing and unchecked global warming — to LAFD having its first female fire chief.
The through-line is misogyny and racism, because the heavy implication with narratives such as these is that the qualifications for fighting fires must be in order to accommodate women and minorities.
This type of redirection conveniently papers over the tremendously destructive effects of climate change and redirects the conversation, once again, to segregating the public life of Americans by ethnicity or sex.
The tactics are always the same: baseless claims followed by direct influence and harassment campaigns that culminate in lawsuits, expulsions, or firing. Whether there is any substance to the claims does not matter, as the people making them are loud and well-connected.
In the case of “DEI firefighters,” the rumors stem from a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program that began in November 2022 after years of calls to change the department’s notoriously racist and misogynist culture, by offering better oversight and training.
The water shortage is being addressed by a state initiative to supply dozens of water tankers and related support to the region. And officials point out that urban water systems were never designed to fight the kinds of wildfires the were confined to rural areas before climate change.
Other baseless disinformation narratives floating around in relation to the fires include a rumor that California had no fire engines because it sent them all to Ukraine. While it is true that some Californian fire departments made donations to Ukraine in 2022 to aid them against Russia’s attacks, it is untrue that they sent all the equipment they might need in the event of a future wildfire.
The DEI and Ukraine rumors — like all the rest currently being circulated — depend on their believers ignoring the fact that there have been multiple wildfires in the region in recent years. All of them were handily put out by the same firefighting teams that are currently being blamed for Los Angeles burning.
The truth is that as climate change has become impossible to ignore, and the far right’s claims and narratives around the natural disasters a heating planet spawns and escalates have attained new heights of absurdity in order to avoid it as an explanation.
Disinformation is difficult to debunk in real-time, because connecting claims to facts takes time and often investigation. That is well known by its purveyors, who deploy lies in order to help them gain public and political legitimacy.
The coordinated lies and narratives are especially likely to be aimed at a woman of color with influence or power — such as the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass.
These narratives can be convincing and all-encompassing, but their malign influence on the public at large can be fought with simple rules of thumb:
If you find yourself becoming very frightened or angry by a narrative that seems to play on existing biases, such as unexamined racism or misogyny, check your sources; it is very likely that you are being emotionally manipulated into accepting a lie Question your own biases when something presented without proof “feels” legitimate Write down things that you want to remember; don’t rely on random online sources Remember when a public figure has made claims in bad faith in the past, and use that as a guide to their present and future behaviorIt is also difficult to fight disinformation because it depends on individuals remembering to act rationally in highly emotional and fraught situations, which without a strong infrastructure and support can be difficult or impossible.
Resilience targeting is deadliest at the intersection of disinformation and climate change by design. It is difficult to combat directly, because it so often comes from people who have manipulated their way into positions of power.
However, knowing what it looks and feels like is necessary to fighting weaponized disinformation before it is effective getting bad actors whatever they want; in a world now fully redrawn by a changing climate, knowing about this destructive tactic is more important than ever — and believing rumors attacking DEI initiatives will do nothing to stop the next wildfire from being even more destructive.
Brooke Binkowski is a disinformation expert and journalist. Before arriving at Times of San Diego, she worked as managing editor for debunking sites Truth or Fiction and Snopes.
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