New York
Prominent right-wing media personalities are calling on the federal government to withhold or place conditions on aid for victims of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, blaming California’s own policies for the scale of the devastation and response.
As firefighters slowly gain control of the wildfires raging near Los Angeles and thousands of residents return to find their homes in ashes, pro-Trump personalities are blasting state and local officials for “woke” policies that they fault for the disaster.
On Fox News, the network’s hosts have lined up behind the politicized approach, taking pot-shots at the state for its progressive values. Host Sean Hannity told viewers California doesn’t “deserve one federal dollar” because of its immigration policies and placed blame on the state’s forest management.
“Any aid has got to insist that the science of forestry be implemented so you, the American people, you don’t have to keep bailing people out,” Hannity said Tuesday night. “They’ve got to clear out the brush and do things like, oh, control burns and maybe not put a little shrub above the safety of people’s lifeblood, their home.”
Fellow Fox prime time host Jesse Watters suggested that California, with its higher state income tax rate, shouldn’t need additional funding but that officials had squandered tax dollars on unrelated issues.
“Will American taxpayers rebuild L.A. without strings attached?” Watters asked his audience Tuesday night. “L.A. spent more on homeless than firefighters, and both problems are getting worse. They lost $55 billion in Covid money, lost it. They spent $20 billion on a high-speed train that doesn’t go anywhere.”
Glenn Beck, who hosts a podcast and program on The Blaze, blamed the wildfires on the state’s homeless population and railed against the state’s preparation for the extreme winds that fanned the flames.
Gov. Gavin Newsom “and the leaders of California can’t admit that their own disastrous policies, NOT climate change, fueled these fires, they shouldn’t get a DIME of federal aid without serious conditions attached,” Beck wrote on X.
Scientists said this week that climate change contributed to the explosive growth of the wildfires, with the region experiencing exceptional dry conditions that fueled the flames. Other regions are also grappling with alarming fire behavior. Texas saw its largest wildfire on record last year and Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record in 2023.
On Fox, host Laura Ingraham questioned California’s ability to properly disburse funds, telling Sen. Tommy Tuberville in an interview that “the money will be going to friends and people who are politically connected or have the same environmental agenda even though today (Mayor) Karen Bass and yesterday Gavin Newsom said, ‘Oh, no, we’re going to streamline a lot of this permitting.’”
“I don’t think they have any credibility on any of that,” Ingraham said. “Not with our tax dollars.”
Republican Sens. John Barrasso and Bill Hagerty have called for public hearings to investigate Democrats’ alleged “gross mismanagement” in the state following the fires, which as of Wednesday afternoon had scorched more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 25 people.
“There can’t be a blank check on this,” Barrasso told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I expect there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time because this was a gross failure this time.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the budding chorus of conservatives calling for conditional relief on Monday, telling that he, too, thought “there should probably be conditions on that aid.”
Republican calls for California wildfire relief to have “strings attached” are by no means a novel idea. When wildfires surged across the state in 2018, then-President Trump reportedly withheld disaster relief funds given the state’s Democratic lean. However, Trump reversed course after he was informed that he had a larger voter base in the impacted county than in some states, a former official said.
The next year, Trump posted on social media that “billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”
Right-wing media personalities have regularly cast California in a negative light, using it as a punching bag to stir outrage over progressive policies that if allowed to spill beyond its borders would devastate the country.
“So why pick fights with California?” said University of California, Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady. “Well, watch Fox News. California is the boogeyman. California has cities out of control. California is doing all these crazy things with climate change. We are the people who have sanctuary cities and the place where people are woke beyond belief.”
“Punishing California is something that is, from their perspective, a positive good,” he added.
Trump himself has used his Truth Social platform to spread misinformation about the fires and stoke a feud with Newsom, falsely declaring last week that the governor had “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him,” allowing the fires to spread.
Trump’s media allies similarly picked up on his talking points, with Ingraham saying on her show, “we know where California liberals choose to spend billions, and we do know that their environmental fanaticism has shoved common sense thinking out the door.”
“Now, while the winds are horrific, experts insist that bad forest management can make a bad situation worse,” Ingraham added. “And Trump called this out six years ago … He’s right. Incompetence kills.”
On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Trump rekindled threats that, if elected, he would make wildfire aid to the state conditional if Newsom didn’t agree to divert more of the state’s water supply to farmers.
“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said in September. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”
