Elon Musk Exposed Over Right-Wing Lie on L.A. Fires

Elon Musk was fact-checked on his own livestream after making false statements about the California wildfires, and Gavin Newsom was quick to call out the tech mogul on social media.

In a post on X Sunday night, the California governor posted an excerpt from the livestream, where Musk was receiving a briefing with the command team handling the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Musk asked an emergency official twice about water to fight the fires being available in the Malibu area but not in the Palisades.

The official corrected Musk, pointing out there was not a water shortage but that the fire required much more water than could be pumped.

Right-wing pundits and commentators have come up with a number of different reasons at the root of the wildfires, from attacking California Democrats for their “far-left policies” to making the racist claim that “DEI” was a major cause. In reality, while better prevention measures could have been taken, Musk, Donald Trump, and other conservative personalities are using the disaster to score political points without offering much help.

Even the conservative claim that better water management could have mitigated the wildfires doesn’t hold up. Experts in the area told CNN last week that the magnitude of these fires, among the worst in U.S. history, makes it impossible for even the best preparation and equipment to put out the blazes.

“I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA, said to the network.

Musk, Trump, and conservative actor James Woods, among others, have all made the false claim that water reservoirs in the affected areas are empty, even as the state of California said they were “brimming.” It’s no surprise that Newsom would seize upon Musk getting corrected to his face by an emergency management official, on his own livestream to boot. Perhaps the tech mogul and the rest of the opportunistic right should stop spreading misinformation and leave the firefighting to the experts.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is being chastised by MAGA faithfuls after saying some January 6ers shouldn’t be pardoned. 

“If you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance said on Fox News. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”

This statement got some immediate backlash online. 

“Telling your own supporters that the election was stolen and then not giving them a pardon or commutation after you sent them into what you call a ‘fedsurrection’ and ‘trap’ is a betrayal,” wrote Philip Anderson, an  insurrectionist who was arrested for misdemeanor charges connected to January 6. “All of the J6 defendants must be saved. JD Vance is wrong and I hope Trump will save his own supporters.”

“If Trump got a ‘get out of jail free’ card, then so should EVERY ONE of his supporters who rallied for him on January 6th,” alt-right grifter Nick Fuentes said on X.

An X account alleging to be incarcerated January 6er Jake Lang wrote angrily, “The J6 Hostages families have been CRUSHED by the mixed messaging coming from the White House on the J6 Pardon Process recently. WE ARE UTTERLY CONFUSED!!”

Vance later tried to walk back his comments. “I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial,” he wrote on X. 

Vance’s statement was much softer than Trump’s, who has recently reaffirmed that he was looking at “major pardons” for insurrectionists even if they were charged with violent offenses. 

Over 1,200 people have been charged for their actions on January 6, according to the Department of Justice. Of that number, 120 people were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer, while 11 were charged with assaulting a member of the media. Approximately 140 police officers were injured.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s phony science is starting to piss off people actually in the business of weather.

On Sunday, the renowned conspiracy theorist claimed that manufacturing rain would be the obvious solution to ending the devastating Los Angeles blaze that has so far killed 24 people and burned more than double the acreage of Manhattan.

“Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?” Greene wrote on X. “They know how to do it.”

Cloud seeding involves releasing aerosols, such as silver iodide particles, into clouds to encourage more rain or to change the type of precipitation into hail or snow, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 wants to gut. (That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions, which would include national weather alert systems for emergencies including flash flooding, extreme heat, wildfires, and earthquakes.)

But Greene’s antidote to the inferno totally misunderstands the advanced weather modification practice, which is completely dependent on preexisting moisture in the air as well as nearby storms to seed. It also misses the fact that California is in the middle of a historic drought, which impedes the presence of either of those things.

“Please keep politicians away from weather,” Bryce Jones, a meteorologist with WDRB News in Louisville, Kentucky, posted on X. “And keep politics entirely out of it. This is exhausting.”

It’s not the first time Greene has cooked up some unorthodox ideas about California’s wildfires. In a 2018 Facebook post (two years before she took office), Greene linked alleged sightings of “lasers or blue beams of light” to the cause of the Golden State’s fires. She then, apropos of nothing, further tied those sightings to the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family often targeted by antisemitic conspiracies, who she believed were clearing the land for rail stations.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is going for the jugular on Elon Musk.

In an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published Wednesday, Bannon lambasted the world’s richest man as a “truly evil guy” who would be out of Trumpworld by Inauguration Day.

“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time [Donald Trump is] inaugurated,” Bannon told the paper. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon continued. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

Bannon was himself, at one point, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe. He served as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight. Bannon has been developing his ire against Musk since he finished a four-month stint in the clink in October for a contempt conviction.

It is currently unclear what formal role, if any, Bannon will hold in Trump’s new administration. But despite his fall from grace, Bannon has continued to posit his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur similarly assumed he’d continue to wield power under a future Trump administration, promising to slam MSNBC with “prosecutions and accountability” for reporting that Trump lost the 2020 election.

At the heart of Bannon’s rift with Musk is the Tesla CEO’s staunch defense of the H-1B visa work program, which Musk has insisted serves as a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor.

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon told Corriere della Sera, slamming Musk as a “techno-feudalist.”

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,” Bannon said. “His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on.”

Bannon also took a jab at Musk’s heritage, questioning why a white South African—whom he described as the “most racist people on earth”—would be allowed to have any role of authority on “what goes on in the United States.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso wants to use the relief for those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles County as an opportunity to reform liberal policies in California.

During an interview Sunday on CBS News, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed the Wyoming Republican on whether he thought Republicans were at all interested in helping those who had lost their homes, businesses, and belongings, despite the fact they live in a liberal state.

“Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don’t like their local politics in the party?” Brennan asked.

“I expect that 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,” Barrasso replied.

Barrasso claimed that the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” though did not explain what policies specifically he was talking about. It’s not entirely clear what liberal policies would have contributed to the widespread devastation, only that the fast-moving fire quickly depleted the water reserves in the Pacific Palisades.

But Barrasso has a loose grip on liberal policies anyway: He once baselessly claimed that the Green New Deal would ban livestock, marking an end to cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

Last week, MAGA Representative Warren Davidson said that he didn’t see how congressional Republicans could possibly support aid to struggling Californians without enforcing some of their own policy changes.

Ukraine is offering to send firefighters to Southern California after Donald Trump Jr. accused the Los Angeles Fire Department of donating supplies to the country during its war with Russia. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that the country is ready to send 150 firefighters for relief efforts after Trump Jr. complained last week on X about supplies being sent to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Zelenskiy responded with an X post of his own, saying in a video that he “instructed Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and our diplomats to prepare for the possible participation of our rescuers in combating the wildfires in California.”

Ukraine isn’t the only country to offer its support to fight wildfires in Southern California. Canada, despite being repeatedly criticized and trolled by President-elect Donald Trump, has sent firefighters and firefighting equipment to the region. Mexico, another target of Trump, has also sent firefighters and equipment to Southern California, even as Trump searches for reasons to shut down the southern U.S. border.

It might be surprising that Southern California is receiving foreign aid. But these wildfires are among the worst in American history, and at the federal level, Republicans are reluctant to send more aid.

Republican congressmen have threatened to condition federal aid on the Democratic-run state changing its policies, perhaps forgetting that Democrats under President Biden did not make any such demand on the red states of South Carolina and Florida during Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. Republicans have also proposed making dangerous government cuts that would severely hurt relief efforts.  

Trump and his right-wing benefactor Elon Musk are using the wildfires to score cheap political points against Democrats, specifically California Governor Gavin Newsom. The right has refused to acknowledge that climate change has anything to do with the disaster, instead coming up with racist explanations for the fire. Meanwhile, Southern California has to take aid from whoever is offering, including countries at war.

Wannabe crusader, accused sexual predator, and rampant misogynist Pete Hegseth is also a Confederate apologist.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary called the removal of Confederate names on military bases a “sham,” “garbage,” and “crap” in media engagements from 2021 to 2024, according to CNN. He continued this rhetoric in his War on Warriors book tour last year.

“We should change it back, by the way,” he said of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty—which used to be Fort Bragg—on the Everyday Warrior podcast last summer. “We should change it back. We should change it back. We should change it back, because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.” 

The fort’s namesake, Braxton Bragg, was an often-defeated Confederate civil war general who enslaved 105 Black Americans on his sugar plantation in Louisiana.

Hegseth could lobby to change Fort Liberty and other fort names back to their old Confederate ones if appointed defense secretary, although he’d need congressional support to do it. 

This is one of many reasons that Hegseth thinks the military is too “woke.” In The War on Warriors, he complains that the military is anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

 Hegseth’s confirmation hearings begin on Tuesday.

Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Keith Kellogg told Fox News that the Russia-Ukraine war would come to a “solvable solution in the near term.” 

“You know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level and professional level. I would say, let’s set it at 100 days and move it all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends,” Kellogg said.

A “near term” timeline is a marked difference from Trump’s bravado on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly bragged that he could end the war in a day or even sooner. Trump himself seems to realize this, telling Time magazine last month that “the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin has also thrown cold water on Trump’s promises, ignoring the president-elect’s “warnings.”   

Trump is probably going to backtrack on many of his campaign promises, with his supporters in for a rude awakening. The question is whether anyone will call him on it—and if there will be any consequences. 

The incoming Trump administration is instituting loyalty tests for longtime bureaucrats.

Specialists at the National Security Council have been getting questioned by incoming Trump officials about who they voted for in November, who they’ve donated to, and what they’ve posted on social media, an official close to the situation told the Associated Press. These nonpolitical NSC employees were initially told they’d be asked to stay on with the new administration.  

Some of them have quit in response. This seems to be exactly what the Trump team wants.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Trump’s national security adviser nominee Mike Waltz told Breitbart News last week. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Waltz continued, stating that “the folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

A mass resignation of national security experts may not bode well for everyday operations at the National Security Council, especially as the new administration takes on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The Trump Organization has opened its doors for business—with foreign private companies.

In a departure from Donald Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s company released a new ethics agreement Friday that no longer prohibits deals with foreign companies while he is president. The Trump Organization has already reached development agreements for hotels and golf courses in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s looking to make even more with Israel, hoping to look at properties to build luxury hotels in the country when its brutal war in Gaza ends.

“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” ethics professor Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told the Associated Press.

Anyone who wants to be in Trump’s good graces can simply give his business lavish amounts of money. Trump is telling the international business world that he can indeed be bought. The Trump family is also trying to reclaim the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a doubly corrupt institution in which six different governments spent more than $750,000 in his first term.