As a Dog Returns to Its Vomit

The permission structures keep activating, even as they undermine the people who activate them. The automaticity and predictability of the performance suggest the degree to which years of practice have embedded the practice of narrative policing in the media, through a kind of muscle memory.

Here’s why the moment is so surprising: The news media, especially but not invariably the local news media, have been astonishingly sharp during the Los Angeles fires. The Los Angeles Times reported that the reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty as the neighborhood burned. A local reporter told Mayor Karen Bass, face-to-face, that he was in the Palisades with his crew for hours, watching hundreds of houses burn without ever seeing a single firefighter. TV news crews flew over a city maintenance yard full of unrepaired fire engines — video below — then found city memoranda detailing budget reductions that led to the loss of fire department mechanics.

Journalists are now interviewing people who say they called 911 about the start of the Palisades fire for 45 minutes before they saw anyone fighting it. A crew from KNBC interviewed a man in Altadena who spent days fighting spot fires on and around his home, using buckets of pool water to keep the house from burning. The fire started on Tuesday, the man said, and “there wasn’t a fireman ‘til Friday.”¹ CNN, no less, broadcast an interview with a Los Angeles fire captain who broke down in tears as he slammed the failure of the city to prepare for a serious wildfire.

Flatly, the media is doing its job. On and on, in a damning flood of serious information. I’m surprised to say it, but they’re on it.

And yet. And yet.

You can read this fact-checking garbage here, a pathetic grab bag of idiotic strawmen: “State water distribution choices were not behind the hydrant problems, they said, nor was a lack of overall supply in the region.” The local reservoir was empty, so the “news” says that no, the regional supply of statewide water wasn’t diminished. We’re back to the normal bag of tricks, starting with the one in which the claim is changed so it can be fake-debunked.

1. Was the local reservoir empty?

2. Stop lying, the state has plenty of water!

Governor Gavin Newsom, whose performance looks increasingly sociopathic and shameless, made the same narrative pivot, responding to the empty local reservoir by saying in a television interview that it’s a filthy lie California could have instantly transferred water from reservoirs in Northern California to fight the fire. The maneuver of answering a question that wasn’t asked, to address a criticism that wasn’t made, while pretending to be really angry about the strawman: Gavin Newsom 101.

In an example of a narrative pivot that changes the target and hollows out a valid argument, someone posted viral video on social media that showed Los Angeles firefighters using what looked like purses to carry water between a fire engine and a fire (this is a screenshot; click the link to play the video):

But, as a community note says on X, the LAFD carries bags to put water on small fires so they can spare the trouble of pulling a hose when only a little water is needed. But people who posted this were asking if firefighters had the resources they needed, a question much on the minds of everyone in Los Angeles today. Watch KNBC and a gibbering halfwit elected official change the subject:

Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes the Palisades fire, said misinformation is demoralizing for firefighters.

“When they hear that there’s a suspicion that they didn’t put their best foot forward, that they weren’t at their best, that they weren’t excellent in terms of the service that they deliver, of course that’s crushing,” she said.

If you wonder whether firefighters are getting the resources they need to do their job, you’re attacking firefighters. Was the fire department given inadequate resources in an emergency? Ohh, why are you saying that they didn’t put their best foot forward?

Watch for this story. You’re going to see more of it.

1. Mayor, did you cut the fire department budget too much?

2. Stop attacking our brave firefighters!

The “misinformation” game is ramping up aggressively, even as the very same media organizations tear into the obvious failures of California institutions during the fires.

Bizarrely, the news media is going to report with increasing urgency that criticisms of officials are conspiracy theories and misinformation — as the same media organizations report with growing clarity and seriousness on the failures of state and local officials.

Finally, the comedian Bill Burr sat down with Jimmy Kimmel — apparently last night, not that I was watching — to say, where have we heard this before, that government did an excellent job during the fires, and all criticism of government is crazy babbling from fools on the Internet who lack the credentials to be experts in fighting wildfires:

Credentialism, argument from authority, strawmanning, conflation of process and outcomes. The Covid maneuvers, still alive like a vampire, as 12,000 homes are destroyed, whole communities are wiped off the face of the earth, and who the hell are you to doubt the experts? do YoU eVeN hAvE a deGrEe iN fIRe sCIenCe, YOU MORON?

We hardened these old cultural habits during the pandemic, and they’ll be a long time in dying. But this story about unquestionable experts becomes a little more pathetic each time it’s told. Watch this, and think about the story that you can’t question the authorities, who did an excellent job:

1. In a moment I’ve already described a bit here, I personally used buckets of pool water to cool hot spots next to a friend’s ruined house in Altadena, with his detached garage and a neighboring house still standing, in a neighborhood where homes were still burning and there was no fire department presence. What this man is describing: I saw this, and did this.