Increasingly, we’re seeing events that in the past would have stirred public sympathy being transformed into vehicles for politicized spite. This can’t end well.
Last month, it was the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which was a little unusual in that most of the spite was spontaneous. That wasn’t the case this month when a well-oiled internet machine dedicated to the manufacture of spite was up and running as soon as the flames started rolling down the hills of Los Angeles.
“For just $19 a month, your donation will help a celebrity in need,” goes a meme picturing Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson. “Before you let celebrities ask you for help and donations for rebuilding Hollywood, remember the people in Asheville, N.C., right now who are sleeping in tents and campers in this cold weather. It speaks for itself,” goes another. When exactly the same words are repeated over and over on social media, it also speaks for an organized effort to turn one group’s misfortune into the target for another group’s grievances.
In addition to about $2 billion in federal disaster aid, which was already committed to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, Congress has approved $1.65 in block grants to the state, with a big chunk for Asheville. It’s true that in some isolated areas where property owners have declined to leave, they’re living in tents, but they’ve chosen to do so. So despite the AI-generated little boy holding up the “Don’t Forget NC” sign, the government hasn’t. Meanwhile the fires are still burning in Los Angeles, and the winds are forecast to pick up again.
It doesn’t help that President-elect Donald Trump is at the same time taking shots at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, but that open political warfare seems less insidious than using misery to pit one part of the country against the other.
The scope of the damage from these fires is already historic, and the scary thing is that it is by no means the wind-swept fires have done their worst. If an atomic weapon had leveled an urban area the size of San Francisco, Miami or Boston in a surprise attack, the effect on the stock market would have been immediate. It’s slower in this case, but this will still be an enormous hit to the entire national economy.
That it comes so close to the change in administration obviously adds to the suspense hanging over a recovery, the size of which we can only guess. As Trump’s inauguration nears, firefighting units from Mexico and Canada have joined the effort to fight the fires. You can’t hold it against the residents of Los Angeles for welcoming their help, however you voted.
Both the Los Angeles fires and Hurricane Helene have been linked to climate change, but that connection hasn’t made it down to the spite level. This could be an ominous warning. In a future dominated by natural disasters, pitting one disaster area against another could prove to be a grim but effective political strategy of evasion; in a future dominated by natural disasters, nobody can do anything about it.
There are a lot of land and water use issues that are specific to California, but the effect of the fires on property insurance rates nationally could be dramatic. This is an immediate problem in California and Florida, and a ticking time bomb everywhere else. While we’re remembering North Carolina and the victims of Helene, let’s not forget that something like this was never expected to happen in a place like that.
In their dazed interviews over the past several days, you can hear one Angelino after another saying pretty much the same thing.
