For some, the Los Angeles wildfires that consumed thousands of homes were due to a perfect storm of hurricane-force winds, drought and overdevelopment.
For others, it was the fault of the gay firefighters.
“They are all lesbians named Kristin,” a conservative provocateur close to Donald Trump once said, referring to a number of officials, including Kristina Crowley, the fire chief who has spent decades fighting fires across the region.
Angry residents are rightly raising questions about how parts of their city It turned to ashes in a matter of hours..
and there is there is no lack of answers.
The search for blame has quickly become an all-encompassing dispute between Democrats and Republicans, left and right. melted fish to “awaken” diversity policies.
Several figures in the orbit of the president-elect have stated that the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was more focused on inclusion schemes than on its basic task of tackling fires.
“DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) means people DIE,” Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire and Trump ally, wrote on his X social media platform.
“They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” he added in a later post.
To date, about 16 people have died, a number that is expected to rise as another 16 are missing and cadaver dogs continue to dig through destroyed neighborhoods.
Crowley’s biography on the LAFD website notes his commitment to “promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion and equity,” which has given rise to his critics.
At the same time, there is no evidence that this is an unqualified diversity hire. The same biography notes that he worked for 22 years in the fire department, including as a firefighter, paramedic and engineer.
Crowley also appears to have been one of the few figures to raise the alarm about the impact the city’s budget cuts would have on his team’s ability to fight wildfires.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is contemplating a future run for the White House, has also been criticized for his response. He claims misinformation has gotten so bad that he has created a fact-checking website to give the public access to “fact-based data.”
Trump, just days before returning to the White House, has become one of Newsom’s arch critics since the fires broke out on Tuesday.
“One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning to the ground. They are ashes and Gavin Newscum should resign. “This is all his fault,” the president-elect said this week.
In an intervention that apparently baffled the governor, he accused Newsom of allowing fires to rage unchecked to protect an endangered species of fish.
As Trump told it, the Democrat diverted water from the northern part of the state because “he wanted to protect an essentially useless fish called smelt by giving it less water (it didn’t work!).”

As firefighters attempted to put out fires ravaging neighborhoods this week, there were multiple reports of fire hydrants are drying.
But while Newsom has previously opposed efforts to redirect more water to Southern California, experts and officials have downplayed claims that the policy had left Los Angeles at the mercy of the flames.
They say the speed with which the fires spread through the city, destroying hundreds of homes simultaneously, meant that the municipal system could not pump water fast enough to meet the needs of firefighters.
Peter Kay, 40, who works in real estate, described the governor as “incompetent” and echoed Trump’s claims that he prioritized a fish over Los Angeles residents.
Kay told The Telegraph: “He is a narcissist. He’s just a horrible, horrible, horrible governor. “He hasn’t done anything good for any Californian.”
Denis Mahgerefter, 46, a business owner in the same Woodland Hills neighborhood, asked, “Is human life or fish life more important?”
Newsom, in turn, has accused the president-elect of threatening to withhold aid from emergency workers in California unless they follow his “orders.”
In a podcast episode released Saturday, he criticized the “finger-pointing” culture that has emerged in the wake of the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, before pointing the finger at unnamed officials.
He claimed he was receiving “different answers” from local leaders about the situation on the ground as bushfires raged through the region, adding: “When you start getting different answers, then I don’t understand the real story.”

However, the person who has borne the brunt of public anger over Los Angeles’ response to the wildfires is Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.
Mrs. Crowley, her own fire chief, told a reporter on Friday that she had let the fire department down by cutting its budget when tensions between the two women came to light.
Mrs. Crowley claimed that the LAFD had been “crying out for adequate funding…so that we can serve the community,” arguing that its staff should have been doubled and that dozens of new fire stations needed to be built.
In a December memo, he warned the mayor $17.6 million budget cut “It severely limited the department’s ability to prepare, train and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
Los Angeles’s messy response to the fires seems to confirm that warning.


In a sign of the political dysfunction that has engulfed city leaders, Bass summoned Crowley to his office on Friday, where the fire chief, according to the Daily Mail, she assumed she would be fired.
A source close to the fire department told the newspaper that Bass may have realized at the last minute that it would be “suicide” to fire the figure who coordinated the response to the wildfires.
It now appears likely that the mayor and city officials will face a class-action lawsuit from angry residents when the fires, already estimated to have caused some $150 billion in damage, are finally extinguished.
Shelley Sykes, whose son, disabled former child star Rory Sykes, died at home when she was unable to call emergency services, has said she intends to take legal action.
Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, has said she intends to sue the state of California for alleged negligence when her multimillion-dollar home burned to the ground in the Pacific Palisades wildfire.
The wildfires appear unlikely to spur a resurgence of the Republican Party in California, which has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.
But the damage inflicted on senior Democrats, particularly Newsom and Bass, appears serious, perhaps terminal.
Newsom, a second-term governor, cannot seek re-election in 2026, but the wildfires will tarnish his brand ahead of a possible presidential bid in 2028.
And although New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin won another term in office in 2006 despite the devastation inflicted on the city by Hurricane Katrina, the botched federal response gave him a boost.
Mrs. Bass, more than anyone, has also found the finger of blame pointed directly at her.
For now, Los Angeles residents will be rummaging through their dilapidated homes, worrying about the fate of their friends and neighbors, and filing insurance claims.
But soon, their attention will turn to finding out who exactly is to blame for the wildfires that devastated their lives. As the political circus moves forward, they may finally get some answers.