Anything to keep the realities of climate change from spreading.

There is nothing political about the wildfires that have annihilated thousands of buildings around Los Angeles this week, with two exceptions.

The first is that California and Los Angeles are run by leaders from the Democratic Party, meaning that anything bad that happens in those places happened on their watch.

The second is that the conflagrations are in part a function of an unusually hot, dry period in the region — precisely the sort of extreme that scientists who study climate change expect to be more common as the world warms. The world was probably warmer during 2024 than it has been at any point in recorded history. There’s no real question that climate change contributed to what’s happening in Los Angeles.

Over the past two decades, though, climate change has gone from a peripheral concern of scientists to a global problem to an issue that’s viewed through the lens of political partisanship. Taking action to combat climate change enjoyed a brief moment of bipartisan support, a unity that collapsed as Republican politicians leaned into rhetoric (stoked by fossil fuel companies) that downplayed the risk and accused the left of seeking to restrict American freedom rather than carbon dioxide emissions.

The result by this point is that any declaration that the various examples of climate-change-linked disasters as being climate-change-linked is seen as a left-wing talking point. So the right, across its mouthpiece television channels and social media bubble, lines up for partisan warfare.

As is nearly always the case at this point, President-elect Donald Trump led the charge. In multiple social media posts, he accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — a longtime Republican foil — of having failed to prevent or control the fires. He accused Newsom of declining to sign a “water restoration declaration” aimed at diverting water from Northern to Southern California. He said that there was “no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes,” presumably meaning “or” rather than “not.”

That line about the hydrants is, like many of the attacks that have unfolded over the past 24 hours, rooted in something real. Hydrants near some of the blazes that are ripping through neighborhoods around the city have failed to produce water. On CNN, an official with the Los Angeles Fire Department explained that this was because so much water had been pulled from local reservoirs that were intended to battle house fires, not wildfires. Other experts have noted that high demand can cause pressure in the system of hydrants to drop, making it harder to extract the water.

But this is a political fight, not a debate over resources and systems. So Trump and his allies cherry-pick things that are unrelated to the struggle to contain the flames and present them as the real reasons that houses are burning down, particularly if those unrelated things serve as indictments of other perceived elements of left-wing politics.

We should begin by noting that most of the criticisms — about the hydrants or water diversion or the LAFD itself — have nothing to do with why the fires erupted and spread so quickly. Instead, hurricane-force Santa Ana winds quickly spread small fires across areas that were unusually dry. Wildfires have long been a challenge in California; what’s unfolding in Los Angeles is an overlap of factors that increase the risks of wildfires spreading.

So when actor James Woods, a prominent voice on right-wing social media, declares that the fires are because of “liberal idiots like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass,” saying one of them “doesn’t understand the first thing about fire management and the other can’t fill the water reservoirs,” he is incorrect. For example — and in contrast to Trump’s claim about diverting water from Northern California that was aimed at agriculture, not firefighting — reservoirs in Southern California are at or above historic levels. That’s good news for firefighting aircraft that need the water to douse flames, except that those high winds prevented them from flying for several hours.

It doesn’t matter, either, that Trump complained to Joe Rogan about California’s wildfires shortly before the election. He made the same claims about water that he did this week (and that he has for years now). He also reiterated claims about the need to engage in the herculean task of raking dry leaves out of forests — claims that are irrelevant to fires that have destroyed tightly packed residential areas.

It is also not the case that the LAFD was hampered by having donated a small amount of material to the country of Ukraine three years ago. Donald Trump Jr. shared this story with a harrumph, given that it sloppily loops another left-coded political issue into the fire discussion. But news reports about what was contributed make clear that it was a smattering of surplus gear and that not much was sent.

It’s not the case that LAFD “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” as Trump aide Elon Musk wrote on Wednesday. “DEI,” which stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” is a recent target of the right. Referring to programs aimed at ensuring diverse representation within organizations, it has become a shorthand for the idea, popular on the pro-Trump right, that White people are being disadvantaged and discriminated against. By now, declarations like Musk’s — that non-White hires are necessarily less competent — somehow land without raising eyebrows.

A photograph showing LAFD Chief Kristin M. Crowley alongside two other women was lifted up by prominent right-wing voices, including on Fox News, as evidence that the department’s leadership was all women — and therefore a function of diversity efforts.

Crowley worked her way over the ranks for the past 22 years, as her official biography explains. Most of the leaders of the LAFD, meanwhile, are men.

None of this has anything to do with the point. It is not the case that a small fire began in the hills above Los Angeles and a recently hired, incompetent firefighter was standing there spending 45 minutes trying to figure out how to work the hydrant — her wrench having been dispatched to Kyiv — before discovering that the only thing it produced was a note reading, “Thanks for the water. — San Francisco.” The hills were hot and dry and the winds were fierce and a small fire became multiple big ones very, very quickly.

That reality isn’t going to get you many shares on social media or keep your cable news audience angry at your enemies, though. So the eye-rolling about “climate change” — here we go again! — becomes an effort for other explanations, however disconnected. It’s 2020 election denialism wearing a different outfit.

Meanwhile, at least five people have died in the fires.