As wildfires raged out of control across the Los Angeles area on Wednesday, consuming over 28,000 acres of land, destroying thousands of homes and buildings including entire neighborhoods, and causing the deaths of at least five people, President-elect Donald Trump, his MAGA acolytes, right-wing commentators, conservative news outlets, and far-right conspiracists all laid the blame not on climate change or on eight months without rain, but on wokeism.

Trump—who supports vastly expanding the extraction and use of fossil fuels, which scientific consensus directly connects to the increasing prevalence of extreme weather events—used the unfolding tragedy to attack his long-time nemesis, California governor Gavin Newsom. He claimed that the Democrat’s embrace of environmental issues was to blame for the inability of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) to contain what is already the worst fire in California’s history.

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”

The governor’s press office issued a statement Wednesday slamming Trump’s comment and pointing out that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction.”

Democrats’ embrace of so-called woke policies has become an all-purpose bogeyman for the right in recent years. As in previous generations they blamed political correctness and affirmative action for various problems, after major events like the