Truthdig
The Mainstream Media Is Lying About the California Fires
Firefighter Jose Corona sprays water as flames from the Camp Fire consume a
home in Magalia, Calif., on Nov. 9. (Noah Berger / AP)
I dont like accurately predicting the future. But it happens to me
sometimes. And its never a good thing.
Not once have I predicted that I would stumble upon a great sum of money or
that a friendly squirrel would mysteriously leave a fresh, delicious scone
on my windowsill. No, the things Ive said that have come true years later
have always been utterly awful. And the latest one has to do with
California.
This week, Donald Trump has continued to blame the horrific fires in
California on forest mismanagementbasically saying that if the parks
service had just raked up a few more dry leaves, then countless people,
homes and buildings would not have been incinerated. I unintentionally
predicted this kind of idiocy. I said something similar in a 2011 stand-up
comedy album titled Chaos For The Weary.
To paraphrase, I said, You notice no matter how close they say the major
effects of global warming are, it doesnt change how we all behave.
Soon
theyll be saying, People in California are ON FIRE! and everyone will be
like, They probably live in a very fiery area. Theyre probably storing dry
stuff in their homeslike old magazines and elderly people.
And sure enough, here we are. People in California are on fire, and the
president is saying its because they stored too many dry pine needles
around their homes. Trump is able to do this because most of the mainstream
media are allowing him to fill a voida void that represents the answer to
these questions: Why is this happening? Why is our nation turning into one
of the lower circles of hell?
Dont get me wrongthe corporate media have extensively covered that
California is ON FIRE. They have. They just cant bring themselves to say
the words climate change very often. No. It gets caught in their throat
like a dry falafel puck. They look like they want to say it but just
cantlike a dog that wants to tell you it has a thorn in its paw. But its
just impossible.
Take, for example, NBC Nightly News. You cant get a finer news program
anywhere (in the building where they tape). I watched a full six-minute
segment last week covering multiple California fires, the destruction, the
loss of life; they even had reporters on the ground. And yet throughout the
entire report, they never uttered the words climate change, global
warming or even simply, We are fucked. Instead, they made it sound like
fires are a tragic yet common occurrence, and the cities will rebuild.
Never speaking the words climate change while whole towns literally go up
in flames is like covering the drowning death of someone and never
mentioning he was being waterboarded at the time. The real cause of these
fires is at least half the story, if not more.
NBC host Kate Snow did say these fires are ones for the history books, but
I guess those books are going to get shorter and shorter because 1,000-year
fires are quickly becoming 5-year fires. Saying these fires are ones for
the history books implies that 20 years from now, the children in
California will be reading about the Great fires of 2018.
But they wont.
They wont be in the history booksbecause in 20 years the history books
will be ON FIRE. And the great fires of 2018 will look like nothing but a
warm day with a piña colada. Heres an example of what I mean: A headline
from HuffPost read, Californias Wildfires This Year Have Been Breaking
RecordsThe state has experienced some of the biggest and deadliest fires in
its history this year.
Sounds pretty accurate, doesnt it? The only problem is that article is from
December 2017. LAST year. Did they go down in the history books? How often
does everyone huddle under the blankets and take turns telling scary tales
about the 2017 fires?
Acting like each years fires are a fluke that will never happen againthat
in and of itself is denying climate change. It is lying to the American
people in order to cover up that we are promoting a system based on big oil,
big factory farming and big environmental destruction. A new Media Matters
report found the mainstream media only say climate change in reports about
these recent fires 4 percent of the time.
Now, some of you may be thinking, You cant prove these fires were caused
by climate change. And youre right. I cant. But the Union of Concerned
Scientists can.
They said, The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation
levels, and soil moisture are turning many of our forests into kindling
during wildfire season. The scientists also pointed out that wildfires are
increasing and that the wildfire season is getting longer in the U.S. In
terms of forest fires over 1,000 acres in size, in the 1980s, there were
140. In the 1990s, there were 160. And from 2000 to 2012, there were 250.
And as mentioned before, 2017 was Californias worst wildfire season.
Until 2018.
So if theyre not willing to talk about the obvious causes of our pop-up
infernos, what was NBC Nightly News reporting on? Well, they spent a good
amount of time on the firefighterscorrectly informing viewers that these
men and women are heroes, and theyre putting their lives on the line to try
to save people theyve never met. Good job, NBC. You only missed one thing.
You somehow failed to say that many of the firefighters you highlighted are
PRISONERS LOCKED AWAY IN CALIFORNIAS CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM!
Estimates are that 30 percent of the states firefighters are prisoners, and
its clear from the uniforms that many of the ones NBC filmed were indeed
inmates. Sure, they volunteered for that job, but many of them are locked up
for small crimes and see no way out of the misery and hardship of prison
other than to volunteer for fire duty. Its kind of like how I
volunteered to give my wallet and shoes to that guy with a gun when he
casually noted that he liked my wallet and shoes.
Furthermore, the inmates are working as firefighters for roughly $1 per
hour.
ONE DOLLAR PER HOUR.
They get paid less than the amount of money most people are willing to bend
down to pick up if they see it in a puddle. But NONE of this is said by NBC
Nightly News even as they show video of the inmates fighting fires. This
would be like showing Nike sweatshop workers in Indonesia and saying, These
fine craftsmen are making your shoes. Oh man, do they love making shoes.
They volunteered to do it.
Are you starting to get the point? Kate Snows joblike most of those in
mainstream mediais to cover up your reality. Her job is to make you think
we live in a system that can recover from this carnage WITHOUT large-scale
changes, without a new economic paradigm that doesnt reward waste and
planned obsolescence and profiting off the lives of others. Generally
speaking, the job of mainstream corporate outlets is to ignore the harsh
reality that our endless consumption and furious appetite for fossil fuels
are burning our country, turning it into a desert wastelandand the easiest
response is to throw slave labor at the problem.
On the other hand, its the job of you and me to see through the propaganda,
through the spectacle and the bullshit, and to fight for a better world.
Maybe it will help if I predict that 20 years from now we all will have
woken up from this mass delusion and switched to a sustainable, green,
egalitarian economic system.
Its about time I had a positive prediction come true.
If youd like to hear my other latest predictions, check out my brand new
stand-up comedy special Super Patriotic Very Uncle Sam Comedy Special Not
Allowed On American TV. Its only available at LeeCampComedySpecial.com.
This column is similar to a monologue I wrote and performed on my TV show
Redacted Tonight.
Lee Camp
Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp
is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show Redacted Tonight With Lee
Camp on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for
Lee Camp
