Is the Los Angeles Firefighters Union suing California Gov. Gavin Newsom for "dereliction of duty" by refusing requests for water to be turned on during fires in 2025? No, that's not true: The post spreading that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer and a warning that all the contents of the page are fabricated. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content. There is no evidence that it is real.
The claim originated as a post (archived here) published by the America's Last Line Of Defense Facebook page on July 27, 2025. The caption above a photo of Newsom at the scene of the Palisades fires read:
The Los Angeles Firefighters Union is suing Gavin Newsom for $400 million for "dereliction of duty during a crisis."The suit claims that the LAFD repeatedly requested that the water be turned on during the fires earlier this year, but the governor refused.It also states that the department's trucks were forbidden from siphoning water from the ocean to battle coastal blazes because of the damage it might do to marine wildlife.'He failed the City of Los Angeles and the State of California.'
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jul 29 15:32:43 2025 UTC)
There is no evidence that the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City is suing Gov. Newsom or anyone else related to the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles. A search of the union's news webpage found no references to a lawsuit (archived here) or any mention of Newsom (archived here.)
A Google search for "firefighters lawsuit newsom los angeles" found no references other than the satire post making the claim.
The account that shared the post is the creation of Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal from Maine, who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. He uses the nickname "Busta Troll." A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by foreign website networks trying to make money by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
