Things got exceedingly entertaining in the wake of the Los Angeles Mayoral debate, as during it conservative candidate Spencer Pratt clashed with Mayor Karen Bass over the lies that Mayor Bass was telling about the wildfires, exposing the reality that her mismanagement rather than natural conditions led to the disaster.
But what made it truly exceptional was how Bass tried doubling down on lies, and Porter tried backing her up, leading to a furious fight over whether Pratt or Bass was telling the truth. CBS News tried to aid the Democrats by fact-checking him, but ended up having to admit that Pratt was near-entirely correct.
In the exchange that led to the fact-check attempt, Pratt declared, “A lot of people talk about climate change and hurricane-force winds. The winds in the Pacific Palisades never reached higher than 40 mph. For those first six hours, they didn’t go above 27 miles per hour. The whole point of this exchange is that Bass is running around blaming the fire on Climate Change.”
Bass tried to push back on that, insisting that the wind was to blame for the disaster, “He talked about the winds — that is just completely inaccurate. If that were accurate, then the planes would have been able to fly. And so if the winds reached close to 100 miles an hour and the planes were unable to fly.”
Pratt fired back, noting that Mayor Bass was just lying about what had happened. Yes, she mentioned me. So this is — she’s an incredible liar. Everyone on their phones, Google it. 40 weather stations in the Pacific Palisades. It never went above 40 miles per hour. She is referencing the Altadena fire.
The leftist moderator of the debate then chimed in and insisted that Pratt refrain from “name-calling,” saying, “I have to interrupt you. No name-calling, please.” Shooting back, Pratt snapped that she had just lied, saying, “Yeah, but no name calling? She just lied though… No more lying. We need the truth.”
Watch their bickering here:
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Entertainingly, CBS News then fact-checked the viral moment, saying, “Weather modeling reviewed for my reporting shows winds in the Palisades during those first several hours of the fire were, in fact under 40 miles per hour. Planes could and did fly. Stronger winds intensified later in the evening. And that distinction matters because the earliest hours of a wildfire are often the most critical for containment.”
That wasn’t all. Later on, Mayor Bass claimed that her trip to Africa as the fire raged “didn’t matter,” which CBS News also fact-checked, saying, “My reporting found Mayor Bass knew about dangerous weather before leaving for Ghana. Communications to emergency managers described her as only being ‘out-of-state.’ And while she was overseas, her office continued posting on social media images and videos that appeared to place her in Los Angeles [and] the lack of clarity [regarding her whereabouts] created confusion during the opening hours of the fire. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley did not initially know the mayor was even in Ghana.”
The fact-checker added, “And… after Bass was briefed by the chief on the growing fire, she still attended a cocktail reception in Ghana and did not respond for more than an hour to messages from Los Angeles officials asking for help during that critical stretch of the fire’s expansion.”
Watch him here: