Khloe Kardashian is facing backlash for criticizing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass amid the forest fires that are currently ravaging Southern California.
The reality star and her famous family got called out after Kardashian posted on her Instagram story Friday to voice her support for Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, who has been outspoken about how the city’s budget cuts for 2024-2025 left her teams struggling to respond to the crisis effectively.
Included in those cuts were $17 million from the fire department. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, the department’s operating budget had actually increased once additional funds were approved later in 2024, raising its annual budget by more than $50 million when compared to its 2023-2024 budget.
“I stand by YOU Chief Crowley!!!!” Kardashian wrote atop a screenshot of an interview between Crowley and Fox 11 Los Angeles. “You spoke the truth and you had tears in your eyes because I can tell you didn’t even want to say that but it was THE TRUTH.”
“Thank you for being honest,” she added. “Mayor Bass, you are a joke!!!!”
While Kardashian was among the many rightfully upset about the fire department’s lack of resources, people online were swift to remind the star of her family’s poor track record with conserving water.
During a brutal drought in 2022, her sisters, Kourtney and Kim Kardashian, were both caught disregarding LA’s strict water conservation measures at their homes near Calabasas, California.
Though residents were ordered to cut back on tending to their gardens and filling their pools in order to save water for emergencies, like wildfires, public records detailed by the Times found that the two eldest Kardashian sisters regularly exceeded their monthly water allotment by more than 150%.
In June 2022 alone, Kim Kardashian’s home went a whopping 232,000 gallons over its water budget, while Kourtney Kardashian’s house exceeded its limit by about 101,000 gallons.
Though Khloe Kardashian was not directly named in the Times’ story, that didn’t dampen people’s anger at the social media star online.
In response to a post on X, formally called Twitter, where Kardashian thanked firefighters, someone replied with a screenshot of a 2022 Rolling Stone story titled, “Kardashians Among L.A.’s Worst Water Wasters.”
“This you?” the person wrote. “Sit down and stay seated.”
Another comment came under an X post from the celebrity news account Pop Crave, where someone called the Kardashians part of “the reason the city has no water for the common people but have the nerve to criticize the mayor smh.”
However, some came to Kardashian’s defense, contending that while the Kardashians are “out of touch,” criticism toward Bass was fully warranted.
As of Monday, Southern California authorities had confirmed that at least 25 people had been killed in the fires.
While firefighters have begun to contain major fires around Los Angeles neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the National Weather Service warned that high wind forecasts for Tuesday and Wednesday have put the city in a “particularly dangerous situation,” which may see the natural disaster flare up once more.
“We are not in the clear as of yet, and we must not let our guard down,” Crowley said during a Monday news conference.
See more reactions to Kardashian’s comments below:
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