Michael Baxter, Real Raw News, Feb. 9, 2025
Were it not for President Trump and the U.S. military, California would still be burning uncontrollably.
When President Trump ordered the military and Army Corps of Engineers to enter California and release two billion gallons of water from two reservoirs in the Siera Nevada foothills, the Golden State’s principal leadership—a Gavin Newsom clone and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass—vowed to keep the valves padlocked.
Part of the state was afire, burning wildly. Five fires encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres had scorched homes and businesses and sent residents scrambling for safer ground. Firefighters assiduously trying to control the inferno met problem after problem. When they hooked their hoses to hydrants, no water flowed.
The state had restrictively attenuated the flow from Sierra Nevada to southern California to protect a fish–the delta smelt. Combatting the unstoppable inferno meant diverting water away from a river confluence and home to the smelt. The Palisades were being razed, and firefighters were unable to do their jobs, but the state’s governing bodies were adamant about protecting the endangered fish.
President Trump, a philanthropic humanitarian, stopped the woke insanity by instructing the Army Corps of Engineers—whose workforce of 37,000 civilian and military personnel performs military and civil construction across the nation—to discharge water from the Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success.
Upon arriving at the dams, though, USACE encountered resistance. California Department of Water Resources officials and hostiles from the California National Guard’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team were at both sites with orders, allegedly, to repel USACE and defend the state’s precious water.
They were entrenched around the reservoirs and had erected barricades near the switches and valves that opened and closed the penstocks. At Terminus Dam, state officials, flanked by armed Guardsmen, told a USACE civil engineer that President Trump had no authority over the state’s H20 usage.
Moreover, officials said releasing the water would be futile because neither reservoir serviced the greater Los Angeles area. Each side accused the other of lying, and when USACE asserted its sovereignty [over] the reservoirs, insisting they were federal property, National Guardsmen raised rifles defiantly and said, “We’ll see about that.”
Stalemates arose at both locations; negotiation seemed impossible.
The deadlock was broken several hours later when U.S. Marine expeditionary forces reached the reservoirs and said they had been authorized to use “deadly force” against anyone acting in contravention of Donald J. Trump’s orders.
A source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News that USACE had informed the White House about the state interlopers.
“When President Trump got the news, he couldn’t believe Guardsmen would kill to protect a worthless fish. Army Corps of Engineers is just that, engineers. They ain’t trained to fight—they build bridges. Well, the President felt a countervailing force was needed to defuse the problem before any engineers got hurt,” our source said.
The 11th and 15th Marine Expeditionary Units comprised that neutralizing force.
They had departed Camp Pendleton and 29 Palms aboard OV-22 Ospreys and UC-12W Hurons, a military refit of the civilian Beechcraft Super King Air twin-engine turboprop. The Marines deboarded the VTOL Ospreys as they hovered feet above the ground on the south shore of Lake Kaweah, while the UC-12W Hurons had to land in Fresno, 40 miles north, where the Marines “appropriated” vehicles for the drive south.
Meanwhile, the Marines at Kaweah admonished the Guardsmen for disobeying the President and told their highest-ranking officer, a fresh-faced, incredibly green, and jittery 2nd lieutenant, that Marine reinforcements were en route and that if blood were spilled, it would not be Marine blood.
The Marines’ presence gave the Guardsmen and state water officials a moment of pause, as they must have realized they stood no reasonable chance of emerging from a gunfight victorious. Ultimately, they capitulated to Trump’s directives, allowing unfettered access to the dam.
Soon after, billions of gallons of beautiful, clean water replenished the dry fire hydrants so frustrated, beleaguered firefighters could battle the burning blaze, mitigating further destruction.
President Trump would later say, “The water is flowing in California,” adding that the water was “heading to farmers throughout the State and to Los Angeles.”
