Fact-checking suddenly looks quaint, inadequate and practically irrelevant, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• Whole realities — the supposed culprits for the LA inferno, a new MAGA map of the world, a child sex-abuse scandal ("grooming gangs") in Britain — now sweep the internet overnight.
• We no longer need fact-checkers. We need reality-checkers.

Why it matters: When President-elect Trump takes office 10 days from now, he'll be more impervious than ever to metaphysical truth — long the purview of traditional, rigorous news reporting.

Skeptics and opponents will be left shaping, and reacting to, entire worldviews and narratives that have so much momentum — and such powerful constituencies — that they become the reality that lawmakers, regulators, journalists and citizens will have to contend with.

• This is uncharted terrain. What's real? What's spin? What's outright misinformation?
• And who do you trust to make sense of it all? And what if others trust people who are untrustworthy?

🔎 Between the lines: Name the last time Democrats drove the dominant narrative on social media or even traditional media.

• You'd have to go back to before the election. In fact, in the environment that exists at this moment, it's hard to imagine who would drive it and how it would be driven.

Two real-time examples capture this new reality of the online information ecosystem: the LA fires and the British grooming scandal, narrated by Axios' Zachary Basu:

💧 1. As flames tore through Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, X became a cesspool of misinformation and anti-DEI attacks targeting LA Mayor Karen Bass and LAFD chief Kristin Crowley, who is the first woman and LGBT person in the job.

• The truth became impossible to distill: Musk's vaunted Community Notes system was like a Band-Aid on a bullet hole, as reports of water shortages — some real, some fake — exploded into partisan blame games.
• Trump quickly exploited the crisis and accused Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of refusing to sign "the water restoration declaration," which the governor's office dismissed as "pure fiction." With the fires raging and growing, Trump posted on Truth Social: "Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!" Musk quickly tweeted agreement.
• In a now-deleted tweet, Musk responded "True" to an Alex Jones post claiming the LA fires were "part of a globalist plot to wage economic warfare & deindustrialize the [United] States."

Reality check: The unprecedented fires are a natural disaster caused by fierce winds and some of the driest conditions on record for early January, likely exacerbated by climate change.

• Bass is facing real criticism for being on a diplomatic mission in Ghana at the start of the crisis. And water policies have been hotly debated in California. But there's no evidence of diversity programs hindering the response.

The lack of sufficient water to put out the fires wasn't as simple as a few bone-headed decisions by incompetent people. It's exceptionally complex: Municipal water systems aren't built for this many fires requiring this much water from this many hydrants. Fixing this, if super-fires are indeed a new normal, would be a domestic Manhattan Project.

• Surely mistakes were made. But it's implausible to know the precise ones to fault in real time.

🇬🇧 2. Musk plunged the U.K. into crisis last week— and is now plotting to oust center-left Prime Minister Keir Starmer — after reviving and weaponizing a decade-old child abuse scandal involving British-Pakistani grooming gangs.

• What was a widely covered national story at the time — first broken, ironically, by traditional media — has been recast on X as a conspiracy of silence by the pedophilic establishment.
• Musk has baselessly claimed Starmer — who was credited with improving the treatment of sexual assault victims as chief prosecutor in 2013 — is "deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes."
• And Musk has lionized anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson — a convicted felon reviled in British society, even by right-wing Reform Party leader Nigel Farage — as a heroic citizen-journalist.
• For the tens of millions of Americans and X users unfamiliar with the grooming gang scandal, every quote and move by the British government is now being scrutinized through Musk's tainted lens.

Reality check: Starmer and other British officials have acknowledged that authorities and politicians failed many victims of child abuse, and that recommendations from a 2022 independent inquiry should be implemented.

• There's no evidence that the Labour government — which was elected in a landslide last July after 15 years of Conservative rule — has intentionally blocked investigations for political reasons.

The backstory: Trump — and Trumpworld — helped create this new reality.

• From kicking off his first term with "alternative facts" to changing the meaning of "fake news," MAGA-world has consistently sought to discredit traditional gatekeepers.

💡 What you can do: Realize that in-the-moment information is often flawed, and rarely as black-and-white as presented.

• Resist sharing any information outside highly trusted sources.
• Think about the political motivations of people casting blame or spreading ideas.
• View social media — including X — as a good place to find real-time videos, photos and updates if you trust and verify the source. But also full of bad actors. The burden is on you.
• Take a deep breath. Traditional media sources you've grown to trust are quite good at sorting fact from fiction and offering helpful context. That often takes more than a few minutes or hours. Find a source you trust — and trust it.

In the case of the LA fires, the Los Angeles Times is doing a very good job on this front. Check out the coverage.

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The two biggest wildfires ravaging LA have killed at least 10 people and damaged or destroyed 10,000+ homes and other structures, AP reports:

• The Eaton Fire near Pasadena, which started Tuesday night, has burned more than 5,000 structures, a term that includes homes, apartment buildings, businesses, outbuildings and vehicles. Firefighters were able to establish the first bit of containment yesterday.
• To the west in Pacific Palisades, the largest of the fires burning in the LA area has destroyed over 5,300 structures. Firefighters had no containment.

At least 130,000 residents are under evacuation orders.

• All the major fires are located in a roughly 25-mile band north of downtown, spreading a sense of fear and sadness across the nation's second-largest city. No cause has been identified for the largest fires.

Billy Crystal lost the Pacific Palisades house where he had lived since 1979. Paris Hilton watched her Malibu beach mansion burn down on live TV, Reuters reports.

• The list of celebrities who lost their homes and neighborhoods in the worst fire in LA history reads like a Hollywood who's who.

Jamie Lee Curtis, James Woods, Mandy Moore, Mark Hamill and Maria Shriver were among those who publicly described being forced to evacuate as out-of-control fires swept across some of the most lavish real estate in the world. Read on.

While the fires that devastated celebrity neighborhoods near Malibu have caught the world's attention, a similar size blaze in Eaton Canyon, north of LA, ravaged Altadena, a racially and economically diverse community, Reuters reports.

• Black and Latino families have lived in Altadena for generations. The suburb is also popular with younger artists and engineers working at the nearby NASA rocket lab. Read on.

📷 See four before-and-after images.

Last year was Earth's hottest since instrument record-keeping began — eclipsing 2023's record, and for the first time exceeding the Paris target of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes from a Copernicus Climate Change Service announcement last night.

• As with 2023, the year was very likely the hottest in at least 125,000 years.

Keep reading.

AI technology is advancing rapidly and if you're not already using it at work, brace yourself, Axios' Emily Peck writes.

• Why it matters: That was Sam Altman's message, buried in a recent blog post. "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies," writes the OpenAI founder.

State of play: The possibility of using AI agents to do work instead of expensive humans has some companies super excited. It's making many workers super anxious.

• Distinct from an AI chatbot, an AI agent can work autonomously. You tell it what to do, and the agent goes off and does it in the real world. In other words, it could theoretically fully replace a human.

For example, a scientist could use a bot to conduct research and possibly even design an experiment.

• But an AI agent, when prompted, can act as a research assistant — it can not only do the research and design an experiment, the agent can conduct it and compile the results.

Some companies are already experimenting with AI agents in limited pilot programs — to conduct drug discovery, for project management, or to design marketing campaigns.

• Keep reading.

The world's most powerful supercomputer was officially dedicated in the Bay Area yesterday, with the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and AMD on hand to celebrate their handiwork, Axios' Ina Fried reports.

• Why it matters: El Capitan — as the $600 million supercomputer is known — will handle classified tasks aimed at securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons and conducting a variety of other unspecified simulations.

🔬 Zoom in: El Capitan, along with a smaller sibling designed for non-classified work, sit inside a large data center inside Lawrence Livermore National Labs in Alameda County, roughly 30 miles east of Silicon Valley.

• That smaller sibling, Tuolumne, is similar in design to El Capitan, but just one-tenth the size. It's still powerful enough to rank tenth among the world's most powerful supercomputers.

🧮 By the numbers: El Capitan is capable of peak performance of 2.79 exaflops, or 2.79 quintillion calculations per second.

• That's equivalent to the processing power of about 1 million of today's high-end smartphones working simultaneously.
• Its 87 computer racks and accompanying infrastructure weigh 1.3 million pounds. That's about the same as four blue whales or 100 African elephants.

Keep reading.

In a new Axios Visuals special project, Sam Sabin, Aïda Amer and Jared Whalen show — step by step — why ransomware attacks plague pretty much every company in every sector.

• Why it matters: Its perpetrators have hardly had to innovate to stay profitable.

The big picture: In a cat-and-mouse game, cybercriminals constantly change their tactics as defenses against them improve.

• When businesses got better at backing up their key servers, many ransomware gangs started ditching encryption altogether. Instead, they opt to steal companies' proprietary information, or shut down systems needed to run the business.

Explore the visual.

Here's an early look at next week's cover of The New Yorker, "Two's a Crowd," by Barry Blitt, who imagines a swearing-in scene with Elon Musk sidelining President-elect Trump into a dash of yellow hair and a sliver of red tie.

• "On January 20, 2025, the next leader of the United States — and of the free world — assumes power," Blitt writes. "Also on that day: Donald Trump is sworn in."

Cover story.

At yesterday's State Funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at the Washington National Cathedral, President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with his estranged former vice president, Mike Pence.

Former President Obama amuses President-elect Trump, who was accompanied at the service by former First Lady Melania Trump.

• More photos.