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Column: Anthony Fauci's memoir strikes a crucial blow against the disinformation agents who imperil our health

Published

1 year ago

July 4, 2024

Column: Anthony Fauci's memoir strikes a crucial blow against the disinformation agents who imperil our health

Just after Thanksgiving 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci visited a high school in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. His goal was to promote the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in a primarily Black community, where vaccine rates were lower than in the rest of the capital.

Fauci was joined by Barack Obama — the fifth of the seven presidents he would serve during his more than half-century career as a public health official. Together they made the rounds of vaccination booths in the school gym, posing for photos. As they were getting into their cars after the visit, Obama turned to him with a word of encouragement.

Fauci had been accused by congressional crackpots such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of having helped to create the COVID virus, unleashing the pandemic, and by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of having masterminded nationwide pandemic shutdowns. Credible death threats against him had prompted the government to provide him with 24-hour security protection.

AIDS had made me a target, but that was largely before social media…. Now my family and I were barraged by emails, texts, and phone calls … with foul language and sexually explicit messages and threatened with violence and even death.

— Anthony S. Fauci

Obama’s advice carried so much weight that Fauci, 83, has used it, in its original Latin, as the title of a chapter of his newly published memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.” That chapter, concerning the maelstrom of abuse he sustained as a right-wing whipping boy during the pandemic, is called “Illegitimi Non Carborundum.”

Published in mid-June, “On Call” is an indispensable addition to the growing shelf of books by medical and scientific professionals fighting back against the tide of disinformation undermining public health in the U.S.

Over the last few months I’ve reported on others, including “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science” by pediatrician and immunologist Peter Hotez and “We Want Them Infected” by neurologist Jonathan Howard, which demolishes the claims of anti-vaccine ideologues such as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya.

This year has brought us not only Fauci’s book but “Tell Me When It’s Over” by vaccine expert Paul Offit, which takes aim at the “COVID myths,” which anti-vaxxers have wholesaled to encourage vaccination resistance in the general public.

Fauci’s book stands out because its author has chosen to place the abusive, ignorant treatment he received from disinformation grifters in and outside of government beginning with the Trump years in the context of his long career as a public servant.

His work started with his joining the National Institutes of Health as a fellow in 1968, at the age of 27. He stayed there, as a staff member and ultimately as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, until his retirement in 2022.

Over that time, Fauci became the nation’s most respected and influential immunologist. His public role first emerged with the appearance of AIDS in 1981. Within a few months, he decided to leave the routine research he had been doing on human immune response and focus instead on “this mysterious new disease seemingly restricted at this point to gay men.”

It was a soul-crushing experience. The cause of AIDS was not understood until 1983, when the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was identified as the culprit. There were no effective treatments, much less a cure. Fauci describes himself watching powerlessly as NIAID wards filled with patients facing a death sentence.

“None of my training or temperament,” he writes, “provided a bulwark against that horrible, inevitable outcome…. All of us who worked on the ward with those patients had to stuff away our feelings of loss, day after day, just to be able to carry on.”

A youthful Anthony Fauci opens an AIDS conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2004.

(LAURENT GILLIERON/AP)

Fauci also became a target of AIDS activists, who blamed him for failing to persuade his bureaucratic superiors to pull out all the stops on AIDS research — among them the playwright Larry Kramer, who in 1988 wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner headlined “I Call You Murderers, an Open Letter to an Incompetent Idiot, Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

Yet Fauci’s efforts to bring Kramer and other activists into the official meetings, and his championing of a full-scale government program to battle the disease, ultimately brought them together by the time Kramer succumbed to AIDS in 2020. “A complex relationship, indeed,” Fauci writes.

But the experience with AIDS didn’t prepare Fauci for the abuse he received as “the de facto public face of the country’s battle” with COVID. “AIDS had made me a target, but that was largely before social media,” he writes. “Now my family and I were barraged by emails, texts, and phone calls… with foul language and sexually explicit messages and threatened with violence and even death.” Right-wingers and GOP politicians even called for Fauci’s prosecution.

The problem began with Trump, who was courteous with Fauci in private and even seemed to accept his truth-telling about the seriousness of the developing crisis — but at public rallies dismissed COVID as a Democratic “hoax.”

Fauci is judicious about many of the administration officials he worked with as a member of Trump’s COVID task force, including Vice President Mike Pence, who Fauci says seemed sincerely to face up to the crisis but was hamstrung by his sedulous fealty to Trump. But he’s contemptuous about those who exploited the public’s unfamiliarity with the scientific method to cast doubt on necessary pandemic countermeasures and hype useless nostrums.

“People associate science with absolutes,” he writes. But science is a process in which new information is absorbed and evaluated, leading to new conclusions.

That was the case with the government’s advice against masking, issued when the pandemic was new, its means of transmission unknown, and hospitals were suffering a severe shortage of surgical masks and other protective equipment.

When the shortages eased and it became clear that masks would help stem the spread of COVID, the advice changed — but was portrayed on the right as an example of deliberate deceit by government experts.

Those who earned Fauci’s contempt include Peter Navarro, a Trump economic advisor who marched into a White House meeting after Fauci had dismissed hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug Trump was touting as a COVID treatment, dumped a pile of papers on the table and barked at Fauci: “I have all the evidence in the world that hydroxychloroquine works. And by preventing people from getting it, you have blood on your hands!”

Navarro is currently serving a prison sentence for ignoring a subpoena from a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Fauci’s inclination to be candid about the perils of COVID and the value of social counter-methods eventually led to his being muzzled by the White House, barred from appearing on cable news shows even as the COVID toll increased inexorably. Nearly 1.2 million Americans have succumbed to the disease, the U.S. toll from which is by far the worst in the developed world.

“Attacks on me came daily,” Fauci relates. Right-wing organizations and Republicans in Congress kept “digging for something that would discredit me. When nothing was found, they just made up stories with no evidence whatsoever to back them up.”

Paul advanced the baseless charge that Fauci’s institute, via a grant to the research organization EcoHealth Alliance, had caused the pandemic, even though the research EcoHealth had funded at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology could not conceivably have produced the SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID.

In his book, Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration panel that rules on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, traces his own experience with the anti-vaccine movement.

Offit ably traces the origin of the modern anti-vaccine movement to a fact-free campaign in 1982 blaming the whooping cough vaccine for childhood injuries, which was taken up by the mass media but had no basis in fact. It was augmented by a fraudulent 1998 paper tying the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism.

The paper was eventually retracted by its publisher, the British journal the Lancet, and its main author, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his British medical license. But the paper’s infliuence is still shown by resistance to the MMR vaccine in Britain and pockets in the U.S., where Wakefield is lauded by anti-vaccine agitators as a hero.

Offit shows how the messaging of anti-vaxxers has evolved from claims about the purported health hazard of vaccines into a movement for “medical freedom” — the right of individuals to decide for themselves “what we can or can’t put into our bodies or the bodies of our children.”

That turns the very concept of public health on its head. “Public health had morphed into private decisions, the public be damned,” Offit writes.

He ties the anti-vaccine movement to other health-related conspiracy-mongering, such as the notion that COVID originated in that Chinese lab, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it reached humans the way other viruses have throughout history — as a spillover from wildlife in contacts with humans.

Even before that, the drumbeat of campaigns against vaccines resulted in a dangerous skepticism about science just when sober scientific judgments were most needed.

“The outside impact of these conspiracy theories on the American public meant that the war against Covid would soon become a war against ourselves,” Offit writes. “Much of the suffering and deaths from Covid could have been prevented had people chosen to be vaccinated. But they believed the myths. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly.”

Doctors and scientists have been pondering with ever-increasing urgency how to combat the tide of science denialism that infects public health policymaking and public discourse. They’re facing a tough enemy, because the underlying driver of conspiracy movements is grift — the purveying of disinformation for profit and fame — witness the rise of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to political prominence.

Fauci, Offit, Hotez, Howard and other responsible scientists are placing their livelihoods, reputations and even their safety on the line to bring the facts to the American public. They’re heroes, and we must heed their efforts to protect science from charlatans and frauds, for our own good.

Business

Kevin Costner’s western ‘Horizon’ faces more claims of unpaid fees

Published

37 seconds ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Kevin Costner’s western ‘Horizon’ faces more claims of unpaid fees

In the midst of attempting to complete filming on his western anthology ”Horizon: An American Saga,” Kevin Costner is facing another legal dispute over the production.

On Monday, Western Costume Co. sued Costner and the production companies behind the epic western, claiming unpaid costume fees and damages to some of the clothing during the filming of the series’ second episode.

“The costumes are costly to replace if damaged or not returned,” states the complaint, which included copies of invoices for about $134,000 in costume rentals. “Without a reasonable basis for doing so and/or with reckless regard to the consequences, defendants failed to pay for the rented costumes and failed to return the costumes undamaged.”

Western Costume, the iconic business based in North Hollywood, is seeking to recover roughly $440,000, including legal fees, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A spokesperson for Costner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal and financial problems that have dogged the sprawling western drama, which Costner directed, co-wrote, starred in and partially funded.

In May, United Costume Corp., sued the production, claiming $350,000 in unpaid fees for the first two chapters of “Horizon.” Two months later, the costume firm filed to dismiss the suit with prejudice.

In May, Devyn LaBella, a stunt performer on “Chapter 2,” sued the production for sexual discrimination, harassment and retaliation in Los Angeles Superior Court. LaBella alleged an unscripted rape scene was filmed without the presence of a contractually mandated intimacy coordinator.

In a motion filed in August to get the suit tossed, Costner said he had reviewed LaBella’s complaint and was “shocked at the false and misleading allegations she was making.”

In October, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied Costner’s anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss the case. The judge also denied LaBella’s claim that Costner had interfered with her civil rights through the use of intimidation or coercion with respect to her participation in the filming of a rape scene, but allowed several of her other claims to proceed.

The case is pending.

The production is also facing an arbitration claim for alleged breaches in its co-financing agreement with its distributor New Line Cinema and City National Bank, “Horizon” bondholder, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In June 2024, “Chapter 1” of the planned four-part series was released in theaters followed by a streaming broadcast on HBO Max, but it was largely panned by critics.

In its review, The Times described “Horizon” as “a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience.”

It failed at the box office, grossing just $38.8 million worldwide, on a reported $100 million budget.

“Chapter 2” premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last September, but its theatrical release was pulled and remains indefinitely delayed, while the final two chapters remain in production or development, according to IMDb.

Business

Snoopy is everywhere right now — from jewelry to pimple patches. Why?

Published

12 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Snoopy is everywhere right now — from jewelry to pimple patches. Why?

As a child, Clara Spars, who grew up in Charles M. Schulz’s adoptive hometown of Santa Rosa, assumed that every city had life-size “Peanuts” statues dotting its streets.

After all, Spars saw the sculptures everywhere she went — in the Santa Rosa Plaza, at Montgomery Village, outside downtown’s Empire Cleaners. When she and her family inevitably left town and didn’t stumble upon Charlie Brown and his motley crew, she was perplexed.

Whatever void she felt then is long gone, since the beagle has become a pop culture darling, adorning all manner of merchandise — from pimple patches to luxury handbags. Spars herself is the proud owner of a Baggu x Peanuts earbuds case and is regularly gifted Snoopy apparel and accessories.

“It’s so funny to see him everywhere because I’m like, ‘Oh, finally!’” Spars said.

The spike in Snoopy products has been especially pronounced this year with the 75th anniversary of “Peanuts,” a.k.a. Snoopy’s 75th birthday. But the grip Snoopy currently has on pop culture and the retail industry runs deeper than anniversary buzz. According to Sony, which last week acquired majority ownership of the “Peanuts” franchise, the IP is worth half a billion dollars.

To be clear, Snoopy has always been popular. Despite his owner being the “Peanuts” strip’s main character and the namesake for most of the franchise’s adaptations, Snoopy was inarguably its breakout star. He was the winner of a 2001 New York Times poll about readers’ favorite “Peanuts” characters, with 35% of the vote.

This year, the Charles M. Schulz Museum celebrated the 75th anniversary of the “Peanuts” comic strip’s debut.

(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)

But the veritable Snoopymania possessing today’s consumers really exploded with the social media boom of the early 2010s, said Melissa Menta, senior vice president of global brand and communications for Peanuts Worldwide.

That’s also when the company saw the first signs of uncharacteristically high brand engagement, Menta said. She largely attributed the success of “Peanuts” on social media to the comic strip’s suitability to visual platforms like Instagram.

“No one reads the comic strips in newspapers anymore,” Menta said, “but if you think about it, a four-panel comic strip, it’s actually an Instagram carousel.”

Then, in 2023, Peanuts Worldwide launched the campaign that made Snoopy truly viral.

That year, the brand partnered with the American Red Cross to create a graphic tee as a gift for blood donors. The shirt, which featured Snoopy’s alter ego Joe Cool and the message “Be Cool. Give Blood,” unexpectedly became internet-famous. In the first week of the collaboration, the Red Cross saw a 40% increase in donation appointments, with 75% of donors under the age of 34.

“People went crazy over it,” Menta said, and journalists started asking her, “Why?”

Her answer? “Snoopy is cute and cool. He’s everything you want to be.”

Art of the Peanuts characters hangs at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

The Red Cross collaboration was so popular that Peanuts Worldwide brought it back this year, releasing four new shirt designs. Again, the Snoopy fandom — plus some Woodstock enthusiasts — responded, with 250,000 blood donation appointments made nationwide in the month after the collection’s launch.

In addition to the Red Cross partnership, Peanuts Worldwide this year has rolled out collaborations with all kinds of retailers, from luxury brands like Coach and Kith to mass-market powerhouses like Krispy Kreme and Starbucks. Menta said licensed product volume is greater than ever, estimating that the brand currently has more than 1,200 licensees in “almost every territory around the world,” which is approximately four times the number it had 40 years ago.

Then again, at that time, Schulz enjoyed and regularly executed veto power when it came to product proposals, and licensing rules were laid out in what former Times staff writer Carla Lazzareschi called the “Bible.”

“The five-pound, 12-inch-by-18-inch binder given every new licensee establishes accepted poses for each character and painstakingly details their personalities,” Lazzareschi wrote in a 1987 Times story. “Snoopy, for example, is said to be an ‘extrovert beagle with a Walter Mitty complex.’ The guidelines cover even such matters as Snoopy’s grip on a tennis racquet.”

Although licensing has expanded greatly since then, Menta said she and her retail development associates “try hard not to just slap a character onto a T-shirt.” Their goal is to honor Schulz’s storytelling, she added, and with 18,000 “Peanuts” strips in the archive, licensees have plenty of material to pull from.

Rick Vargas, the senior vice president of merchandising and marketing at specialty retailer BoxLunch, said his team regularly returns to the Schulz archives to mine material that could resonate with customers.

“As long as you have a fresh look at what that IP has to offer, there’s always something to find. There’s always a new product to build,” Vargas said.

Indeed, this has been one of BoxLunch’s strongest years in terms of sales of “Peanuts” products, and Snoopy merchandise specifically, the executive said.

Bejeweled keychains of Snoopy and Charlie Brown.

Daniella Yacobovsky, co-founder of the celebrity-favorite accessory retailer BaubleBar, reported similar high sales for the brand’s recent “Peanuts” collection.

“Especially for people who are consistent BaubleBar fans, every time we introduce new character IP, there is this huge excitement from that fandom that we are bringing their favorite characters to life,” Yacobovsky said.

The bestselling item in the collection, the Peanuts Friends Forever Charm Bracelet, sold out in one day. Plus, customers have reached out with new ideas for products linked to specific “Peanuts” storylines.

More recently, Peanuts Worldwide has focused on marketing to younger costumers in response to unprecedented brand engagement from Gen Z. In November, it launched a collaboration with Starface, whose cult-favorite pimple patches are a staple for teens and young adults. The Snoopy stickers have already sold out on Ulta.com, Starface founder Julie Schott said in an emailed statement, adding that the brand is fielding requests for restocks.

“We know it’s a certified hit when resale on Depop and EBay starts to spike,” Schott said.

The same thing happened in 2023, when a CVS plush of Snoopy in a puffer jacket (possibly the dog’s most internet-famous iteration to date) sold out in-store and started cropping up on EBay — for more than triple the original price.

The culprits were Gen-Zers fawning over how cute cozy Snoopy was, often on social media.

Yellow and white pouches with Snoopy pimple patches.

Hannah Guy Casey, senior director of brand and marketing at Peanuts Worldwide, said in 2024, the official Snoopy TikTok account gained 1.1 million followers, and attracted 85.4 million video views and 17.6 million engagements. This year, the account has gained another 1.2 million followers, and racked up 106.5 million video views and 23.2 million engagements.

Guy Casey noted that TikTok is where the brand experiences much of its engagement among Gen Z fans.

Indeed, the platform is a hot spot for fan-created Snoopy content, from memes featuring the puffer jacket to compilations of his most relatable moments. Several Snoopy fan accounts, including one dedicated to a music-loving Snoopy plushie, boast well over half a million followers.

Caryn Iwakiri, a speech and language pathologist at Sunnyvale’s Lakewood Tech EQ Elementary School whose classroom is Snoopy-themed, recently took an impromptu trip to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa after seeing its welcome center decked out with Snoopy decor on TikTok. Once she arrived, she realized the museum was celebrating the “Peanuts” 75th anniversary.

Two red construction-paper doghouses with Snoopy on each roof.

It’s a familiar story for Schulz Museum director Gina Huntsinger.

“Last December, we were packed, and I was at the front talking to people, and I just randomly asked this group, ‘Why are you here?’”

It turned out that the friends had traveled from Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas to meet in Santa Rosa and visit the museum after seeing it on TikTok.

According to Stephanie King, marketing director at the Schulz Museum, the establishment is experiencing its highest-ever admissions since opening in 2002. In the 2024–2025 season, the museum increased its attendance by nearly 45% from the previous year.

Huntsinger said she’s enjoyed watching young visitors experience the museum in new ways.

In the museum’s education room, where visitors typically trace characters from the original Schulz comics or fill out “Peanuts” coloring pages, Gen Z museumgoers are sketching pop culture renditions of Snoopy — Snoopy as rock band Pierce the Veil, Snoopy as pop star Charli XCX.

“When our social media team puts them up [online], there’s these comments among this generation that gets this, and they’re having conversations about it,” Huntsinger said. “It’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s creative. It makes me feel like there’s hope in the world.”

A white wall with "Passport to Peanuts" art.

Laurel Roxas felt similarly when they first discovered “Peanuts” as a kid while playing the “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” video game on their PlayStation Portable. For Roxas, who is Filipino, it was Snoopy and not the “Peanuts” children who resonated most.

“Nobody was Asian. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not even in the story,’” they said.

Because Snoopy was so simply drawn, Roxas added, he was easy to project onto. They felt similarly about Hello Kitty; with little identifying features or dialogue of their own, the characters were blank canvases for their own personification.

Roxas visited Snoopy Museum Tokyo with their brother last year. They purchased so much Snoopy merchandise — “everything I could get my hands on” — that they had to buy additional luggage to bring it home.

For some Snoopy enthusiasts, the high volume of Snoopy products borders on oversaturation, threatening to cheapen the spirit of the character.

Growing up, Bella Shingledecker loved the holiday season because it meant that the “Peanuts” animated specials would be back on the air. It was that sense of impermanence, she believes, that made the films special.

Now, when she sees stacks of Snoopy cookie jars or other trend-driven products at big-box stores like T.J. Maxx, it strikes her as a bit sad.

“It just feels very unwanted,” she said. For those who buy such objects, she said she can’t help but wonder, “Will this pass your aesthetic test next year?”

Lina Jeong, for one, isn’t worried that Snoopy’s star will fade.

Jeong’s affinity for the whimsical beagle was passed down to her from her parents, who furnished their home with commemorative “Peanuts” coffee table books. But she fell in love with Snoopy the first time she saw “Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown,” which she rewatches every Valentine’s Day.

This past year, she was fresh out of a relationship when the holiday rolled around and she found herself tearing up during scenes of Snoopy making Valentine’s crafts for his friends.

“Maybe I was hyper-emotional from everything that had happened, but I remember being so struck,” that the special celebrated platonic love over romantic love, Jeong said.

It was a great comfort to her at the time, she said, and she knows many others have felt that same solace from “Peanuts” media — especially from its dear dog.

“Snoopy is such a cultural pillar that I feel like fads can’t just wash it off,” she said.

Soon, she added, she plans to move those “Peanuts” coffee table books into her own apartment in L.A.

Business

Fight between Waymo and Santa Monica goes to court

Published

1 day ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Fight between Waymo and Santa Monica goes to court

Waymo is taking the city of Santa Monica to court after the city ordered the company to cease charging its autonomous vehicles at two facilities overnight, claiming the lights and beeping at the lots were a nuisance to residents.

The two charging stations at the intersection of Euclid Street and Broadway have been a sour point for neighbors since they began operating roughly a year ago. Some residents have told The Times they’ve been unable to sleep because of the incessant beeping from Waymos maneuvering in and out of charging spots on the lot 24 hours a day.

Last month, the city ordered Waymo and the company that operates the charging stations, Voltera, to stop overnight operations at the sites, arguing that the light, noise and activity there constitute a public nuisance. Instead of complying, Waymo has turned around and filed a suit against the city, asking the court to intervene.

“Waymo’s activities at the Broadway Facilities do not constitute a public nuisance,” the company argued in its complaint, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. “Waymo faces imminent and irreparable harm to its operations, employees, and customers.”

A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the suit, the city was aware that the Voltera charging facilities were to operate and maintain a commercial electric vehicle fleet 24 hours a day, and the city approved its use when it approved the permits for the stations.

The rift between the company and some Santa Monica residents began as soon as the vehicles began utilizing the 24-hour charging stations, which have overnight staffing, lights and cars beeping as they reverse in and out of parking spots. Tensions got so bad that some residents took to blocking the path of the driverless vehicles, blocking the driveways into the charging stations, and placing orange cones in the area to hinder their routes and create backups, a practice several have called “stacking the Waymos.”

Meanwhile, employees at the charging stations have called police several times as a result, although no arrests have been made. Waymo also unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a temporary restraining order against one resident who had allegedly repeatedly blocked the vehicles.

On Nov. 19, the city ordered Waymo to stop charging its autonomous cars at the two lots overnight or face the possibility of legal action. Waymo declined and instead sued the city last week after negotiations with the city on mitigation measures to the lots fell apart.

According to the lawsuit, Waymo and Voltera representatives reached out to the city after the Nov. 19 order, looking for ways to mitigate the noise and lights from the lots, including initiating a software update that would change the vehicles’ path to the charging stations. But after a meeting on Dec. 15 with the city, no agreement was reached, the company said in its complaint.

“We are disappointed that the City has chosen an adversarial path over a collaborative one,” a spokesperson for Waymo said in a statement.

“The City’s position has been to insist that no actions taken or proposed by Waymo would satisfy the complaining neighbors and therefore must be deemed insufficient.”

The company also blasted the city’s handling of the dispute, arguing that despite facing a budget crisis, city officials have adopted a contentious strategy against business.

“The City of Santa Monica’s recent actions are inconsistent with its stated goal of attracting investment,” the company said in a statement. “At a time when the City faces a serious fiscal crisis, officials are choosing to obstruct properly permitted investment rather than fostering a ‘ready for business’ environment.”

The lawsuit is just the latest legal battle for the Alphabet-owned company, which has been rapidly expanding across California, making the white, driverless vehicles more commonplace.

Two years ago, the company was sued by the city of San Francisco, which argued that the California Public Utilities Commission shouldn’t have handed Waymo permits to expand and operate in the city, and that the regulatory agency had abdicated its responsibilities.

The California 1st District Court of Appeal disagreed, and ruled against the city.

This past June, Waymo announced it would expand its service area to 120 square miles in Los Angeles County, with Waymos operating in Playa del Rey, Ladera Heights, Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood.

In November the company launched its ride-hailing service to now operate across Los Angeles County freeways, as well as in the San Francisco Bay and Phoenix.

Since it launched in Santa Monica, the company argues it has done more than a million trips in the city and in November alone, recorded more than 50,000 rides starting or ending there.

“The [charging] site has enabled Waymo to provide a safe, sustainable and accessible transportation option to city residents,” Waymo said in the statement.