For the last two mornings, I’ve woken up from broken sleep in my house on Los Angeles’ east side in a blind panic, the smell of smoke permeating the air. The light slanting in is a horrible, eerie orange, illuminating the white kitchen cabinets like a nightmare projection screen. When I climb onto the roof, the air in every direction is full of dark, low, menacing clouds fed by smoke, blocking out the mountains and trees even just a few miles away.
Every wildfire is accused of not being a wildfire, but a planned attack to further sinister ends.
Our car is packed. Our important documents are in a tote bag by the back door. Every ping from the Watch Duty app, which sends out real-time fire alerts, sends me scrambling for my phone. I’m anxiously scrutinizing the perimeter of the Eaton fire, which has destroyed the homes of friends and community landmarks I love, willing it not to jump the 134 highway, praying today will be the day that helitankers will be able to slow the spread. I watch helplessly as the other fires across town engulf homes, businesses, send pets and livestock fleeing alone, reduce lives and memories to ash. I pray the death toll doesn’t mount higher. I watch friends and acquaintances on Instagram reporting from where they’ve evacuated, haggard and blank-faced with shock in hotel rooms and packed cars. I don’t know what kind of city we’ll have waiting for us on the other side of this.
Naturally, then, as a journalist who’s covered conspiracy theories and disinformation for many years, it’s been reassuring to learn that the disaster threatening my safety can be blamed on false flag attacks, Democrat plotting, the evils of diversity, and—say it with me—the Jews. A disaster is a ripe moment for conspiracy peddlers to ply their wares, and a historic series of fires threatening a major city—especially one filled with Democrats, non-white people and wealthy celebrities—has sent the machine into overdrive. The theories being spread about the Los Angeles fires, as Nitish Pahwa wrote yesterday, are a mix of climate change denialism and attempts to pin the disasters on their usual and preferred villains. Perhaps most disturbing of all, they also contain an ugly dose of celebration and schadenfreude. “The Hollywood Hills are on fire,” are burning, tweeted an account associated with the network of Stew Peters, a far-right and deeply antisemitic podcaster. “It’s almost poetic.”
Some of the themes emerging are consistent: pretty much every wildfire is accused of not being a wildfire at all, but a planned attack meant to further some sinister end. This serves two purposes: casting doubt on the established science of climate change, and finding a more politically useful target to pin a disaster on. Conspiracy peddlers blamed the devastating 2018 wildfires in Northern California on “directed energy weapons,” a tidy mix of climate change skepticism blended with endless paranoia about what the government is capable of perpetrating on its own citizens. Typically, proponents’ “evidence” for this will be claiming that the fire is displaying unusual or suspicious behavior, unlike a “normal” fire. Those ideas quickly surfaced this week: Stew Peters, for instance, claimed that in some firestruck areas “none of the bushes and trees were disturbed at all” and the “lawns are still green,” adding, “the government wants to kill you and then they want to steal your land.” (This is, needless to say, simple bullshit: landscaping, brush, hedges and lawns have all been very much “disturbed” in fire-damaged areas.)
“[O]ur Government who is working hand in glove with the WEF and Blackrock, is PURPOSELY setting fires using Military grade DEWs in these areas to initiate a MASSIVE LAND GRAB,” read another post representative of the theory, made on X by someone calling himself The Patriot Voice. Their account is verified, meaning that the user pays for Twitter and thus has the visibility of their posts and replies boosted on the site. The post has so far been viewed 180,000 times.
The other common target from far-right conspiracists has been “DEI initiatives,” as a way of pushing the idea that Los Angeles’ fire and emergency services are somehow too woke to effectively fight fires, with characters like Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok devoting endless tweets to the fact that the Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin M. Crowley is a lesbian.
As with a lot of conspiracy theories, the particular line of attack has been repeated by other more mainstream sources, including the Daily Wire, ex-Fox host Megyn Kelly, and the Federalist, who proclaimed that the LAFD is “DEI-crazed” and thus “made the fires worse.” Blogger Beth Brelje objected to the fact that the LAFD’s strategic plan didn’t use the word “hydrant” but talked about diversity and sustainability. While the plan doesn’t use that particular word and does include such projects, it discusses a wide range of goals in the sprawling department, including wildfire fighting preparedness. Fire hydrants near the Pacific Palisades fire didn’t run dry because of diversity; they ran dry because of an enormous demand for water to fight fires.
Infowars and a variety of other conspiracy sites also claimed that the LAFD was flat-footed because “most of their supplies were sent to Ukraine,” a claim repeated by Donald Trump Jr. In fact, the LAFD sent surplus equipment to Ukraine three years ago, part of a national effort by fire departments to send aid. The “hoses, nozzles, turnouts, helmets, body armor, and other associated personal protective equipment” scrounged up, per the release, was packed up into just five pallets of gear, per a news story at the time—an amount irrelevant to what’s been needed to battle the current, devastating blazes.
Some longtime conspiracy peddlers opted to take a more blanket approach, throwing out a list of buzzwords rather than pin responsibility for the fires on any one source. “Communist China sabotage teams?,” tweeted far-right personality and Pizzagate promoter Mike Cernovich. “Druggies? Random criminals doing arson? In Soros County LA, you can never know who is lighting these fires.”
Despite the ugliness that I see every time I look at my phone for too long, out in the real world, there have been moments of beauty and solidarity. I’m on a text chain with my closest neighbors, which has been full of advice, gentle check-ins, and moments of delirious celebration: when work crews got our power turned back on we joked about who’d be the first outside to meet them with a bottle of tequila. (They vanished before I could dig out the good stuff, sadly.)
Astonishingly, we’ve gotten regular mail deliveries; our mask-wearing mail carrier cheerfully greeted me with some letters, and told me, “I’m just pretending like it’s snow,” gesturing at the ash falling on our heads. Friends and acquaintances and family and total strangers have checked in, some offering their addresses as places to go. My brother-in-law offered to get in the car and drive to me. In the midst of a disaster, there are always moments of genuine warmth and solidarity. But none of them come from the people who are in the business of peddling fear and panic.
