Jan. 10: Theories On the Burning Of L.A.

Elon Musk hosts AfD leader; Fetterman headed to Mar-a-Lago; Venezuelan opposition leader detained

---

---

The Big Story

Los Angeles is burning, and people naturally have some theories as to why. Perhaps a Chilean crime syndicate is setting fire to homes in order to rob them:

Or maybe it’s crackheads, tweakers, and other vagrants:

Indeed, the Los Angeles Police Department arrested a homeless man armed with a “propane tank or a flamethrower,” according to one eyewitness quoted in the New York Post, near the location where the Kenneth Fire broke out on Thursday, on the border between Los Angeles and Ventura County.

Maybe it’s not homeless or drug-addicted arsonists, but a “very savvy arsonist that may know a lot about wind patterns,” in the words of a message from the Baldwin Hills Estates Homeowners Association, which attributed the intel to a “well-sourced person in the LAPD.” And if the arsonist is as savvy as he seems, maybe he’s received military training. He could be an asset of Russia, Hamas, Tehran, or the Chinese Communist Party.

Or maybe we’re thinking too small here, and the truth is that L.A. is suffering from divine punishment—for Gaza, of course:

Sure, why not?

We gave you some of The Scroll’s assessment yesterday, so now we’re turning to Tablet’s geopolitical analyst, moonlighting today as a fire expert. Here was what they wrote to The Scroll, lightly edited for clarity:

Wildfires are normal. Big wildfires are normal. The warning signs that this was coming down the pike have truly been impossible to miss. Southern California is a desert, and this is what deserts do the world over—they burn.

What’s remarkable is that instead of preparing for this insanely obvious danger over a decade of wildfires that have been steadily escalating in intensity, both the state and the city apparently did absolutely nothing.

The culprit may very well be one of the aforementioned suspects. (Except for God; let’s leave Him out of this.) Foreign aggressors are constantly looking for ways to infiltrate and attack America. The question is why these groups suddenly seem to have all sorts of options for vulnerable soft spots available to them. And the answer is because our government is making the conditions for broadscale destruction much easier—whether the origin of that destruction is natural or manmade. Here is Tablet contributor Joel Kotkin, writing in UnHerd:

During her tenure, [Los Angeles mayor Karen] Bass, whose political icon was Fidel Castro, had cut the fire department budget, signed off on lavish, and largely unsuccessful, programmes to address homelessness, and crowed about how the city would defend illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, everything in the city—from parks to schools—is worn and in a state of ill repair.

That’s tinder for any fire starter, no matter their motivation or point of origin. Back to our analyst:

If you look at the history of these fires, there has been a very big major fire every two to three years. There are frontline things you do—preplanned fire breaks, water dumps, offshore fireboats to restore pressure using seawater—if you were to want to protect your neighborhood or state. There are also midrange things you do, like thinning forest, removing underbrush, having flex capacities for firefighters. In other words, you plan to meet a danger that in a probabilistic universe will happen even though no one can put a date on when.

Instead, California simply did nothing. They completely abnegated their responsibility to this portion of their citizens—which, from another perspective, is hardly surprising, since that’s what California’s migration policy is and what its education policy is and what its tax policy is.

The only difference here is the question, “Who benefits from the fires?” The answer is whoever got the money that in a sane universe would have gone to basic fire prevention measures directed at ensuring Los Angeles didn’t burn to the ground. And we know who that is. Free hospitals for migrants alone was $7 billion, but the LAFD’s entire firefighting budget was $1 billion. That tells you exactly what the social priority was.

The nature of this kind of event is that no one “causes it” by throwing away a match or setting their neighbor’s house on fire. Too many people are doing those things all the time to meaningfully assign blame.

The takeaway here is to assume other large systems are similarly broken, and that other types of safety or security you have been assuming are a myth.

---

The Rest

→The destruction wrought by the Pacific Palisades wildfires is incalculable. At least 10 people are dead, according to the Department of Medical Examiner, but the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department expects that number to rise. More than 5,000 structures have been lost to the flames, according to The New York Times, and 180,000 people have been ordered to evacuate. Curiously, ahead of the fires, the neighborhood’s home insurance costs were some of the most affordable in the country, Reuters reports—cheaper than 97% of U.S. postal codes. The median annual insurance premium for Pacific Palisades homeowners was $5,450, less than what residents paid in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, the low-income neighborhood ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, according to Zillow. Consumer-friendly regulations in California kept insurance costs low, with insurance companies charging customers in other states more in order to balance their books. Sangmin Oh, a finance professor at Columbia, told Reuters that homeowners in less regulated states are “effectively subsidizing” the insurance costs of California homeowners.

→Quote of the Day

Only AfD can save Germany, end of story, and people really need to get behind AfD, and otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany

That’s Elon Musk speaking during a Thursday X broadcast with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party and candidate for chancellor in the country’s upcoming elections in February. In April of last year, a German court ruled the AfD to be “suspected of extremism,” and German intelligence put the party’s more radical faction, Der Flügel, under surveillance, as reported by The Guardian. During their conversation, Musk, who endorsed the AfD in December, compared the situation in Germany to that of the one in the United States that resulted in Donald Trump’s victory. Jeremy Stern made a similar point for Tablet in March 2024. Writing of the seemingly inexorable rise of the AfD, Stern said, “If anything, the resurgence of extremism in Germany was a consequence of the incoherent yet firmly anti-Trumpian policy consensus that ruled the Berlin establishment as much as it dominated Washington—a kind of open borders, Green New Deal, China-dependent melange of politically correct ideas present as high-minded answers to the crude populism of the unwashed.”

→On Thursday, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman became the first Democrat to accept a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s my job to find common ground and deliver results for everybody,” wrote Fetterman on X. “And because nobody is my gatekeeper, I will meet with anyone to secure some wins, including President Trump.” As The Scroll noted earlier this week, Fetterman was the first Democrat to publicly support the Laken Riley Act, which passed the Senate 84-9 earlier this week and would require Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain illegal immigrants arrested for theft-related crimes.

→A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand Title IX of the Civil Rights Act—which is written to prevent discrimination based on sex—to cover transgender students. In a 15-page opinion, Chief Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the education department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. “The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

→The incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz, told Breitbart News on Thursday that every intelligence official detailed to the National Security Council will be asked to resign and vacate the premises by 12:01 EST on inauguration day. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now,” said Waltz. “Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees, they’re all going to go back.” The NSC functions by having presidential appointees, called “detailees,” oversee officials from the CIA, the National Security Agency, FBI, and the Pentagon. The detailees are expected to report to the presidential nominees to inform decisions about issues ranging from counterterrorism to cyber policy at the federal level. Trump had problems with many of the detailees during his first term. For instance, former Director for European Affairs Alexander Vindman—a detailee—spearheaded the first impeachment of Trump, related to Trump allegedly “blackmailing” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine. Waltz wants the detailees for the new administration to be aligned with Trump’s agenda. On Wednesday, Tablet’s Lee Smith reported on the war between the deep state and Trump over the NSC: “There’s a lot riding on the current NSC starting off on the strongest possible footing and with an eye to defending a commander in chief certain to be in the deep state’s crosshairs.”

→President-elect Trump promised on Thursday to release a report on the drone sightings reported in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Federal agency officials have urged calm about the drone sightings and emphasized there is “no evidence” suggesting they pose a security risk, without providing more information about why the drones are there and who is responsible for sending them. “I think it’s ridiculous they’re not telling you more about the drones,” said Trump in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday.

→Leader of the Venezuelan opposition María Corina Machado has been freed after being briefly “detained” by unknown actors yesterday in Caracas, Reuters reports. Machado’s party Vente Venezuela posted the following statement to X about the incident:

It’s not clear yet who detained Machado, nor is it clear what videos she was forced to record. But the far-left Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro has accused the opposition of “fomenting fascist plots” against it and has said that defeated opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, who is touring the United States this week, will be arrested if he ever returns to his country. Trump published a message on Truth Social in support of “democracy activists” Machado and González, calling the latter “President-elect Gonzalez” in reference to many U.S. officials’ belief that he is the rightful winner of Venezuela’s most recent presidential election, in July.

→Movie star and filmmaker Mel Gibson appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast Thursday to promote the sequel to The Passion of the Christ, which is slated to start filming this year. During the conversation, he made several provocative but interesting comments on topics ranging from Ivermectin—which Gibson claims cured three of his friends of terminal cancer—and the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as corruption in the Catholic Church, which Gibson insinuated is a “counterfeit Church.” Gibson even accused Pope Francis of continuing to cover up pedophilia. Most pertinent to this week’s big news, however, is that Gibson told Rogan during the interview that he was worried his house in Malibu would burn in the wildfires. When he got home, he found that his house had indeed burned. “I’ve never seen such a complete burn,” said Gibson to NewsNation. “It is obviously devastating, it’s emotional. You live there for a long time, and you had all your stuff. I lived there for about 14, 15 years so it was home to me.”

→On Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Rogan’s show to confirm what’s been obvious for a long time: Facebook and Instagram’s censorship of COVID-19 related “misinformation” came as a result of heavy pressure from the Biden administration. “They pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true,” Zuckerberg said of the administration. “They basically pushed us and said anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you need to take down. And I was just like, well, we’re not going to do that. ... Then all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating coming after our company. It was brutal.” In doing so, Zuckerberg essentially confirmed the argument of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri that the administration had violated Americans’ First Amendment rights by delegating censorship to the tech companies—an argument that the Supreme Court rejected on standing grounds in June.

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.