What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: How the LA Fires Started

Credit: Apu Gomez - Getty Images

On Jan. 7, a deadly combination of dry conditions and unusually strong winds caused a series of wildfires in Los Angeles. The fires then ignited a cultural wildfire of internet ignorance, conspiracy theories, and misinformation that has been burning out of control online. It's been over a week, and neither the fires nor the fake news have been contained.

Much of the mythology around the LA fires revolves around who or what started the deadly conflagrations. It's an understandable question, but there are no useful answers more specific than "the weather" right now.

People are not patient enough to wait for investigations to conclude and lawsuits to be resolved—they can't even wait for the flames to die down— so they're filling in the gaps by casting blame on the groups or things they hate the most.

"The people I don't like set the fires"

The list of culprits is long and peculiar. Here are only some of the people and things being erroneously or prematurely blamed for starting the LA fires.

The Jews: Fan-favorite conspiracy theory "The Jews did it" made an early appearance after the fire. This was posted on Facebook on Jan. 8:

"Just dew it" is a reference to "directed energy weapons," aka Jewish space lasers. But alas, this Facebook post contains a photo from a different fire from 2018, so it doesn't prove anything. That some trees didn't burn doesn't prove it was lasers either. The ancillary theory that homes with blue roofs and/or blue bins aren't targeted by Jewish space lasers isn't true either, but just in case, make sure you recycle.

To be fair, it's not impossible to use "directed energy" to start a fire—you can do it yourself with a magnifying glass—but there's no evidence that this was the cause of the LA fires. A book of matches would be more efficient tool anyway.

Woke people/Democrats: There are a lot of conspiracy theories that blame the fires on the general wokeness of California's government. That these are cheap attempts to politicize a tragedy seems obvious to me, but I'm not the target audience for claims like these. Anyway, California didn't turn away 40 firetrucks from Oregon for not meeting emissions standards. It's also not true that LA sent its firefighting equipment to Ukraine. Donald Trump claimed California governor Gavin Newsom failed to sign a "water restoration declaration," but that isn't actually a thing. James Woods, Elon Musk, and many others claim that the LAFD's diversity program is to blame for a less-than-adequate response to the fire, which is maybe a matter of opinion, but there's no evidence to back it up.

I'm not discounting the possibility that governmental mismanagement or bad public policy affected the response to the fires—nobody's perfect, right?—but it's too early to tell what, if anything, went wrong, and who, if anyone, screwed the pooch. There will be years of lawsuits to straighten it all out, rest assured.

MAGA Republicans: A post on Threads (archived here) from Jan. 8 claims that the LAPD are "looking for three 'persons of interest,' all tied to a MAGA website and who were spotted at the source of all three major LA fires." This is not true. Like it's fully made-up.

Illegal immigrants: This one is at least plausible. In the days after the fire, LA police arrested a homeless citizen of Mexico who was carrying a blowtorch. But whether the blowtorch was used to set fires hasn't been determined. Could it have been understandably nervous local residents mistaking a drug-smoking blowtorch for a fire-starting blowtorch? Maybe. In any case, ICE is looking into it, and if this undocumented dude was really was starting fires, rest assured, we will never, ever stop hearing about it.

Kids smoking weed: 24-year-old hiker Beni Oren posted a series of harrowing videos of himself and his friends running from the Palisades fire shortly after it began, leading to widespread comment section speculation that those kids were smoking weed up there, and that's what started the fire. Many helpful X users also pointed out that "Oren" is a Jewish name. There is no evidence that Oren or his friends were anything but hikers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. That could change, of course, but for now, that's all we know.

Unspecified people (who are probably the Jews): During a Fox News interview, actor Mel Gibson claimed that "there were people ready and willing and able to start fires and are they commissioned to do so." Because he's Mel Gibson, I assume he's talking about the Jews, but you never know.

Global warming: Global climate change is definitely real, but whether this specific fire (or any fire) was "caused" by climate change is complex question. On one hand, there were wildfires in California before there were humans on earth, but on the other, wildfires are more destructive and more frequent now than they were even 30 years ago. Climate change probably amplified the weather conditions that made this fire so devastating, but does that mean global warming "caused" the fire? I guess it depends on what you mean by "caused."

Enthusiastic urban planners: According to this poster on X, "by 2028, LA is poised to be a fully operational AI based 'Smart City,'" and the fire was set to drive away people so the AI could take over.

Similar "concerns" were voiced by Fox News host Laura Ingram, who said, "There's already talk—and we played a couple of sound bites—of reimagining the way rebuilding occurs, and obviously there's a great need for high-density housing in California and across the country, that's a big push by the climate folks, and you're already hearing rumblings of that in this case. Like, goodbye single-family homes, hello high-density housing."

Ingram doesn't specify who "the climate folks" nor does she detail the "rumblings" she heard. She seems purposefully vague about the details so viewers can fill in the blanks themselves. No one can really say she's wrong exactly, but the insinuation is that some shadowy group purposefully set the fires to achieve their nefarious goal of available affordable housing.

Diddy: According to this conspiracy theory, someone set the LA fires to cover up evidence of crimes connected to P. Diddy. Among the proponents of the "Diddy did it" theory is Catherine Austin Fitts, who served as the Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under George H.W. Bush. While this is possible, a huge fire seems like a wildly ineffective tool for evidence destruction.

So what really caused the LA fires?

In a broad sense, the LA fires were the result of unprecedented high winds and dry conditions. The Santa Ana winds are a semi-annual event, and high winds in California usually result in fires. Small blazes that would be quickly extinguished on a normal day become huge wildfires when it gets windy enough.

To be fair to Nature, most of those small blazes are caused by people. Human activity is directly responsible for 85% of wildfires, whether it's electric lines being blown down or arson. As for the current fires: There's some evidence that the Palisades Fire was caused when the remnants of an older blaze reignited, and the Eaton Fire could have been set off by an electric company's equipment, but until The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives finishes its investigation and releases its findings, we have no solid evidence of who or what caused the fires.