When Hurricanes Milton and Helene ravaged the Southeast in the fall, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said she feared that a whole new level of disinformation was taking hold.
“It’s absolutely the worst I’ve ever seen,” she told reporters, as conspiracy theorists claimed their favorite agency was suddenly, absolutely detaining locals in tents, only saving trans people, not saving white people, demanding all aid money be repaid with interest and other blatant absurdities spread in online posts.
Criswell may have wanted to save the superlatives for January.
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The fires currently tearing through the homes of entertainment-industry professionals and (a far greater number of) ordinary Angelenos have enabled a torrent of outrageous comments that have multiplied with astonishing speed. Platforming it would serve no good purpose. But suffice it to say there’s zero credible evidence that fires have been set by eco-terrorists looking to draw attention to climate change; that the tragedy was fueled by massive budget cuts to the LAFD (the department’s budget was trimmed a miniscule 2 percent last cycle); that the LAFD’s effectiveness has been hampered because it’s too busy sending supplies to Ukraine (Donald Trump Jr.’s go-to); or that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s attempts to save a fish caused a water shortage (Donald Trump Sr.’s go-to).
Such dispatches from Imaginaryland haven’t been limited to MAGA; moderate Republic strategist Scott Jennings on CNN on Wednesday night somehow connected the devastation to DEI hiring at the LAFD. (He was promptly shot down by the panel.)
Nor has the left been immune. Some upper-middle-class liberals in L.A.’s entertainment community have quietly been raising the possibility of a Guy Fawkesian arson plan, citing, among other things, Joe Rogan’s oft-repeated story that a firefighter once told him “the right wind” will one day blow through L.A. and destroy it.
Rogan told the story to Quentin Tarantino again last month, and the elites have seen it as some kind of dog whistle meant to cue an eat-the-rich attack, though there’s not a single shred of evidence to support the idea — Rogan just seemed to be playfully peddling doomerism and gently trolling Hollywood as he always does. Any reports of fires actively being set — on Thursday evening LAPD was working under a theory that the Kenneth Fire was the result of arson and arrested someone who may have been connected — have come with no indication of class warfare. Experts have long said arsonists tend to act out of personal pathology, not political anger.
That hasn’t stopped some Hollywood types from spreading the theory in text threads and WhatsApp groups. Perhaps this is just establishment jitters in a post-Mangione world, but it shows one thing: The lure of the conspiracy theory knows not from party affiliation.
At least there hasn’t been much AI-deepfake action yet. Then again, when the canvas is that stark — harrowing scenes of apocalyptic destruction — you don’t need to manufacture images to get your point across. You just caption the existing ones with the most seductive outlandishness you can find.
Natural disasters have always attracted crackpots. Without the clear antagonist of, say, a terrorist attack, these events lend themselves to manufactured fictions. But you’d be right to suspect something has changed over the past few years.
Back in 2005, Hurricane Katrina contained plenty of finger-pointing and calls for accountability. But the speed, scope and depth of the scapegoating is new; what started decades ago as an honest if fervent search for responsibility in natural disasters has turned into something much more wild and malignant. The Maui fires in the summer of 2023 brought a whole raft of nonsense theories about a “direct energy” laser, which tumbled into the Helene theories in 2024 and now rolled up with the Southern California fairy tales about Ukrainian drones and Greta Thunberg secret orders.
Laugh at these inanities but these theories often serve an end, especially on the right: to help politicians and movements score points with their base. They are the lifeblood of a beast that must always keep its followers lathered up and a villain in its sights.
What we are witnessing is nothing less than the weaponization of tragedy — an exploitation of personal pain for political gain. Boosted by a social media optimized for outrage and a removal of its institutional guardrails (hello, Meta), the leaders work the system to their agenda, whether that’s loosening environmental regulations (the clear aim of the fish story), avoiding the disbursement of aid money (a real concern when Trump arrives in office in 10 days) or simply to sully a hated elected official on the other side.
Solutions seem scarce, especially as, on the once-robust public square of Twitter (now X), Elon Musk continues to throw open the hotel doors to the misinformers. (Musk has been boosting the Newsom-fish theory with regularity.)
University of Toronto political science professor Geoff Dancy, who has studied conspiracy theories for much of his career, has argued that conspiracy theorists are reacting more emotionally than intellectually, which is why responding to them with facts generally doesn’t work (and might make things worse; the more pushback they get, the more it reinforces the sense something is being kept from them).
People who’ve researched wildfires also say the events are uniquely suited to conspiracy theories. Lucy Walker, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who made the landmark wildfire movie Bring Your Own Brigade a few years ago, told me it’s become almost an expected feature of these events.
“I have spoken to more survivors of wildfires than almost anybody because I spent several years making my documentary,” Walker said when I messaged her to ask about this. “I was astonished when sane-looking people would start telling me insanely implausible conspiracies about alien light beams, or any of these other absurd theories.
“Some of it you can just explain with the fact that the algorithms promote contrary positions,” she said. “But I think it is also interesting to ask if maybe some people need protecting as they are really struggling with the absolute horror of this.”
Walker said that, at least when it came to civilians, the benefit of the doubt was due them. “I guess I see that a lot of people are in shock and grief, and anger is famously one of the stages of grief and can lead to a tendency to blame. It is hard to absorb the truth and the big picture, especially when it is overwhelmingly inconvenient to face the fact that it is risky to live in these beautiful areas that we love so much. … I hope that we can stay compassionate with one another rather than create more stress by name-calling or pathologizing.”
One would hope. But these theories have real-world consequences, and if a public official who’s genuinely trying to solve a problem is done in by a Trumpian theory mob — or if such fancifulness is used to rally support for a reduction in aid — it’s harder to see it as so benign.
If there’s some small comfort to be taken from all this, it’s that while the tools and speed are new, the motivations aren’t. Ask any casual student of history about what caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that decimated much of the city and they’ll come back with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, which knocked over a lantern and set the town ablaze. The story is actually patently untrue — the fire was started in the area near her barn, likely by someone else, and a reporter quickly admitted they invented the cow detail to make the story more interesting.
What’s more, Mrs. O’Leary was Irish, an ethnic group undergoing a demonization in the city, and blaming her sated a populist need for a villain; she was the DEI hire of her time.
Alas, with extreme-weather disasters increasing and both the social and social media conditions ever more ripe for the stoking, these demonizing theories will likely only intensify in the coming years. Bad actors creating havoc with false information, it turns out, can be a tinderbox too.
