Volunteers distribute food and relief supplies in Echo Park.Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma
Since the Los Angeles wildfires broke out on January 7, a strain of online panic has painted the city as functioning a lot like The Purge, the horror movie about a 24-hour period where all crime is legal.
Take a purported conversation that former Tinder executive Brian Norgard relayed in a Twitter/X post that’s been seen over 2.5 million times. “My famous actor neighbor came by today after the looting gangs freaked him out,” he posted, “and whispered in my ear, ‘I guess I am a conservative now.’”
In contrast to the doom and gloom pronouncements, the city has been overwhelmed by acts of goodwill.
A few days into the fires, X and Tesla owner and richest man alive Elon Musk struck a similar note: “Please be careful in some areas, as there is non-zero risk of armed looters,” he tweeted on January 12, adding a product plug. “Cybertruck side panels are bulletproof to subsonic projectiles (handguns, shotgun & Tommy gun), but the glass is not, so make sure to duck if you see anyone wielding a gun.”
“Nobody’s responding to crimes right now,” declared Leo Skepi, a fitness influencer and podcaster with nearly five million TikTok followers, who moved from Los Angeles to Texas over the summer. “Everything is going to be covered and overlooked by this whole fire that’s happening. People are already breaking into businesses, breaking into houses, harming other people.”
As it happened, I, like Norgard, also spent time with my neighbor recently. We live closest to the Eaton Fire, which has already burned more than 14,000 acres and utterly devastated Altadena, a beautiful and historically Black part of town. All across our neighborhood on Los Angeles’ east side, local businesses and community centers had transformed into clearinghouses, taking and distributing donations to people who’d lost homes.
Together, my neighbor and I headed to a couple of these spots to find items for a family of four who have been displaced. Over a few hours, we got clean or even new clothes for the parents and their kids, along with underwear, tampons, socks, an air purifier for where they’re temporarily sleeping, and cheery little Barbie and Paw Patrol toothbrushes with color-changing toothpaste that we hoped the kids might like.
In sharp contrast to the doom and gloom pronouncements, the city has actually been smothered, sometimes even a little overwhelmed, in such acts of goodwill. When I went to drop off other donations at the Snail Farm and Bike Oven—an artists studio and community-run bike workshop, respectively—both were so thoroughly stocked there was hardly room to put anything down. “Please, no more children’s books,” begged a local bookstore, calling off a previous request for donations of reading material for evacuated kids. “Once again having to put a stop to Angelenos bottomless generosity at this time!!!” (As such messages attest, at this point, it is far more useful to send money to affected people; most places have stopped accepting physical donations.)
Things are, of course, not so uniformly sunny. On Wednesday, Los Angeles police said 97 people have so far been arrested on charges of fire-related burglary, vandalism, or looting. There have also been several arson arrests for people accused of starting small fires, including to trees or trash. One of the arrestees, as right-wing media has extensively noted, is undocumented, according to ICE, and with a long criminal history; he was detained while allegedly holding a blowtorch near the Kenneth fire, a now-contained blaze in the city’s West Hills. The causes of the largest conflagrations, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires, are still under examination.
The idea that the city has been overtaken by violent looters is a distortion to serve political ends.
While Governor Gavin Newsom’s office says that about 2500 members of the California National Guard have been called in to both help fight the fires and assist with public safety, their duties can be as prosaic as helping to direct traffic. But comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla proclaimed on January 13 that the National Guard had been called in to deal with widespread looting, claiming that “We live in Sodom and Gomorrah times here in Los Angeles.”
For corners of the right wing internet and parts of Silicon Valley—whose wealthiest denizens often complain about crime and disorder in San Francisco—the fires have presented a new opportunity to focus on alleged failings of government, accusing the mayor, the governor, the fire department, the police, FEMA, and the National Guard of either acting too slowly or focusing on the wrong things while allowing looting, arson, or other crimes to take place.
They’ve also pushed conspiracy theories about a fire department too woke to function, as a way of assailing the chief, who is a lesbian, and the supposed negative impacts of DEI hiring efforts. “After JFK got shot, the Secret Service was reformed,” tweeted the account End Wokeness, which has 3 million followers. “After 9/11, airport security was strengthened. After the LA fire calamity, meritocracy must be restored.”
There’s assuredly blame to go around: Mayor Karen Bass, for instance, has been criticized for being abroad when the fires broke out. A mistaken evacuation alert sent to the cellphones of ten million county residents—including me—was serious, unsettling, and, worse still, for some residents followed by more erroneous alerts.
But the idea that the city has been overtaken by violent looters on every street corner is a distortion tailored to serve political ends. Norgard, the ex-Tinder exec, has not only claimed that “Colombian cartels” are engaged in looting, but that the LAPD had confirmed the allegation to him. Separately, he said that Sinaloa cartel foot soldiers are “being arrested in Los Angeles for arson,” and appeared on a podcast to discuss “Chilean cartels” who he’s alleged are also in the area. Reached for comment about Norgard’s comments on Colombian cartels, the LAPD told Mother Jones, “We are unable to confirm the information”; it did not respond to a follow-up question about Sinaloa cartels.
The claims of violence also don’t account for the astonishing outpouring of generosity and community care across Los Angeles, which has been incredible in its speed, depth, and creativity. The Costume Designers Guild prepared a massive event to get clothes to those in need. The Magic Castle, a venerable magicians’ venue, organized a street fair where displaced people could collect donations and watch performances. At least two local theaters, Vidiots and Brain Dead Studios, screened free cartoons so displaced families could relax. The famous Bob Baker Marionette Theater offered free shows for families impacted by the fires, accompanied by delightful-sounding “puppet meet and greets.” A recovery fund called Altadena Girls was created by a 14-year-old to replace what helps people her age feel normal—makeup, clothes, hair products, pimple patches—and soon became flooded with donations from celebrities and beauty brands.
“There has been an incredible outpouring of support.”
There’s also the staggering amount of money raised, with donations flooding in from across the city, the country, and the world. A collection of organizations, including the music festival AfroPunk and local groups Walk Good LA and Community AID Dena, announced on Tuesday that they’ve raised $10 million for 501 Black families in the Altadena and Pasadena areas. A GoFundMe spokesperson told me that more than $100 million has been raised on the platform “to directly help…and to support nonprofits providing relief on the ground.”
“Since the fires began,” the spokesperson added, “we’ve seen thousands of fundraisers help meet the immediate needs of family members and friends, aid with long-term relief and rebuilding, and fund nonprofit on-the-ground relief efforts. There has been an incredible outpouring of support for needs that we anticipate to grow as the fires are contained and communities are able to truly assess damages.”
People’s selflessness has been evident even when their homes have been destroyed. Artists who lost their own housing at Zorthian Ranch have been sharing fundraisers for other displaced people. People with little time or money to spare have spent it shuttling food and supplies; friends and acquaintances have thrown themselves into delivering hot meals, hand warmers, and nicotine pouches to firefighters. If these are the charitable efforts I’m seeing every time I open Instagram, I can only imagine how many more people across the city are quietly working offline to help their loved ones and total strangers alike.
It may be true that some people—particularly the very rich—feel themselves under siege, beset on all sides by burglars and cartel members and incompetent government officials. And while their feelings might be real, so too are the countless acts being undertaken by community members, who have put everything they have into helping their friends and neighbors to rebuild.
When the fires go out, the online rage-and-fear baiting will move on to a new subject. But those community bonds will hold strong.
