Leftist Domestic Terrorism Caused the California Fires and Legacy Media Is Ignoring It

The Pacific Palisades did not burn because the planet ran a fever. It burned because a man fixated on a millionaire’s accused assassin allegedly walked into the brush above Skull Rock with a lighter and a head full of class warfare.

Twelve people are dead. Roughly 7,000 homes and businesses are gone. Damages are estimated at $150 billion. And nine months after federal prosecutors charged Jonathan Rinderknecht with starting the blaze, the legacy press still cannot bring itself to say plainly what happened or why.

What happened was an act of leftist domestic terrorism. What is happening now is a slow, embarrassed retreat by the same media establishment that spent January 2025 selling the nation a climate-change fairy tale.

The Memo the Networks Won’t Read on Air

Federal prosecutors in the Central District of California filed a pretrial memorandum on April 29 that reads less like a routine arson case and more like a profile of an ideologically captured young man. According to the filing, ahead of his June 8 trial, Rinderknecht had spent the weeks before the fire searching online for “free Luigi Mangione,” “lets take down all the billionaires,” and “reddit lets kill all the billionaires.”

On January 3, two days after the initial Lachman Fire ignited and four days before the winds carried it into a citywide inferno, he reportedly took a screenshot of an article about Mangione’s not-guilty plea.

His Uber passengers on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day described him, in the memorandum’s words, as “angry, intense, driving erratically, and ranting about being ‘pissed off at the world’ and Luigi Mangione, capitalism, and vigilantism.”

When investigators interviewed him on January 24 and asked why a person might commit arson in the Pacific Palisades, Rinderknecht reportedly told them it would be done out of resentment of the rich enjoying their money as “we’re basically being enslaved by them,” and he again invoked Mangione’s alleged crime as a comparable act of “desperation.”

This is not the rambling of a man undone by a bad breakup. It is a coherent, if contemptible, political worldview. Strip away the lawyer’s spin about a missed New Year’s Eve date, and what remains is the now-familiar script of the radicalized American left. The rich are oppressors. Violence against them is justice. Arson is rhetoric. A man who shoots a father of two in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk is a folk hero whose name you write on your search bar.

The “Climate Change” Lie and the People Who Sold It

Cast your mind back to the second week of January 2025. The Palisades and Eaton fires were still raging. Bodies were still being recovered. And the most powerful Democrats in America, joined by their stenographers in legacy media, had already settled on the cause.

Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on X on January 8, “80,000 people told to evacuate. Blazes 0% contained. Eight months since the area has seen rain. The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.” The post pulled in 18.5 million views and 107,000 likes. Joe Biden, in his farewell Oval Office address, blamed “the existential threat of climate change.” Rep. Jared Huffman demanded “real action.” Rep. Sarah McBride described the fires as a “climate catastrophe.” The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and Axios obediently followed, churning out climate-attribution coverage based on activist research from the World Weather Attribution group.

Every word of it has now collapsed under the weight of an indictment. The fire was not lit by a warming planet. It was allegedly lit by a 30-year-old Uber driver who had been radicalized into a hatred so consuming he wanted to set the world on fire and call it justice. The actual climate record, as biostatistician Steve Milloy has documented, shows Los Angeles is cooler today than it was in the late 1950s, and conditions identical to January 2025 (Santa Ana winds, dry chaparral, brittle infrastructure) were warned about in the Anaheim Gazette in 1875.

What the fires actually exposed was something the climate narrative was designed to obscure: a Los Angeles reservoir sitting empty for months, fire hydrants running dry, decades of forest mismanagement, and a state government that prioritized green theology over the basic competence required to keep a major American city from incinerating. The “existential crisis” was real. It was just a crisis of governance, not greenhouse gases.

The Selective Silence of the Networks

Now consider how the most important development in the case (the federal memo laying out Rinderknecht’s ideological obsessions) has been treated by the same networks that gave Sanders his climate megaphone.

According to media monitor NewsBusters, the May 4 evening newscasts of ABC and CBS did not cover the new court filings at all. ABC found time for the latest in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni litigation. CBS covered the Met Gala. Only NBC Nightly News reported the story, and to its credit, anchor Tom Llamas and reporter Steve Patterson led with the Mangione fixation and the “kill all the billionaires” search history. NBC quoted Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli directly:

“There is an extremely disturbing trend where people are resorting to violence to communicate political messages or economic messages. I don’t know if this guy saw himself as Luigi but he’s an arsonist, he’s a criminal.”

One network out of three. That is what passes for accountability in 2026. Imagine, for a moment, that prosecutors had charged a MAGA-hat-wearing man with setting a fire that killed twelve people in San Francisco, and his search history showed obsession with a right-wing assassin. Try to picture the wall-to-wall coverage. Try to imagine ABC bumping the Met Gala. The exercise is impossible because the asymmetry is the point.

This Is Not One Bad Apple

The Rinderknecht case is not an outlier in California. It is the second high-profile leftist arson prosecution to come out of the state in less than a year.

In September 2025, Casey Robert Goonan, a 35-year-old Northwestern doctorate holder who uses they/them pronouns, was sentenced to nearly twenty years in federal prison for a string of firebombings at UC Berkeley and the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland. Goonan placed Molotov cocktails under a campus police car, attempted to throw firebombs into the federal courthouse, and set additional fires on the Berkeley campus. He admitted his attacks were inspired by the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of Israelis and that he had called on others to launch what he branded “Operation Campus Flood” against Bay Area campuses. His pamphlet read, “Knife to the throat of zionism. Death to amerikkka.”

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White formally designated Goonan a domestic terrorist. Prosecutors described him as a “narcissistic violent ideologue.” His supporters, drawn from the same activist ecosystem that has filled American streets and college quads since 2023, raised more than $54,000 for his defense and now lobby publicly for his release.

Two California arsonists. Both leftist. Both ideologically motivated. Both designated, in fact or in substance, as domestic terrorists by the federal courts. And both treated by national media as discrete crime stories rather than the data points they so obviously are.

The Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight

For roughly a decade, the federal security establishment and its media allies have been telling Americans that the gravest domestic terror threat comes from the right. That assertion has always required ignoring substantial evidence to the contrary, but the events of the last two years have made the official narrative untenable. The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was assassinated in midtown Manhattan by a young Ivy League graduate whom millions of progressives celebrated as a hero.

Tesla dealerships have been firebombed across the country. ICE facilities have been attacked. Two young Israeli embassy staffers were murdered outside a Jewish museum in Washington. A Jewish community in Boulder was set on fire by a man shouting “Free Palestine.” Now Pacific Palisades, the deadliest American wildfire in recent memory, was allegedly ignited by a man who treated Luigi Mangione as a saint.

The American left has spent years insisting that words are violence. It now appears that, for a growing subculture of its most radicalized adherents, violence is words. Arson, assassination, and intimidation have become forms of political speech, and an entire media ecosystem has worked to launder this development by either ignoring it, sanitizing it (“resentment of the rich”), or redirecting blame onto carbon emissions and Donald Trump.

Scripture is not silent on this kind of cultural moment. The prophet Isaiah warned, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

That verse could have been written for the editor’s note of every major American newsroom in 2025. When a man burns down a city out of resentment, calling him an arsonist is not enough. He is a terrorist. When a senator blames the dead on a hoax to score political points against a president not yet in office, calling him merely wrong is not enough. He is, at minimum, a participant in the very moral confusion that makes such crimes thinkable.

Justice and What Comes After

Rinderknecht’s defense team will argue, as defense teams must, that he is a scapegoat for the Los Angeles Fire Department’s failure to fully extinguish the original New Year’s Day blaze. They will point to firefighter testimony about smoldering hot spots and to the disputed “holdover” theory that connects the January 1 fire to the January 7 catastrophe.

A jury will hear it all in June, and the legal system will do what only the American legal system can be trusted to do, even imperfectly. Prosecutors say their case rests on geolocation data placing him 30 feet from the ignition point, on the digital record of his searches and ChatGPT queries (including the chillingly self-incriminating prompt asking whether he would be at fault if a fire started from his cigarette), and on physical evidence including a recovered lighter.

Whatever the jury decides about Rinderknecht specifically, the larger story is already settled by the public record. The men charged with these California fires were not climate refugees lashing out at an indifferent planet. They were ideological actors in a movement that has been incubated in elite universities, celebrated in entertainment, excused by activist nonprofits, and protected by a press corps that finds Met Gala fashion more newsworthy than left-wing terror.

Pacific Palisades was not a weather event. It was a confession. And the country deserves a media establishment with the integrity to read it back to us honestly. The fact that we still don’t have one is a story in itself.