Some residents of the Pacific Palisades and Southern California more generally have begun to wonder whether the fire that consumed nearly 24,000 acres and almost 7,000 structures was, in fact, set deliberately.
In the absence of clear information from public officials at every level, this theory has flourished. It is worth spelling out the theory — at least in broad outlines — along with the counterarguments, because it is gaining traction.

The theory holds that elected Democrats set Pacific Palisades on fire (or deliberately allowed it to burn) to destroy a privileged, and predominantly white, neighborhood so that they could rezone it to build low-income (“affordable”) housing, and to add thousands of people to the social welfare system.

The theory of deliberate destruction relies on several pieces of evidence, all of which have plausible, alternate explanations, but which the theory ties together well.

1. Mayor Karen Bass was conveniently out of the country. When she ran for office in 2022, Bass promised not to undertake any international travel. Yet she left for Ghana several days after weather forecasts warned of extreme, “life-threatening” winds. A recorded phone call obtained by James O’Keefe’s appears to suggest that Bass knew something big was coming: “[R]ead in between the lines and hold tight… you will understand soon,” she says.
O’Keefe himself notes that the phone call was about the crisis of homelessness and violent crime in MacArthur Park — i.e. not about the Palisades. And Mayor Bass was, if anything, being urged to stay in town, not to leave. Still, the fact that she was gone is cited as evidence that she wanted to be able to deny having anything to do with the fire — and that she wanted to ensure there would be no effective city leadership in place to stop it from spreading once it started.

2. Emergency services were told to stand down. L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley (whom Bass fired last week) allegedly made a deliberate decision on January 6 not to pre-deploy 1,000 firefighters ahead of the wind event, and specifically not to deploy ten fire engines to the Palisades. Local police, too, were unavailable to direct traffic during the evacuation, since then-President Joe Biden was conveniently in town, supposedly on a family visit.

3. There was no water in the reservoir. One of the most infuriating and inexplicable details of the fire is that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) entered the fire season with hardly any water in a reservoir atop Palisades that holds up to 117 million gallons. Officially, the reservoir was emptied for maintenance because of a tear in its cover, spotted in January 2024. The deliberate theory holds that the reservoir was kept empty on purpose.

4. No one had cleared the brush in years. There had been some small-scale brush clearance, but none in the area where the fire started — on state land adjacent to private homes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom had launched an ambitious program of brush clearance, but had — rather famously — failed to deliver, and had also misled the public about the program’s success. Through neglect and deceit, the fuel was provided to turn any fire into an apocalypse.

5. The insurance crisis peaked in the months before the fire. California’s socialist price controls on fire insurance had been forcing insurers out of the state for several years. But it was only in the months, weeks, and even days before the fire that many Palisades residents were dropped by their carriers. Many were forced onto the hated California FAIR Plan, which barely covers anything. Thousands became instantly poor and will struggle to rebuild.

6. Public officials touted government aid. Elected officials were keen, often bizarrely so, to tell distraught residents that the most urgent thing to do after the fire was to sign up for assistance (a mere $770) from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); to “opt in” for “free” debris clearance by the Army Corps of Engineers (later to be paid back from insurance proceeds); and so on. The push for welfare, so the theory goes, was deliberate.

7. Democrats prioritized illegal aliens over residents — even during the fire. While the embers were still smoldering, and many thousands of displaced families were struggling to find shelter, Gov. Newsom and Democrats in the state legislature struck a deal to spend $50 million — not to help residents, but to fight Trump administration policies that would roll back California’s welfare state, and to help millions of illegal aliens fight against deportation.

8. Democrats spent almost nothing on rebuilding. Gov. Newsom signed $2.5 billion in fire relief, with much fanfare. But a look at the fine print revealed that almost all of it was allocated to evacuation and cleanup; a paltry $5 million was allocated to rebuilding. The Governor and the state legislature apparently cared more about moving people out of the Palisades (and other fire-struck areas) than in rebuilding them or restoring essential local services.

9. No cause for the fire has yet been identified. Some locals believe that the fire began when a burn scar from a previous fire on New Year’s Day, caused by fireworks, re-ignited in extreme winds. But despite investigations by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), no cause has been revealed to the public — seven weeks later. Several arsonists were also caught trying to set fires elsewhere in L.A., adding to the sense of suspicion.

10. Los Angeles has embraced the idea of planning a “smarter” city. Some proponents of the theory note that L.A. had been considering plans to become a “smarter” city, with infrastructure and services integrated neatly into high-tech networks that could make life more convenient — or, alternatively, easier to control. Given claims by Governor Newsom, and others, that leaders would be “reimagining L.A.” after the fire, suspicion continued to grow.

11. There has been no transparency from city leaders. Mayor Bass appointed entrepreneur Steve Soboroff as the city’s “Chief Recovery Officer” without any process of public consultation. She hired Hagerty Consulting — despite a questionable track record — behind closed doors. And the LADPW began talking about building major projects that locals had opposed, using the fire as an opportunity. Given the lack of transparency, some began to imagine the worst.

What this all adds up to is the claim that Mayor Bass, Governor Newsom, and others deliberately set — or allowed — the Palisades Fire to destroy the community — an affluent, suburban neighborhood, the kind that Democrats, going back to the Obama administration, have been trying to break apart. At the same time, they hoped to expand welfare rolls — either to crash the system (the “Cloward-Piven Strategy“) or legitimize it with formerly affluent beneficiaries.

There are several obvious problems with the theory of deliberate destruction. It requires a level of coordination and competence unseen in any government, left or right. It also suggests a malevolence that is difficult to imagine, even among hard-left Democrats. Sheer incompetence is a more likely explanation.

But in the absence of transparency and accountability — no one has resigned thus far — the alternative theory remains, for some residents, more convincing.