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.’”
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.
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