Why So Many Political Pyromaniacs, Assassins, and Other Scary Types? | The American Spectator

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass insists that “climate change” caused the Palisades Fire. Federal prosecutors believe that an angry, anti-capitalist Uber driver who frequently posted that climate change caused wildfires set the conflagration that destroyed so much of Los Angeles County.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California prosecutes Jonathan Rinderknecht on charges of destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and timber set afire. Though a dozen people died in the Palisades Fire in early 2025, Rinderknecht faces between five and 45 years if convicted. (RELATED: Wildfires As a Wake-Up Call)

The feds posit that he intentionally lit a fire in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2025, partly in response to frustrations with an old girlfriend rebuffing him and partly in response to professional frustrations. The fire, the prosecutors allege, lingered underground after its ostensible extinguishment only to reemerge with the encouragement of strong winds. Possibly that thesis makes for a harder sell to a jury in court, which probably explains the more modest charges.

Rinderknecht’s cell phone places him at the desolate, late-night part of the morning scene, they say, and so, too, does it contain videos of the fire and records of repeated plays of a video in which a French rapper acts as a pyromaniac. Like Beavis, Rinderknecht appeared to harbor an obsession with fire.

Prosecutors allege that passengers described Rinderknecht as “angry, intense, driving erratically, ranting about being ‘pissed off at the world’ and Luigi Mangione, capitalism, and vigilantism” — a one-star Uber experience, to be sure — in the New Year’s Eve hours leading to the New Year’s Day fire. His internet searches in the weeks leading to the fire included “Free Luigi” and “lets kill all billionaires.” When asked why he thought someone might set such fires, Rinderknecht offered that it “would be out of resentment of the rich enjoying their money” and likened it to Luigi Mangione’s murder of healthcare executive Brian Thompson. (RELATED: Memo to Mangione: Read the Unabomber Obituaries. Not the Manifesto.)

All sorts of factors contribute to political violence. Mental health issues, personal setbacks, and resentment over one’s professional reality not living up to one’s assumptions of the status one should occupy often pop up in the histories of such offenders, just as they do with Rinderknecht. Increasingly, harboring crude left-wing beliefs stands as a marker for those who politically rationalize destructive acts.

One thinks of the would-be assassins of Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of Brian Thompson, Cody Allen Balmer’s alleged arson of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion with Josh Shapiro and his family inside, Tyler James Robinson’s alleged assassination of Charlie Kirk, James Hodgkinson’s attempt to assassinate Steve Scalise and other Republicans playing baseball in 2017, and various other riots and acts of political violence witnessed in the last decade. (RELATED: Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means)

Noah Rothman tries to explain all this in Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, a new book I look forward to reading. In a book I read many years ago, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America, Richard J. Ellis points out that “noble ideals can themselves be the source of ignoble actions” and dreams of the perfectibility of man can “provide reasons to hate the world as it is.” Ellis wrote, “The dark side of the left is integrally connected … to the left’s tendency to ignore or deny the dark side of humanity.”

That seems true. So, too, does the role of self-righteousness. The question Chuck Klosterman wrote upside-down on the cover of a book a few years back, “But What If We’re Wrong?,” never seems to occur to people who so passionately need to be right.

Americans live in the safest period in their lives in terms of violent crime. We live in one of the more dangerous times in American history for those who speak their minds openly and loudly.

We need more books like Rothman’s and Ellis’s to help us understand why this is.

READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:

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