My instagram feed is full GoFundMe links, mostly for friends of friends, who have lost everything in the LA fires. Welcome to 2025.
I lived in LA for three years, and can all too easily imagine what it might feel like under those red skies—though I’m grateful to have never known, in my time, such acute fear as my friends must be feeling now. There’s no point to my saying so except that this calamity remains on my mind, along with everything else, in these slow days before my school year starts up again. A waking nightmare, life in the United States involves going to work while inhuman things happen all around you—“now, more than ever.”
The wildfires condense everything of our collapsing empire into one singular spectacle, for in addition to being the most urgent kind of crisis there is for those living through it, the fires are also that: A disaster we have made, as a society, as a culture, and which is now being argued over by talking heads and internet trolls, even as people continue to flee the flames. You can teach a whole seminar on what’s happening in LA right now, as people did after Hurricane Katrina.
Obviously, (OBVIOUSLY!!!), the fires first and foremost (should) invoke the climate crisis, bringing what registers most days as an ambient anxiety that’s a precondition for being alive in 2025 into an acute example over which we can panic. Of course, we have plenty of examples to choose from there, from Hurricane Helene in in September to Milton just the next month.
The fires invoke COVID, the government’s gaslighting and minimizing of a debilitating disease, and the abandonment of public healthcare infrastructure that would see N95 respirators distributed for free or quality ventilators installed in schools, particularly in areas of high risk, whether from airborne pathogens or forest fire smog. This abandonment—which saw money dry up for school meals and the end of the child tax credits, along with most other lockdown-era government support, saw blue states like New York pursuing mask bans, saw coverage for covid vaccines disappear for the uninsured—is all the more galling given what’s likely coming is less neglect and more direct attacks on public health, and can be read as a theme of the biden administration and democrats generally, who did not strengthen the institutions they claimed to be worried about in advance of a coming dictator, utterly inadequate to the task they set for themselves.1
They invoke the loss of a useable internet, as well as the looming, threatened loss of reading, writing, and critical thinking skills promised by the advent of AI, a technology that steals copyrighted work in order to spit back nonsense at you and poorly, all so the richest companies in the world can continue to monetize things nobody wants. Insofar as the fires are caused and worsened by climate change, and insofar as AI datacenters contribute to these deteriorating environmental conditions, these issues are connected. Moreover, AI’s contributions to climate change are directly linked to a fourth crisis:
They invoke the erosion of reliable sources of information insofar as the fires immediately became the subject of widespread, weaponized, politicized disinformation on the internet. Coming right on the heels of Meta’s capitulation to trump, the willful deterioration of platforms like Twitter and Facebook reveals the techbro worldview fully and unmistakably in its totalizing nihilism: They will literally destroy the planet and facilitate the spread of the most vitriolic, least accurate information so long as it makes them money. Whereas the previous trump era was governed by a sense that zuckerberg and musk were misguided/colorblind/milquetoast liberals—or else “apolitical” types—ill-equipped to stand up to autocrats, the situation today sees them doubling-down and more on old fashioned bigotry. All this takes place in a context where major newspapers have become unreliable as sources of factual information, either because they’ve been taken over by some of those same techbro billionaires or because they’ve been defunded to the point of incapacity—or both. I love substack as a platform; but the solution can’t be that each of us gets the news from the dozen or so newsletters to which we individually subscribe, further exacerbating the fragmentation and atomization of life under neoliberalism.
Like all natural disasters in this country’s history, the fires invoke the systemic racism undergirding our social policy. We can see this in both the media coverage and the aid efforts in LA, which have focused on wealthier, whiter neighborhoods at the expense of ones more mixed in terms of race and class demographics.
Relatedly (as these points all are), they invoke our racist and exploitative carceral system, since hundreds of prisoners are fighting the fires for basically no money.
They invoke genocide insofar as the images out of LA both mirror and obscure coverage of Gaza, the destruction of which our government continues to subsidize at record levels, even as it’s unclear if, when, and how LA residents will rebuild—particularly after insurers decided it wasn’t a worthwhile investment to stay in some of the most affected areas.
They invoke the coming inauguration insofar as trump is already being treated like the president, and so can be heard threatening to withhold relief aid because of California politics, a foreboding foreshadow of things to come.
And speaking of California politics: the fires also invoke how even progressive-by U.S.-standards has meant inhumane treatment for poor people, who had already lost everything. Newsom’s encampment sweeps, some of which were still under way as the fires broke out, are ludicrous responses to a housing crisis inaugurated by the same neoliberal consensus that California democrats have also endorsed for decades, which doesn’t pursue investments in public housing or rent control schemes, doesn’t pursue anything besides luxury condo development by private equity firms, pushing prices ever higher.
So again and finally, the fires invoke peak neoliberalism, which leaves people to fend for themselves instead of offering social solutions to social problems (hence the GoFundMes); which subsidizes the priorities of corporations—even when they harm us and actively lie about doing so.
I don’t know what to say except that I’m mad enough to sit here and spend three hours tracking down all the links that I’ve been reading on my stupid social media feed since the fires began, as if compiling them proves I’m not out of my mind after all, as if venting on this platform does anything to help anyone. The skies are red in Los Angeles. Happy new year.
In the most recent episode of The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast—after an entire discussion dedicated to showing the right wing’s attack on journalism writ-large, and after living through a trump administration that infamously named the free press as the “enemy of the people”— journalist Susan Glasser, in response to the question “How do we approach covering trump 2.0?” can be heard favorably quoting Marty Baron saying “We’re not at war; we’re at work.” This, to me, is indicative of the failure of the entire liberal project: Only the right even understands that there’s a war on.