Month: January 2025

Eaton Fire #3: The Rumor Mill and What to Do About It

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist and author with an uncertain road ahead and almost no time or space to do the work of debunking disinformation. To support my writing, please subscribe to my Patreon page, or Venmo me directly, @rothschildmd.

One of the reasons certain people are drawn to conspiracy theories and alternative realities is that they provide easy answers to complex problems. It’s comforting to believe that someone has a plan, has control over what happens to you, and can be blamed when it all goes wrong. Whereas the most difficult and frustrating answer to any question is the one that no conspiracy theory provides: the answer of “we don’t know.”

Losing your house in a vast cataclysm is a catastrophe that’s always going to provide more questions than answers, more rumors than facts, and more uncertainty than settled knowledge. As such, it’s rife with the possibility for exploitation, scams, fraud, and tumbling down rabbit holes of disinformation and conspiracy theory.

Some of the questions are philosophical and unanswerable. Other questions are scientific, about the random and unknowable nature of fire. Of course, there are the questions brought up by the conspiracy theorists and disinformation gurus. Those are the ones that I and my fellow journalists work hard to try to come up with the actual answers for, as opposed to the false yet comforting ones that so many believers get sucked into.

The vast majority of the questions, however, are logistical. They revolve around timing and contacting people and timelines and knowledge that you don’t have access to because nobody does. They involve things that haven’t been decided upon yet, or take varying amounts of time, or that there’s no plan for. Those are the questions for which “we don’t know” isn’t just the best answer, it’s the only answer, at least for now.

Will our neighborhoods be sold off to developers? We don’t know.

Where will the kids be going to school? When will they start? We don’t know.

What exactly is FEMA going to do for our community? We don’t know.

Since the fire, I haven’t been paying as much attention to the conspiracy theories – which is probably not something that a journalist who covers conspiracy theories should admit. For one, I’m too busy trying to rebuild our life. But beyond that, it’s too abstract, too unmoored from reality to seem to matter in the moment. And in many cases, they’re just wrong in ways that I know to be wrong. The conspiracy theory that “DEI firefighters” caused the blaze to grow out of control is ridiculous, because I’ve seen firsthand how courageous and skilled the firefighters have been. I don’t need to debunk it because the fact that virtually anything in Altadena still stands debunks it.

Conspiracy theories about “space lasers” starting the blaze, the fire being set by the deep state to cover up P. Diddy’s crimes, or Gavin Newsom using the fires as a giant land grab to create “15 minute cities” to take away our freedom haven’t come up at all in any of the chats, text threads, Facebook groups, or phone calls I’m in with fellow survivors of the Altadena diaspora. It’s just not something any of us give a damn about.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a rumor mill, and it’s a powerful one. Whispers spread almost instantly of buildings burning down that didn’t, FEMA giving out vouchers that it wasn’t, of families getting burned out that weren’t, lawyers skulking around with bad intentions, checks coming to you that aren’t, taxes or fees waived that weren’t, and on and on. The rumors are powerful, filling people with either false hope or unwarranted fear. And they are everywhere in my community right now, spread by people not out of malice but out of sheer desperation to know what the hell is happening and what happens next. Rumors are spreading because nobody knows anything.

“We don’t know” is a deeply uncomfortable answer. But for so many questions, it’s all we have.

When will the water be safe to drink again? We don’t know.

Is Altadena going to keep its charm and diversity? We don’t know.

Should I sign on to one of these lawsuits? Who’s fault even is this? We don’t know.

If it helps, there are ways I’ve learned to navigate rumors that spring from uncertain times. One very easy way, particularly when it comes to conspiracy theories (which aren’t exactly the same as rumors) is to simply not engage. Getting into an argument with idiots on Twitter about how fire works and that trees survive fires because they’re full of water is not a good use of anyone’s time. I’ve ignored most of the conspiracy theories just because they’re really stupid and a waste of the energy I have to expend on things like making sure I have clean pants (yes!) and am getting enough sleep (definitely not).

Rumors are harder to deal with because they come from a place that wants to do good, especially when it involves spreading around news of vouchers or checks or lawsuits or areas that are safe to enter. Be gentle with the people sharing them, because they’re trying to get answers and find help. We all are. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to be extremely skeptical of anyone offering something that seems too good to be true, doesn’t make sense, or falls outside the bounds of how you know things work. If you see a meme or picture going around promising something or claiming something, that doesn’t mean it’s false, but it does mean you might want to take a few seconds and dig a little deeper – if you can. The rumors are flying so fast that it’s hard to even get a handle on all of them, much less see if any of them are actually true.

It also means not spreading news that hasn’t been confirmed, and that’s really hard to do. Even I’ve done it. I told our insurance adjuster that the Walsh house from Beverly Hills 90210 on Altadena Drive had burned down, when it hadn’t – “only” the house next door had. It’s a small thing and easily correctable, but I only said it because I heard someone else say it. Bad debunker, but understandable.

Most people in situations like this aren’t spreading rumors to be malicious or to troll people. Believe it or not, most people who aren’t terminally online and utterly brain poisoned don’t think that way. Rumors spread because we either want to know or think we know and want others to. It’s not a bad place to come from. Be gentle and understanding. We just want certainty and control, in a horrible time that offers nothing but uncertainty and helplessness.

When will I have a home to call my own like I used to? We don’t know.

Will my kids ever run around in our backyard, carefree and settled? We don’t know.

Is anything ever going to be the same again? We don’t know.

And it’s going to be a long time before we do. So the rumor mill will grind on, forcing us to cope with a deluge of falsehood and whisper, while we’re all just trying to get through the day and rebuild our lives.

Altadena will rebuild.

Eaton Fire #2: Lists Listing Lists

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist and author with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work, please subscribe to my Patreon page, or Venmo me directly, @rothschildmd. Only if you can afford it, of course.

When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door

The first thing you do when you find out your house burned down is to start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

Ok, no. That’s nonsense. The first thing you do is suppress the urge to find a hole to get sick in. Based on the stories I’m hearing from folks who also lost their houses in the Eaton Fire, some are more successful than others. Hey, no judgement.

So then, the second thing you do when you find out your house burned down, after the vomiting, is start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

For those who lost their homes in the wildfire plague of California, lists will become the currency of the realm. Notepads and piles of receipts become more valuable than gold. You will make lists on your phone, in your head, on scraps of paper, and in disjoined texts to yourself at three in the morning.

There are things you have to do for the remains of your last house so you stop paying for things you won’t need for a long time. You have to cancel DirecTV, your Stitch Fix subscription, your Amazon subscribe and save. You don’t want to get charged for your air filters and Flonase getting delivered to a burned out husk, after all. You have to call your mortgage company and explain very patiently that no, you don’t have a check from your insurance company to repair the damage to your house because your house doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaking of insurance, you have to start that ball rolling – assuming you’re lucky enough to not have gotten kicked off your homeowners policy. You have to make calls, start files, download pictures, and save everything electronically. They’ll want you to document everything you spend while out of your house, while also documenting everything you had in your house when it burned down so it can be replaced, or at least some version of it can be bought again. Assuming it can. The lists are granular and demand an absurd level of detail so as to make sure you don’t squeeze a few extra pennies.

Salad plates, white, ceramic, x12. Hundred year old brass Shabbat candlesticks, x2. Pushpins, clear, container, x1. Never opened.

You make lists of where you’ve stayed while on the road. Lists of things you’ll need to get at Target to be able to have something resembling clean clothes and some food, assuming they have anything left. Lists of people to thank for their generosity and kindness. Lists of donations. Lists of people to contact who you may or may not get around to. To-do lists for the next day, most of which you won’t get to because you’re strung out and wrung out and bone tired. Lists of lists.

Eventually, we’ll get to lists of things to do for the next house. But that’s so far down the line it’s not even possible to conceptualize it. So we stay in the realm of the immediate, the thing that has to get done today. That’s all any of us can handle.

Of course, there are other lists. I’ve seen multiple lists of businesses burned out of Pasadena and Altadena. Restaurants and shops and bars and people’s life’s work that are gone and might not ever come back. The coffee place where we grabbed horchata con espresso right after the elementary school holiday show. The dry cleaners where I took the suit I had made for my mom’s funeral – a suit that’s now gone. The bar in walking distance where I celebrated my 40th birthday, and where the bartender had seen me on CNN once.

And that’s to say nothing of the businesses burned out from the other fires, which I can’t even wrap my mind around yet. There are the lists of your friends who lost their homes, though in truth it would take less time to list those who hadn’t. There are the lists of the things they lost and the things they took with them. Some are heartwarming – the friends who were out of town but managed to get in touch with a neighbor who saved their cats and Social Security cards before the flames crept in. Others are ludicrous – the good friends who managed to save their house, while packing, among other things, a strapless bra meant for an evening gown. Hey, one day, right?

The lists come at you from every direction. Lists of historic structures, built from materials that aren’t made anymore. A century of American architecture decimated and just waiting to be turned into a vast field of glass and concrete shit boxes. Lists of places you can pick up free food and water, because the water in Altadena has been declared “do not use.” And there are the lists of GoFundMe pages from your friends, your neighbors, your community. You want to give to them all. But you can’t, because you need as much as you can get for yourself at the moment. A bottomless pit of need and despair.

The lists become documentation, not just for insurance purposes, but for remembrance. I’m finding in these first few days that witnessing and remembering is just as important as FEMA applications and itemizing Target receipts. Connecting with friends and going over what they saved, what they need, where they’ve been. Their lists. The list of our collective loss. This is how we even start to come to grips with what’s happened. We do it through writing it down, taking pictures, shooting videos, and leaving as many concrete reminders as we can.

So we make lists. We take notes. We scribble nonsense and send ourselves incomprehensible texts. It’s how we get through these days and do the things we need to do, but it’s also how we pay tribute to what we had and what we lost. Because there is just so goddamn much of it.

This piece will go up Monday, 1/13. We have a list of things to do for the day. Maybe we’ll even get to some of them.

Altadena Will Rebuild.

Eaton Fire #1: The Valiant Smoke Detector

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water.
With the heat rising in my eyes

What do you take when you’re trying to pack your house into your car and have no idea if you’ll be back again? Passports and tax files and the signed photo frame from your wedding, yes. The six bags of avocadoes you picked from the giant tree branch that was torn off int the windstorm earlier that day? Ah, no. The foul ball you caught at the Dodger game? The new LL Bean sweatshirt that you literally just got for Christmas and really liked? The artwork your kids made when they were 4 that were you probably were going to take a picture of and recycle? Hopefully – but probably not.

I saw the glow of the Eaton fire from my porch at 6:30 PM on Tuesday. It was distant, eerie, but not threatening. We had power. The wind was brutal, but our house was 100 years old and sturdy. A few hours later, we decided to be cautious and pack some things. We didn’t think too hard about it, because we weren’t even under an evacuation watch. We were being alarmist.

At 3:25 AM, our phones told us otherwise. We had to go. Now.

Of course, we had no power at that point and the house was freezing. The kids were freaking out. We were freaking out. I got dressed, but spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the right t-shirt, as if I were heading out for a night at the bar. We grabbed flashlights, filled water bottles, and grabbed a few more things. We left far more behind. We headed out into the howling wind, our streetlights dead to the world, and smoke filling our lungs like a bad day on the Western Front. We drove south, my radio still tuned to the SoCal Sound, a relic of another life a few hours ago.

Twelve hours and another evacuation later, we knew house was gone. We had an inkling – a neighbor sent us a screengrab of a KTLA report of their house on fire, with ours in the distance, also burning. Maybe it was just the avocado tree, right? Firefighters were there, so we may have gotten lucky. Around the same time, our smoke detector started sending us alerts, valiantly doing its job to the last, as it probably melted. We told ourselves that the air was a horror show, and just because the alarm was going off didn’t mean our house was necessarily on fire.

It was. Now it’s gone We haven’t seen what’s left of it yet, but neighbors and friends who have snuck back into the area told us, and a few took pictures. We recognized the porch, the coral tree in the front yard, the pavers. Whatever’s left won’t be useful, likely. Today, we started the process of filing an insurance claim, putting our mortgage on pause, and, oddly, cancelling the coffee subscription that sustained us on seemingly endless mornings getting our kids out the door.

We’re safe and far from the fires now. The air is cool and slightly acrid, but nothing close to Altadena, which is still something of a war zone. We’re heading north tomorrow, reduced to refugees in a parade of plug-in hybrids. You always think of people fleeing catastrophe as slow-moving lines of families pushing carts with their meagre belongings, and women wearing babushkas, heading west to avoid rampaging hordes. That’s us now. Except our babushkas burned alongside our avocados, the foul ball from the Dodger game, and the LL Bean sweater.

We aren’t alone in our journey. So many families and friends lost homes that it would be easier to list those who didn’t. Altadena is a tight-knit and quirky community where people come because they want to escape the packed-in constant closeness of LA. It’s affordable, or at least it used to be. Because of the Pasadena area’s long history of segregation, Altadena is where many Black families were able to buy property, and the city is a working-class mix of races and cultures and incomes, all living together in 100 year old cottages and Craftsman bungalows.

Over the last decade, what was once a bit of a wilderness had become a place where younger people and working class families wanted to move, because of the vibe and the green open spaces and the quirky feeling of a place that wasn’t urban, wasn’t suburban, and wasn’t rural. You were five minutes from hiking trails that took you to a waterfall, and a half hour from Dodger Stadium. Nothing like this existed anymore in LA. This wasn’t influencer country or glass and steel box McMansion hell. Celebrities moved into town and nobody knew who they were. Little league teams overran pizza places after games, and the local park drew huge crowds on Sundays for organized soccer games where nobody spoke English. People in Altadena look out for each other, families let their kids walk around the block the way kids used to, we protect the look and historical nature of our houses, and you always run into someone you know when you go out for tacos. It’s a community. A village.

I have no idea if that’s gone for good, but it’s gone for now. It vanished with the fire that I watched grow from a distant glow to a looming inferno to a destroyer of stability. And it’s still going, one of many fires turning Los Angeles into something unrecognizable, driven by a vicious wind that people who lived here for half a century said they’d never experienced. Victims of a planet that increasingly seems to not want anything to do with the fossil fuel and cheap plastic obsessed humans who control it.

Because it’s 2025, there’s been some negativity, conspiracist fearmongering, and brain-rotted lunacy. I’ll get to some of that eventually on this blog. But it’s been vastly outweighed by generosity, mutual aid, good wishes, offers of lodging and financial help, and people reaching out to give whatever they can. The spirit of everyone being in this together that we had in the early days of the last generational trauma we suffered through, the pandemic, is being felt even by people who are not actually in this. It’s incredibly heartening, and I’ll carry it with me right alongside the memories of the stuff we lost, the panicked run from our house, and the confusion and anguish of the next day. It’s bad, but it’s not all bad.

Thank you for going down this road with me as I attempt to document life as a climate change refugee. I can’t commit to any kind of regular schedule, pretense of editing, or coherence. I’ve had eight hours of sleep in two days, so I’m not sure if I’m actually typing words at this point. But I hope to write down what I’m going through, so I remember and so other people can experience something that nobody should ever have to experience. I want to chronicle our adventure, Altadena’s rebirth, and Los Angeles’ future.

And for god’s sake, make sure all your important documents are in the same place.

More to come.

To support my work during this difficult and uncertain time, please subscribe to my Patreon, or you can donate directly to my Venmo, @RothschildMD. Please only give if you can afford to.

Altadena Will Rebuild

January 6th and the Rewriting of Memory

Mike Rothschild

Upon his soldiers discovering the first Nazi concentration camps in western Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower personally toured the sites of the Final Solution. Writing in his memoirs after the war, Eisenhower said he “visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” He would also ask members of the press and Congress to walk the grounds and see what he and his men had seen, so they could show it to the public “in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”

As many journalists and observers will write about, today marks four years since the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election – or die trying. And while Eisenhower insisted the camps be documented so that nobody could deny their existence with any credibility, cynical doubt and propaganda are now the currency of the west.

With a few exceptions, Holocaust denial never flourished beyond the fringes of neo-Nazi dead-enders and Hitler worshippers selling pamphlets to each other. But January 6th denial and the rewriting of current events, has shown enormous staying power and mainstream appeal, to the point of being one of the biggest factor’s in Donald Trump’s improbably comeback. The thing that looked to have doomed his political career is now its engine.

The rewriting of history around January 6th has become an industry that denial of the camps could never have become. If you deny that millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were murdered by a methodical Nazi machine, you’re probably not going far in mainstream public life. But if you deny that January 6th was an organized attempt to violently seize total power and nullify an election, you’re probably going to be a superstar in the GOP. You might even get your own podcast.

The American press covered January 6th, its planning, its minute-by-minute execution, and its prolonged aftermath with as much vigor and enthusiasm as maybe any subject since 9/11. But for a certain segment of the population, all of it was a lie. To Trump, his inner circle of acolytes, and his vast (and growing) base, January 6th wasn’t an insurrection, it was a “day of love” meant to show support for the rightful winner of the election. The angry, violent, armed, unhinged mob that breached the Capitol was actually a “sightseeing tour.” The instigators of the insurrection weren’t a loose alliance of racists and anti-government extremists, but actually federal agents directing these peaceful tourists who were just there to express legitimate political differences and their sincere belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

On and on the false history goes, rewritten on the fly by cynical grifters and political hacks. The Capitol Police were the unhinged ones who viciously attacked the meek and humble Trump supporters, while the peaceful patriots caught up in the dragnet are hostages and political prisoners. Nobody was there to hurt anyone except the fed plants and undercover antifa soldiers who turned the day dark. There were no Republican criminals that day, the real criminals are the Soros-funded Trump-hating members of Congress investigating the “attack” to influence the 2024 election. Democrats in Congress weren’t under siege that day, they planned the attack or, at the very least, allowed it to happen. And Donald Trump never told anyone to do anything wrong, and did nothing wrong himself. He even told the “mob” to go home peacefully and that he loved them. Because it was a day of love.

Falsifying history gets easier as events recede and witnesses die off. But falsifying current events takes willpower, commitment, and a vast and relentless drive to tell yourself that the things you saw happen didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean you’re being lied to, like a conspiracy theory requires. It means you’re lying to yourself. Over and over and over. And if we know one thing about devotion to Donald Trump, it’s that self-delusion is a requirement.

Reeling from his loss and his party turning against him in the days after January 6th, Donald Trump decided that the only way to recover from the event was to created an alternative history of it and act as if it were the real one. At first, he was in exile, rambling to a seemingly shrinking audience that he’d won the election, that January 6th was a setup, and that the people who rioted and killed for him were heroes.

The falsified history was that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but nobody did anything wrong except the Democrats and law enforcement. And he just kept at it, relentlessly, and with no oxygen given to any other narrative.

Of course, it worked. It started working on the same day as the attack, with hundreds of thousands of tweets immediately calling the riot fake, a false flag, and a fed hit job – all based on Trump’s own casting of blame elsewhere. In the months after the insurrection, when ardent Trump acolytes in Congress began shifting blame to mythical FBI plants and antifa infiltrators, it was in full swing.

The Republican history of January 6th, the one clung to by the party that will soon control every branch of the federal government, is that it was a peaceful protest ruined by federal jackboots and outside agitators. And it’s a protest that the American people, much more concerned about the price of eggs and the possibility of being raped by Haitian migrants, don’t care about anymore. Soon it will be swept out of the history books entirely, with Trump pardoning all the “hostages” and going after the investigators who tried to hold him to account

It never happened.

Except, of course, it did happen.

Relatively few people saw the immediate aftermath of the Nazi camps, and virtually none are still with us. Most of us only know of the Nazi horror through the footage taken in the aftermath, the testimony of those who survived, and the blubbering fake repentance of those who did the deeds. But millions of Americans were watching the news and seeing in real time how the American electoral system teetered on the edge.

We all saw it together. Our hearts raced and our jaws dropped and we all asked ourselves and each other “can this really be happening?” Because it was happening. We heard the screams of the Capitol Police officers being torn apart. We saw the blood on the floors and the shit on the office walls. We know it wasn’t a peaceful love fest, but a sacking that would make a Visigoth proud. We know what January 6th was – not a “day of love”, but an organized and well-planned attempt to prevent a presidential election loser from transferring power to a presidential election winner. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters knew what it was. Until they decided otherwise and began lying to themselves.

The more an event is documented, the more effort needs to be put into making us question our memories of the event. And that’s ultimately what J6 denial is about – not even so much rewriting history, but rewriting our memories. Trying to convince us that what we saw wasn’t what we saw, what we experienced wasn’t what we experienced, and our feelings – our horror – weren’t real.

Don’t let Trump and his acolytes rewrite your memories of that awful day. Take them with you, speak of them often, tell those too young or disengaged to have been watching what you saw. Don’t allow them to cynically deny what they did, and never question the depravity and deeply unpatriotic derangement of those who did it.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will pardon those responsible for January 6th. But no matter what their legal outcomes are, we can hold them to account with our memories and witnessing. We must all be the documentarians of the horror of January 6th, and we can never allow ourselves to be convinced that it was anything else than what we saw.

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