Dispatches from a still-not-burning Los Angeles.

This is one of those times that you are faced with a lie so shameless, outrageous, and despicable that you need to step back for a moment and take it all in, letting the full weight of it settle on you. 

Kristi Noem: "I do know that LA wouldn't be standing today if President Trump hadn't taken action."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 31, 2025 at 7:37 AM

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the little civil unrest that we did see here in L.A. was solely because the Trump Administration was doing everything in its power to provoke a reaction. Even with all that, the incidents (at least those coming from the people and not the ICE agents) were minor. Other than the vandalizing of a few unoccupied Waymos—it’s difficult to convey how much people around here hate those cars—the incidents were few and minor, leaving no residents feeling threatened (at least by the protesters). Noem is taking a few firecrackers and blocked streets and trying to convince people this was the second coming of the Watts Riots of ’92.

At this point in the story, we all need to acknowledge that there is no apparent lower bound here—that while there might be lines that members of the administration would not cross, we shouldn’t assume that any specific act or position is beyond the pale.

I’m not going to delve into the questions of psychopathy or moral character. I do, however, have something to say about this specific lie, how it’s part of a larger myth, one for which the Establishment press has considerable culpability.

Through a combination of sensationalism, laziness, provincialism, various prejudices and bigotries, and a willingness to let conservatives dictate the narrative, the Establishment press (and, as always, the New York Times in particular) have done everything they could to propagate a fantasy of cities—especially Los Angeles—as post-apocalyptic hellscapes.

Before going on, our standard note on these stories: the relevant unit in almost all these cases is L.A. County versus the city of L.A. The city is large; the county is huge. It covers thousands of square miles and is home to almost 3% of the United States population—more than even NYC. That footage you saw of burning buildings during the Black Lives Matter protests? Entirely outside of the city. Most of the casualties from fires a few months ago? Mostly outside of the city.

The New York Times has a history of reporting on California—and especially Los Angeles—disasters with a barely concealed sense of glee. This extends to disasters that haven’t actually happened yet and which, if anything, threaten NYC more than they do the West Coast. Case in point: numerous stories on rising sea levels that ignore the fact that Los Angeles has an elevation much higher than that of New York City. Furthermore, the West Coast seldom faces hurricanes and the storm swells that often follow them.

The wildfires of earlier this year provided a perfect example of the paper’s coverage of these stories. The fires were horribly destructive. Dozens of people lost their lives. Millions had to deal with heavy smoke for days, serious enough to be life-threatening for people with pre-existing conditions. All that said, however, only about one-half of 1% of the county was caught in the fires. Despite this, the New York Times ran a series of sensationalistic stories with headlines like “Can Los Angeles Ever Recover?”

The coverage of the wildfires also put the class bigotry of the Establishment press on full display. Though the fire in Pacific Palisades was less deadly than that in Altadena, it got the overwhelming majority of the attention because the residents there were rich and famous.

That was, however, far from the most embarrassing display of the press’s bigotries. For that, you need to look to the Black Lives Matter protests. Despite this being, given its tremendous scale, one of the most peaceful mass protests the country has ever seen, the coverage often made it seem like angry mobs of Black people were coming for the readers. Go back and look at Tom Cotton’s dangerous and dishonest piece in the New York Times and then read the paper’s opinion editor defending the decision to run it. While Cotton did not speak for the paper, its leaders were disturbingly close to his point of view.

Recently, quotes from Marc Andreessen emerged talking about how he was supposedly radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement. This is, to a degree, disingenuous—we now know that Andreessen has always been a bit of a white supremacist, not to mention a hardcore anti-feminist—but his statement that Black people were declaring war on the rest of us would have been remarkably easy for New York Times readers to hold.