Calumny and Psychological Avoidance

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 07, 2025

 

South Carolina state authorities have so far found no evidence that the catastrophic house fire that consumed Circuit Judge Diane Goodstein’s home was a deliberate arson.

 

Three people were hospitalized with serious injuries sustained in the blaze that destroyed the judge’s Edisto Island home, and that’s horrific enough. For some, however, the fire could not have been an accident. To them, it must have been an act of vengeance against one of Donald Trump’s many enemies.

 

“I urge our citizens, elected officials, and members of the press to exercise good judgment and not share information that has not been verified,” State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel warned. His prudential admonition went ignored.

 

TIME observed in its coverage of the fire that the judge “had received death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire,” which is a wholly unacceptable but distressingly common feature of modern life. The threats coincided with her ruling against a Trump administration effort to access voters’ data in the Palmetto State. In the hours before the fire, Trump adviser Stephen Miller accused another judge, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, of “legal insurrection” for blocking a deployment of National Guard troops to Oregon. Trump himself has castigated other judges, too, using highly provocative language. The inference readers are supposed to glean is clear.

 

And that inference led some reckless officials and public personalities to declare outright that the fire was an act of potentially murderous pyromania committed in Donald Trump’s name.

 

“Will Trump speak out against the extreme right that did this??” Representative Daniel Goldman bellowed. “We’ve talked today already about crossing Rubicons, right?” onetime Justice Department official Mary McCord told the ashen-faced MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who had just rattled off a litany of circumstantial evidence implicating MAGA in the fire. “And when you’re starting to attack judges because of their rulings, we’re in a very, very dangerous position in this country.” Esquire’s pathologically conspiratorial Charles Pierce declared that there was “more to this than the bare bones of the event,” in part because Miller had protested the accusation that he was responsible for inciting arson too much. “A pile of ashes next to a river is a bit too on the nose, metaphor-wise,” he wrote.

 

This reaction is attributable to the stimuli in the political environment driving Democrats to distraction. Surely, the increasingly concerning threat environment, as represented by genuine threats to the safety of public officials, has everyone on edge. Those threats are not coming exclusively from one political faction or the other.

 

But Democrats are also deeply discomfited by the degree to which their co-partisans have been executing political attacks on symbols of federal authority. As a result, they have been stripped of the only currency they value — a plausible claim to victimization — and they’ve spent the last several weeks scrambling in the attempt to recoup some of that lost capital. Maybe they genuinely assumed the fire was deliberate. Maybe something inside them wanted it to be deliberate, if only to bend the narrative arc back in their direction.

 

This was not a harmless calumny. Thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of Americans who get their news from figures like these now believe that this fire was an act of MAGA terrorism. They may be guided in the actions they take in the future by that inaccurate impression. Some of those actions may be vengeful or even violent. Perhaps that unfounded assumption will merely inculcate in them undue paranoia and fatalism. Either way, the negative emotions these Democratic partisans conjured up are baseless.

 

Perhaps these Democrats abandoned prudence and discretion in the effort to radicalize their followers because they think harnessing radical zeal is their only pathway back to power. If that’s the most charitable explanation we can muster, it’s still no excuse. Their accusations — and they were accusations — were reckless. If those who made them value the preservation of the American civic compact, they will be retracted.