The Torching of Los Angeles Was Anti-Capitalist Vigilantism

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 05, 2026

 

Among the many things progressives would probably like to forget about the moral panic they succumbed to in the summer of 2020 is the extent to which they were willing to excuse property destruction.

 

“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.” The New Yorker editor David Remnick agreed. “We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” he wrote of the big-box and mom-and-pop stores alike that were put to the torch. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.” Sure, “looting is counterproductive,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher conceded. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

 

Of course, the property that was subject to vandalism and destruction wasn’t situated in their own backyards. Perhaps these and other permissive figures on the left would revise that outlook now that the vandals are razing their neighborhoods in the name of anti-capitalism.

 

Thirty-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht has been accused of igniting the devastating Pacific Palisades fire in January 2025, in which at least a dozen people died and over 16,000 structures were destroyed or damaged. According to prosecutors, he was inspired by the very same sentiments that animated the mobs of 2020.

 

Rinderknecht is portrayed in a trial memorandum released last week as “a lonely and erratic man who was angry at the world, particularly the rich,” the New York Times reported. The accused arsonist was also reportedly inspired by the actions of Luigi Mangione, accused of fatally shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson just weeks earlier.

 

“In the wake of the shooting, Mr. Mangione became a folk hero to some people,” the Times observed (including the Democratic Party’s leading lights). “Mr. Rinderknecht searched for Mangione-related news, using the search terms ‘free Luigi Mangione,’ ‘lets take down all the billionaires,’ and “reddit lets kill all the billionaires,’ according to court documents.” When asked by investigators why he did it, Rinderknecht compared his deed to the righteous blow Mangione struck against the capitalist enterprise. “We’re basically being enslaved by them,” the alleged arsonist reportedly insisted.

 

Back in 2020, the refrain bandied about like a mantra by those who were willing to excuse that summer’s violence maintained that property destruction cannot be violence, in part because property is insurable. The degree of mismanagement that has typified the rebuilding process in Pacific Palisades, as well as the market distortions California has imposed on the insurance industry, should disabuse the apologists for violence of that peculiar delusion. After all, maybe the CEO of NPR doesn’t know anyone in the suburbs of Minneapolis, but she probably has some acquaintances in Santa Monica.

 

Or maybe that’s too charitable. Perhaps those who were inclined to excuse property violence so long as it was designed to further a revolutionary reversal of social fortunes didn’t actually believe that the insurance industry would make it all better. Maybe they were just grasping for the nearest rhetorical weapon at hand. Maybe they just like violence.