Democrats and their left-wing media lapdogs beclowned themselves after their manufactured outrage claiming “climate change” had caused the Pacific Palisades fire earlier this year turned out to be a big, fat lie.

After spending months stoking climate hysteria by blaming oil companies and Republican policies for the California wildfires, it turned out the blaze was started by a left-wing arsonist.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California charged Jonathan Rinderknecht — a former Pacific Palisades resident now living in Florida — with maliciously starting the Palisades Fire of January 2025.

BOMBSHELL: Smoking Gun May Reveal Left-Wing Eco-Terrorism Behind Palisades Fire

We have uncovered what appears to be a Facebook page belonging to recently charged Palisades arsonist Jonathan Rinderknecht, exposing him as a radical climate alarmist, pro-vegan extremist, and… pic.twitter.com/NZYLFmHwhg

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 9, 2025

“The complaint alleges that a single person’s recklessness caused one of the worst fires Los Angeles has ever seen,” Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli said.

Today we are announcing the arrest of 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht on a criminal complaint charging him with maliciously starting what became the Palisades Fire in January.
⁰The complaint alleges that Rinderknecht’s started a fire in Pacific Palisades on New Year’s Day –… pic.twitter.com/UzrFa0Lmrz

— Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (@USAttyEssayli) October 8, 2025

Investigators said on Jan. 1, Rinderknecht — who donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign — set fire to a hiking trail off Lachman Lane in Los Angeles.

“Although firefighters quickly suppressed the Lachman Fire, unbeknownst to anyone, the fire continued to smolder and burn underground,” the Justice Department said.

“On January 7, heavy winds caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground in what became known as the Palisades Fire,” according to the DOJ.

The Palisades Fire killed 12 people and burned more than 23,000 acres of land in the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and the Santa Monica mountains, CBS News reported.

In the days before he started the deadly wildfire, 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht obsessively listened to a rap song whose music video showed the protagonist gleefully lighting things on fire.

In the months preceding the Palisades Fire, Democrats frivolously stoked environmental hysteria.

During his farewell presidential address, Biden blamed the fire on “climate change.”

Similarly, leftist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote on X: “Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.”

80,000 people told to evacuate.

Blazes 0% contained.

Eight months since the area has seen rain.

The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable.

Climate change is real, not “a hoax.”

Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is. pic.twitter.com/TDyZZEPmoI

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 8, 2025

Democrats and their media lapdogs have been rabidly hyping the sham narrative that climate change is an “existential threat” as part of a cynical move to push socialist agendas.

“It’s a fiction of the media and the politicians who like to promote that notion,” physicist Steven Koonin told Tucker Carlson in 2021.

Lest anyone dismiss Koonin as “right-wing,” it bears noting that he was undersecretary for science in former President Barack Obama’s Department of Energy.

Despite the nonstop environmental fearmongering from Democrats and their media minions, “human influences” are not responsible for natural disasters, such as hurricanes and intermittent heat waves, which are just as common today as they were in 1900.

“The warmest temperatures have not gone up in the last 60 years,” Koonin noted.

The physicist also berated the scientific community for not pushing back at clueless politicians and the irresponsible media.

Allowing these lies to metastasize in the public consciousness causes unnecessary panic and erodes the credibility of legitimate environmental scientists who don’t endorse this mass hysteria.

“It is a failure of the scientific community not to stand up and say, ‘Guys, you know, you have over-egged the custard. You really need to be much more circumspect in how you talk about this,’” Koonin said.

Environmental expert Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, echoed these sentiments when he asserted there is “zero evidence” that we’re in the midst of a climate emergency.

Zero evidence of “climate emergency”.

“Almost everywhere you look, climate change is having only small, and often benign, impacts. The impact of extreme weather events ― hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts ― are, if anything, declining.” https://t.co/YitpkwawKK pic.twitter.com/P6Wq9ICXh0

— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) February 4, 2021

Like Koonin and some other environmental experts, Moore slammed climate alarmism as pseudoscientific propaganda whose goal is to redistribute wealth and usher in a new world order.

“It is clear that the highly exaggerated claims … are not so much out of concern for endangered species as they are a front for a radical political, social and economic ‘transformation’ of our entire civilization,” Moore said during a 2019 congressional hearing.

“As with the manufactured ‘climate crisis,’ they are using the specter of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance,” Moore explained.

In 2019, a nonprofit think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute compiled a 38-page report chronicling the countless false predictions hyperventilated by Democrats and climate alarmists over the past 50 years.

“Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s,” the report asserted. “They continue to do so today.

“None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.”

Actual climate change pronouncements over the years. pic.twitter.com/j7mRTTUga3

— Michael Eades, M.D.???? (@DrEades) January 16, 2015

The conclusion of the past five decades of failed apocalyptic predictions was that the false prophets shrieking about climate change were doing so to push partisan political agendas.

Just as they have with the overused “race card,” Democrats have weaponized “climate change” to stoke public panic in order to push leftist policies that have little to do with the environment and everything to do with raising taxes and taking money from one group to give to another.

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