The Los Angeles mayoral race is in the news, and with it, the ghosts of the Palisades still smoldering beneath the surface of every debate exchange. On the stage last week, mayoral candidates Spencer Pratt, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, and City Councilmember Nithya Raman duked it out over who was to blame for the Palisades Fires. Rightly so. Pratt correctly pointed out that Democratic leadership was responsible for the empty water reservoirs and hydrants running dry, as well as the misappropriation of funds from the city’s operational budget. However, they all failed to address the actual cause of the fire, which is symptomatic of a much larger rot wreaking havoc across our political landscape. It’s been discovered that a Left-wing arsonist named Jonathan Rinderknecht intentionally started the fire that killed 12 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Prosecutors say he was “fixated” on Luigi Mangione and “held a resentment of the rich.” Rinderknecht searched the terms “free Luigi Mangione” — the man who brutally murdered husband, father, and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the dark streets of New York City in December 2024. He also searched “lets take down all the billionaires” and “reddit lets kill all the billionaires.” He ranted to his Uber passengers about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of vigilante justice. He told investigators, explicitly, that someone might commit arson in the Pacific Palisades out of resentment; the same ideological desperation, he said, that motivated the murder of Brian Thompson. Remove the accelerant and the matches, and he is quoting a standard-issue Liberal pundit. This is among the single most destructive acts of domestic terrorism in modern American history. Over 23,000 acres burned — an estimated $25 billion in damage. Fifty-six percent of Palisades is gone, the result of one man motivated by a coherent, widely distributed ideology, and it has received a fraction of the media coverage it deserves. Why? Because the perpetrator was a leftist. Not a fringe extremist in the traditional sense, but a regular, slightly unhinged leftist. This is nothing out of the ordinary from what we see on a regular basis.  Just recently, a one-eyed TikTok user announced plans to assassinate the president and his children. Obama’s friend and colleague Mark Hamill posted to X that “if only” the president were in a grave. After the president was almost assassinated yet again, a UnitedHealthcare worker was fired for publicly lamenting that the shooter missed. When she took to TikTok to complain, the comment section rushed to her defense. The shooter himself, Cole Allen Thomas, was a seemingly regular, only ever-so-slightly unhinged leftist. He was, by all accounts, normal, until he did the abnormal. Increasingly, Democrats of all stripes are publicly expressing their hatred for billionaires, the wealthy in general, anyone who achieves success – honestly, anyone who’s happy – and this one goes without saying: anyone within 10 feet of a MAGA voter. This hatred, coupled with a rapid and upward trend of political violence where the ends justify any means, is dangerous. Forty-two percent of the Left says political violence is sometimes justifiable. Left-wing violence is at an all-time high. A record number of liberals identify as religiously unaffiliated, medicated, alone, and depressed — conditions their own leaders have done nothing to address and everything to exploit. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mouths off lies about American history to manufacture resentment. Barack Obama lectures about Republican radicalization while posing for photos with terror sympathizers. The New York Times platforms terror-sympathizing podcasters who have explicitly called for killing capitalists and watching them bleed out in the streets. Maine is on the verge of primarying a candidate with a Nazi tattoo, while the national press yawns. The leaders of the Left are not bystanders to this violence; they are its architects. They build the ideological framework, fan the resentment, and then act bewildered when ordinary people take the next logical step. Jonathan Rinderknecht lit a match that burned through 56% of the Palisades, but the kindling had been laid for years by politicians, media figures, and cultural institutions that have spent a decade telling the most unstable among us that the rich are their oppressors, that the system deserves to burn, and that those who act on that conviction are, at worst, romantics ahead of their time. One Leftist. One raging case of class resentment — 23,000 burned acres. And nobody wants to talk about it.