Fires and earthquakes are what any native Californian fears and understands.

Golden State Killer followers, evidence photos here.

I grew up in Santa Paula and Ventura, and on that night in October 1967, my baby brother was born. My dad was with my almost three-year-old brother and me, and we watched the fires consume South Mountain just across town. I was five and a half years old and remember it vividly.

It was terrifying, even though we were safe.

Of course, one of the worst things about this kind of catastrophe is that regardless of loss, it immediately turns you into a victim. Because you are. This kind of destabilization is unbelievably traumatizing. As I learned in the Golden State Killer case, being a victim can suck. Not only do you feel powerless, but others want to tell your story. Half the time, you don’t even know your story yet, so having someone tell it is dystopian and weird.

Add to this the complexity of the MAGA/GOP propaganda machine, where the fire victims are being used to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with what’s happening on the ground.

MAGA views victims through a complex lens shaped by political beliefs, media influences, and cultural framing. Their perspective often depends on the victim’s identity, context, and how the event aligns with its worldview. Victims must conform to the narrative, or they are not considered worthy of support.

1. Replace the actual event (fire) with a manufactured event (wokism) to support the narrative.

GOP propaganda began almost immediately, citing insane reasons for an act of God. Fox News host Megyn Kelly blamed DEI efforts for the department’s struggles to combat the wildfires, suggesting that a focus on diversity compromised operational effectiveness. However, experts attribute wildfires’ increasing frequency and intensity to climate change and extreme weather conditions rather than departmental diversity initiatives.

This kind of propaganda is inaccurate and non-productive for anyone in the fire zone. This nonsense has caused a backlash against victims, and it has nothing to do with them.

But it gets even crazier. A talk show host in England had to deal with a caller who insisted there’s a liberal agenda to tear down existing cities and rebuild Smart Cities, and frankly, we all should know this. “Amid this chaos, a bizarre claim has emerged on social media, alleging that the California wildfires were intentionally started as part of a “criminal land grab” to construct smart cities under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda,” reported by the Hindustan Times.

The Smart Cities conspiracy is a wacky one, but it has legs because the GOP encourages propaganda.

2. Victim blaming to advance an agenda

In some instances, MAGA rhetoric uses victim-blaming to demonstrate lack of conformity will be punished. Yes, even in trauma, you need to do it their way.

For example, the Speaker of the House and white Christian nationalist said, “Obviously, there has been water resource mismanagement. Forest management mistakes — all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership,” the speaker explained.

“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects. So that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid. That’s my personal view. I haven’t seen what the consensus is.”

This position allows the Republicans to move ahead with ways to strip federal aid to Californians by establishing a political means test that bases aid on obedience to a political philosophy -one that doesn’t support non-MAGA Americans (also known as “blue states”).

3. Being a victim is justification for horrible rich people’s behavior.

The goal of the Trump regime is to monetize everything. It’s a transaction-based “tit-for-tat” approach to problem-solving that most Americans set aside by sixth grade. While it’s still the basis for almost every Trumpian directive, it’s exceptionally insincere, immature, disconnected, and opportunistic.

In this situation, victims are revictimized by political game-playing and virtue signaling that has nothing to do with the emergency and everything to do with power and control. “We have to do this for the victims” is the call to arms, but the actions taken are not helpful (like terrorizing leadership instead of supporting them as they strive to aid victims).

At the same time, those in Trump’s back pocket are used to exacerbate the propaganda and create a narrative that public servants were derelict in managing the Santa Ana conflagration. Keith Wasserman, co-founder of real estate investment firm Gelt Venture Partners (take a look if you want to see what wealth looks like), provoked fury after a post on X asking for “private firefighters” to protect his land in the A-list neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades.

There’s no problem hiring private firefighters until there’s a problem hiring private firefighters. I worked for the California State Fire Marshall in public information. These firefighters know what they’re doing, and trust is a significant part of the job. Without a shared strategy and managed access to resources, there’s no trust, and private actors can potentially create more problems. (Mo money, mo problems.)

Interestingly, Kim Kardashian, also mentioned in the article, is evoked as an example. The reporter points out that everyone was repeatedly asked to conserve water. Still, some wealthy residents would rather everyone else “eat cake” than take personal responsibility (I can vouch for conservation. As a Californian, I still don’t flush every time, and water is off during teeth brushing).

Strict water-conserving measures have been in place since 2022, with residents restricted to watering their gardens twice a week for eight minutes. Kim was fined previously for going over her 2022 water allowance by using 232,000 gallons more than her allocation (someone please help me. What does one do with all that water?).

Kim has since installed water-saving measures. One neighbor of Ms Kardashin said: “Everyone was told to cut back on water precisely for this situation, to preserve it to fight fires. “They carried on watering because they could afford the fines.” “I can have it if I pay for it” should never apply to limited public resources.

4. Selective sympathy for those who are deemed MAGA-worthy.

MAGA sympathies often align with their political or cultural narrative. They amplify victims who reinforce their worldview, while those who contradict it are marginalized or ignored. In this case, in mainstream media, we’ve seen stories of how everyone (not based on gender, ethnicity, or wealth) has come together to feed, clothe, and support one another. Unfortunately, the MAGA propaganda machine is white-washing those stories (see anything about James Woods).

For those who aren’t wealthy, MAGA offers little comfort. Relying on “the free market,” the MAGA position is them’s the breaks when you live in a woke state. Without state and federal intervention, housing would be nearly impossible (in Santa Cruz, after the earthquake, we had special tents brought in). And consumer protection isn’t a MAGA or Project 2025 priority. Not at all.

Project 2025 proposes a significant overhaul of federal agencies responsible for consumer protection, including dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which it describes as unaccountable and politicized, and redistributing its functions to other agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It also calls for merging federal banking agencies and diminishing the roles of entities like the FTC and the National Labor Relations Board, which enforce critical consumer and worker protections. Critics argue these changes could weaken the enforcement of laws designed to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices, raising concerns that the plan prioritizes deregulation at the expense of consumer safeguards.

Some real estate agents are saying they’re already starting to see prices of rental units climb hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month. Prices of some units that had been on the market are up 15% to 20% in the last week, said Jeremiah Vancans, another Los Angeles real estate agent.

MAGA propaganda revictimizes those already traumatized by the fires.

Misinformation and priorities based on wealth and not people have significant political implications. It reinforces MAGA bias by prioritizing narratives that support their group identity and dismissing others as unworthy of sympathy.

It allows MAGA to justify hardline, anti-citizen stances on resources, climate change, and resilience. It strengthens polarization and mistrust as “victimhood” framing exacerbates political and cultural divides. Instead of one country, one people, MAGA propaganda creates two views of the same event, with an inherently biased interpretation of victims and their needs.

By analyzing MAGA views of victims, one can better understand how weaponized narratives of victimization are essential for political and ideological purposes. Their strategy reinforces MAGA’s drumbeat while excluding perspectives threatening their worldview.

And none of it is about making American lives better.

None.

---

Here are some photos of what was in the evidence box I received from the Ventura Police Department.