Comedians Blame LA Fires on Terrorists, Homeless People, and “Illegals”

I shouldn’t be, but I’m still shocked at the way comedy’s usual offenders have become indistinguishable from Alex Jones in their responses to the Los Angeles fires. On paper it makes perfect sense: the pandemic turned them all into public health denialists (under the guise of skepticism toward Big Pharma and government overreach), so it’s only natural that other crises would scramble their brains even further. Still, their sheer detachment from reality is jarring to behold. Consider Tim Dillon this week:

The cities may be toast. We don't know. There's arsonists running around, setting fires all over the place. They're arresting them one by one. They're trying to—they let one guy out, and I think some of them might be genuinely homeless. But by the way, if you were a terrorist group, maybe being funded by a foreign country or not, wouldn't you disguise cells as homeless people? Because in LA there are so many homeless people. If you wanted to blend in LA, you'd just be homeless.

So if I'm a foreign country and I'm talking to my terrorist cells and I go, "Guys, in order to blend into this society, you must shit on the street and be homeless and no one..." And they're going to go, "Wait a minute, won't that... Isn't that a tell? Won't we get arrested immediately? Won't that give us away?" I go, "No, no, no, no, no. You're the safest people in the town. Sleep on someone's lawn, piss on yourself, shit on the street. No one will even say anything. You will not be stopped by the police. In fact, if people call the police and say, 'A man is shitting on my lawn,' the police hang up the phone. They don't care. There's nothing for them to do.’ So if you're going to assimilate into Los Angeles society, you must be homeless."

So I can't quite say. If this is an organized terrorist attack, by the way, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. This is our one weakness. No one would even say anything about a homeless guy with a gas can. These dumb cunts in the Palisades, if they saw a homeless man with a gas can, they'd go, "He's just having some fun. He's probably trying to warm himself up." Because their brains have been rotted.

Rotted, indeed. Now consider this repulsive anti-homeless rant from Whitney Cummings:

Homeless people in LA are unstoppable, okay? And in a way, I'm just telling you, they're in a way better situation at this point than Kate Hudson. It's a lot. It's a to take on. And here's the other thing, for those of you who go like, "Why are you coming after homeless people?" Because homeless people, it used to be like, "Yes, homeless person, give this person money. Oh my God, homeless, this is heartbreaking." Because it used to be vets. It used to be heroes that our country failed, remember? Now it's just zombies, dude. Now it's just, what's that stuff? Tranq. Tranq. It's meth and a bunch of other... I don't know. I'm sure I took it by accident during the pandemic, but it's a different breed of homeless people, dude.

And I think they just realized, "Oh, I can just set this entire city on fire. Things aren't going to change for me. Why not?" Whether they got paid to do it. I don't know. Is it arson? Is it arson? I don't know. Is it arson if you know that homeless people be cooking and you know 80-mile winds are coming and you go to Ghana, is that arson? I don't know.

Two pieces of context make this especially disturbing. One, Cummings has spoken at length in recent years about her own recovery journey, telling Catherine Cohen a few weeks ago that she believes in a higher power thanks to her 12-step program; now, here she is justifying her contempt for homeless people by describing them as zombie meth heads. Two, as the fires have raged, Cummings has posted footage on Instagram and Twitter of herself roaming LA searching for arsonists, explaining how she plans to accost them with a pair of wooden swords. Vigilantism and open disgust towards homeless people—always a great combination. 

You are wondering what Joe Rogan has to say about all this, and I’ve got your back: unlike his peers, he believes it is not homeless people starting the fires, but undocumented immigrants. Here he is in a recent, five-hour episode of his podcast featuring Shane Gillis, Ari Shaffir, and Mark Normand:

Normand: Boy, you're about to get an influx in Texas with the fires. It's about to get triple the size over here.

Shaffir: You're going to get a ton of people here.

Rogan: Listen, I bet we can get more comics.

Shaffir: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Somebody lost their home—

Rogan: I'm looking at new spaces. I'm looking at new things.

Normand: Well, Whitney's about to have no home.

Gillis: She was thinking about Texas anyway.

Rogan: She was thinking about Texas anyway, but it was very close to her house.

Normand: Her posts are getting a little unhinged. She's got to get over here.

Rogan: First of all, she's already unhinged, and she's in the middle of a war zone when you got illegals lighting fires that are causing $150 billion worth of damage. If someone dropped a bomb on the Palisades, it wouldn't have done as much damage.

Normand: True.

Rogan: Except it would've killed more people. But if they evacuated the area, because they knew a bomb was going to hit and the bomb did that... That's just like a bomb. And if there's human beings that lit those fires and caused that to happen, which it seems there are, it was literally like they had a bomb. It's just we don't think about it that way because it's not an actual bomb.

I appreciate this clip because it handily situates the Rogan crowd’s conspiracist turn in the context of Rogan’s colonization of Austin during the early years of the pandemic. What I take away from those rants by Tim Dillon and Whitney Cummings—the latter a legitimate A-list comedian and TV star—is that they now exist in an ecosystem without any guardrails preventing them from careening over the edge like this. No one is telling them to take a beat, no one is telling them to get offline, no one is telling them to stop hunting homeless people. 

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That ecosystem exists largely thanks to Rogan, an honest-to-goodness friend and defender of Alex Jones, who took advantage of the pandemic to transform comedy into a business that encourages this sort of behavior. Worse, it’s clear from the above conversation that he will only use the crises of the future to expand his influence.

This is concerning for many reasons we’ve discussed ad nauseam in this newsletter, but I would like to emphasize one of them just a little bit more. Donald Trump will retake power in two days, and his regime plans a disastrous rollback of the rights of LGBTQ Americans. As a few recent conversations in Roganworld have also made clear, these comedians will be more than happy to provide cultural cover for this rollback. Here’s Cummings again:

All right everyone. I'm trying to figure out how this happened in California so that I don't say something that's inaccurate. I came across a video of the fire chief, a lesbian. Love it, great. Fan of lesbians. Tried to be one, didn't take, I don't think I'm a lesbian, I just, I live in Los Angeles and the men are so effeminate that honestly, at this point, dating a woman is the straightest thing you can do. So I just—anyway, talking about recruiting more lesbians into the LAFD to be firefighters. I think lesbians can be firefighters. Dope, fine, I am not thinking about your genitals or your preferences when I need a hero.

But is that not like—why is it okay? That'd be like a gay man being like, "we need more gay men in here." That'd be like me going, "we need more hot guys in here to be firefighters." That would be like a dude be like, "we just need more hot blondes. That's what we need. And I will not stop until there are more people that I'm attracted to or that are in my dating pool." Isn't that essentially just recruiting people in your dating pool to work at your office?

[Citing a tweet by Charlie Kirk] Wait, all the people in charge of Ellie's fire response are lesbians named Kristen? I do not recall voting on a prop that said we could recruit our fire team off Grindr. What?

This is just good old-fashioned homophobia. So is this, from Andrew Schulz’s podcast:

Schulz: Also, have gays fallen off now that we accept them? This new level of gays ain't really cracking, right?

Alexx Media: Yeah. Now they gotta do trans.

Schulz: Yo, actually, that is real thing.

Akaash Singh: Trans came and took up their shine.

Schulz: Are there any more gays in new shows? It's just trans.

Media: No, I ain't really counting.

Schulz: I mean, anytime I see a trans, I start counting. I am just like, "Well, what's going on here?"

Media: But we're not counting the gays anymore.

Singh: Yeah, you might just not be noticing it.

Media: They got mad gays and you're just not counting.

Schulz: But when I see a trans, I notice there's no gay.

Singh: If you told me Elphaba was gay in Wicked, I'd believe it. She wasn't, obviously.

Schulz: But she's not.

Mark Gagnon: I wonder if they're getting less gay because they don't have to rebel. They're kind of like, "Yeah, I'm just a guy and I bang dudes."

Schulz: Which is cool.

Gagnon: Seems like a vibe.

Schulz: We're down with that.

Gagnon: Yeah.

Schulz: We believe that.

Gagnon: But now that they don't have to take a stand, they're just like, "Yeah, I'm just a gay guy." So now you don't notice. Now they're crypto gays.

Schulz: It's kind of what we want.

Media: "Crypto gays."

Gagnon: Yeah, sneaking in.

Schulz: We don't want them defined by their sexuality. But before, they were. Yeah. What, am I wrong?

Media: I don't think they were defined by their sexuality.

Singh: Shut the fuck up.

Media: I think you guys just point it out all the time.

Singh: I hate this guy. I'm so fucking sick of this guy. Get off the fucking podcast.

Media: I think they just wanted to live their fucking life in peace.

Schulz: [To Singh:] Can you say what I'm trying to say?

Singh: Yeah. [To Media:] Shut the fuck up!

Gagnon: That is what you're trying to say.

Schulz: Man, that is so much better than the way I said it.

Gagnon: God damn, dude. Oh, fun police over here.

Media: I'm sorry I care about people, guys.

Gagnon: Oh, shut up. No you don't, you're autistic.

Schulz: You know like a black dude whose whole identity is like, "White people, the oppressors, and they're fucked up and all white people are racist." Like that's their entire identity.

Gagnon: Yeah.

Schulz: That's just exhausting. Your whole identity shouldn't be wrapped around the racism that you've experienced.

Singh: It should be a part of who you are.

Schulz: Yeah. It could be a part of things you say, but it can't define only you. And I feel like the gay identity, the gay voice, the gay way affect, the dress, all that kind of stuff. Yes, it's a culture within itself, but part of it is this rejection of what it is to be a heterosexual man. And I think what Mark was saying is, the more accepted they become, the less they'll need to adopt this new identity as a way to have this peer group and community.

Gagnon: Very well said.

And finally let us return to another segment from the above episode of Rogan’s show, in which the crew complains about the US military paying for service members’ gender reassignment surgeries:

Rogan: Of the 243 gender reassignment surgeries performed on military personnel since 2016. 50 of them took place between 2016 and December 31st, 2017 and 193 occurred from must January 1st, 2018 to December 31st, 2019 through the first two years that President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would bar transgender individuals from serving in the US military. 

Shaffir: Dave Smith has the best idea about that—transgenders shouldn't be in the military, and all the liberals like, "How dare you?" He goes, "Oh yeah. Right, because your stand should be, transgenders should also kill unarmed people in the Middle East." How about just don't kill? You guys are getting it wrong.

Rogan: It's just weird. If they're paying for their surgeries. Are their surgeries paid for by the military? Find out if that's the case.

Shaffir: Of that $15 million—you missed that stat—$3.1 was surgeries and $11.9, or $11.3, was psychotherapy. 

Rogan: Interesting. 

Gillis: Which is also made up gobbledygook. 

Rogan: Look at this. Pentagon has spent $15 million in the past five years to treat 1,892 transgender troops. 

Shaffir: How much is that per troop? 

Rogan: How much did they pay for the regular troops? Including $11.5 million for psychotherapy, $3.1 million for surgeries. That's wild. They did pay for the surgery. That's wild. Removal of breasts, testicles, hysterectomies, and labiaplasty. Creation or resurfacing [sic] the flesh around a vagina 

Shaffir: Reshaping it? I know a bunch of girls that need that. 

Gillis: I had a couple girlfriends that should enlist. 

Rogan: Get a tune-up. How wild is that? Russia must be laughing their fucking asses off. You ever seen the commercials, the Russian commercials when they shit on America? It's always like, "How many genders do you have?" 

Gillis: It's very funny. 

Normand: That's embarrassing. 

Rogan: It's always just mocking all the crazy gender shit we're involved in. How long before that just goes away? 

Gillis: The gender stuff? 

Normand: It might. 

Rogan: Yeah, I think it goes away. 

Normand: Could be a fad. 

Gillis: Yeah, it was a fad. 

Rogan: It drops down to the stable one percent that it's been forever. 

Gillis: Yeah.

Shaffir: Yeah. 

Rogan: Yeah. 

Normand: Could happen. 

Shaffir: It's just report—I think it over-reported. 

Gillis: I think young kids growing up in it now are going to— 

Rogan: Well, the problem is now they have these gender reassignment surgery centers. They're trying to make money. And they're still open. And if they're open, they're going to try to make money.

Shaffir: It's like Covid testing spots. 

Rogan: They just ram kids through there. They just give 'em hormones like, "Yeah, yeah, you need it. Yeah." They're trying to make a ton of money. There's so many of 'em now. if you go back to 2007 and see how many gender reassignment surgery centers there were, and now in 2024, it's bananas. They just erupted like Starbucks in the nineties. 

Shaffir: I think the reassignment will end because it's like, when they said your dick doesn't make you a man, so then well, you can be a woman with a dick. Right? That's acceptable. So then just be that. You don't have to reassign. 

Rogan: But some people want to get snipped. 

Shaffir: Well, that's just cosmetic then. It's, your dick or your pussy is not what makes you a man or woman. According to them. Then it's just cosmetic.

Do you see what I mean? Here is the end result of this crowd’s rendering of the “cancel culture” era—in which a handful of comedians suffered temporary career setbacks for being professional bigots—as an assault on free speech. Now, finally, they have all the free speech they want, and they’re using it to attack gay and trans people, homeless people, undocumented immigrants, and pretty much everyone who isn’t white. What an incredible win for comedy.

Just for a good laugh, I’d like to leave you with this exchange from Theo Von’s new interview with Dave Smith: 

Von: You're Jewish?

Smith: Yeah, yeah, I am.

Von: Okay. And so are you Israeli too? Is that the same thing?

Smith: No. No, no, no. Israel's the nation. I have nothing to do with that.

Von: Okay. But are—but some—are some Jews—but someone's Jewish, they're just Jew—they're just means that they have family that's from Israel originally?

Smith: No, not even necessarily. 

Von: Ohhh.

Take care out there.