Early on January 1, 2025, as everyone else in Los Angeles was still ringing in the new year, Jonathan Rinderknecht hiked into the Santa Monica Mountains and, with his cigarette lighter, allegedly set some paper or brush or both alight. The flames spread and, prosecutors say, became the Lachman fire, which would in turn become the much bigger Palisades fire—the most disastrous blaze in the city’s history.

Rinderknecht was an Uber driver, and he had been “agitated and angry” earlier that night, according to two girls he’d driven around. About what, they couldn’t be sure. It didn’t really matter. By now he was a type, someone who was increasingly familiar to Americans: young, angry, rudderless, very online, very political, but whose agenda was difficult to discern.

We have watched other twentysomething men on our screens who resemble Rinderknecht—outraged, ranting, blank-faced, in possession of some secret knowledge that the rest of us lack: Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City, in December 2024; Shane Tamura, who killed four people, including a Blackstone executive, also in New York City, before taking his own life, in July of this year; Robin Westman, the Minneapolis shooter who killed two children and injured 30 more people at a Catholic school before taking his own life, in August; and of course Tyler Robinson, who is accused of assassinating conservative organizer Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, in September.

That January night in Los Angeles, at 11:34 p.m., Rinderknecht dropped off his last Uber passenger in the Palisades. According to an indictment filed earlier this month, he then drove on alone, and at 11:38 p.m., parked his car at Skull Rock Trailhead. He apparently tried to contact his ex-girlfriend on Facebook Messenger, but they didn’t connect. He then hiked up a series of concrete switchbacks and drainage ditches all the way to the clearing known as Hidden Buddha.

It was cool and damp, and Rinderknecht wandered through the evergreen shrubs and the oak trees, and he listened to the French Congolese rapper Josman rapping “Un Zder, Un Thé,” about an alienated young man sliding into pyromania. Read more»

Peter Savodnik |”The Suspected LA Arsonist and the Rise of the Nihilistic Violent Extremists” | October 27, 2025

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