Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.

Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.

The venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for example, could not be more of an establishment figure: He was an early investor in Facebook, is now a mentor of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance, and has strong links to the U.S. defense industry through his company Palantir. But in a recent opinion column in the ultra-establishment Financial Times, Thiel sounds like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder after a long night in the Bigfoot forums. “The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” he writes.

[Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel implies, we might finally know the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether the coronavirus was a bioweapon. Thiel notes that the internet also has questions about the death of the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis”—that is, a revealing—“of the ancien regime’s secrets,” he adds. (Two pretentious expressions in one sentence? Monsieur, watch out for hubris.) Thiel wants large-scale declassifications and a truth-and-reconciliation commission, in the model of South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619,” Thiel writes, referring to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

Thiel portrays Trump’s resurgence as a defeat for the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex,” or DISC—his friend and employee Eric Weinstein’s term for legacy media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that supposedly prevent politically inconvenient truths from reaching the public. Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed.

Like most classic conspiracism, Thiel’s arguments contain grains of truth. As Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger wisely notes, “The line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.” Thiel is right that some liberal commentators and mainstream outlets were too quick to dismiss the question of whether COVID-19 originated anywhere other than a Wuhan meat market. At one point, a New York Times reporter suggested on Twitter that racism underlay any suspicions that the virus had escaped from a research lab. None of this shows, however, that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, or that Anthony Fauci deserves to be prosecuted. (For that matter, the Times has run multiple articles that are open-minded about the origins of the virus.) In any case, who was president in 2020, when the COVID-origins debate was emerging? If any classified evidence existed that would have cleared up the controversy, Donald Trump had the power to disclose it.

[From the October 2023 issue: From feminist to right-wing conspiracist]

As for Epstein, his death, in 2019, was certainly very convenient for anyone who might have been embarrassed by what he knew. Nevertheless, the so-called mainstream media are not covering up the lingering questions; definitive answers simply aren’t available, and may never be. (CBS broadcast an episode of 60 Minutes with graphic photos of Epstein’s autopsy all the way back in January 2020.) Besides, if anyone is hiding the truth about Epstein, it’s probably not the left-wing blob. Who would benefit from killing a man who hung out with Trump, Prince Andrew, and various tech billionaires? Probably not blue-haired vegans from Portland, Oregon; racial-justice campaigners; or humanities academics. Meanwhile, the idea that anyone stifled doubts about the official explanation of the Kennedy assassination before social media is laughable. The subject has captivated Americans for more than six decades. Oliver Stone’s JFK, which highlighted florid conspiracy theories about the former president’s death, came out in 1991. The film starred Kevin Costner and won two Oscars.

Thiel’s quest for closure about the pandemic is noteworthy. Something happened during that period to drive influential, apparently rational people toward beliefs that were once associated with crackpots. Others suddenly lost trust in institutions and expertise. The podcaster Bryan Johnson—a successful tech entrepreneur who is now pursuing literal immortality—went from boasting about receiving the Moderna vaccine in 2021, because he had invested in one of the companies involved in its development, to complaining that “vaccines are a holy war” and that he regretted getting a COVID shot because not enough data supported its use. This is a man who pops enough pills that if you shook him, he’d rattle.

[Read: I went to a rave with a 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager]

High-profile figures across the political right have revealed their penchant for woo-woo. Skepticism of conventional medicine has become a staple of heterodox podcasts that simultaneously promote unproven, unregulated dietary supplements. My colleague Anne Applebaum has described this trend toward mysticism, fringe religious beliefs, and pseudo-spirituality as the New Obscurantism.

Until recently, I had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. Thiel has always made a point of entertaining provocative heterodox opinions, but he has also demonstrated himself to be eloquent, analytical, and capable of going whole paragraphs without saying something unhinged. But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him.

The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands. The cynical Tucker Carlson of the Dominion era has given way to a more crankish version since his firing from Fox. When Carlson first went independent, he seemed to be hosting kooks for clicks. On his live tour, for example, he looked faintly embarrassed as Roseanne Barr told him that Democrats “love the taste of human flesh and they drink human blood.” And maybe he didn’t really believe the former crack user who claimed to have had a gay affair with Barack Obama, or the historian who asserts that Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—was the “chief villain” in the Second World War. But at a certain point, I started to take Carlson at his word. Recently, he claimed that he’d woken up with scars and claw marks after being attacked by a demon in his bedroom. A few days before this, he said that America needed a “vigorous spanking” from Daddy Trump, and a few days after, Carlson revealed that he thought demons had invented the atom bomb. He’s clearly working through some stuff.

What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.

The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.

On Wednesday morning, in Highland Park, Los Angeles, dawn never broke. The morning light that normally streamed into my rental house simply shifted from pitch-black to gradations of orange-brown as smoke from the Eaton Canyon fires billowed over the hills. Outside my window, a woman used the flashlight on her phone while walking her dog. My own dog and I barely made it around the block; the soot-filled air was dry and pungent, and the winds—those relentless winds—smacked us with a combination of dry pine needles, fallen bark, and chunks of ash. Most of my neighbors wore masks as they loaded their cars with shopping bags and suitcases. By the time we got back, all the phones in my house were buzzing with evacuation alerts.

We were a full house: three middle-aged adults, a 6-year-old, and a naughty dog (mine). The night before, after losing power in her home in Altadena, my best friend and my goddaughter went to kill time in classic L.A. style: by driving through their local In-N-Out. Power outages from the Santa Anas are not unusual in L.A., and despite the Palisades Fire raging across town, they were trying to act normal—perhaps the only way to psychically survive in a city prone to fires is to push the constant threat of imminent natural disaster out of your mind. In any case, by the time they got their burgers, the street was illuminated by flames, the night sky hot yellow from Eaton Canyon, just a few blocks away. They drove the 15 minutes to my house, where we immediately lost power too. Her husband hunted down every candle he could get his hands on in a drivable radius.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

In my living room, we texted friends and neighbors, checking on their homes and kids and evacuation plans. Outside, the sound of the wind was terrifying—because of the howling, but also because of the danger it represented, each gust potentially carrying embers this way, taking out homes and businesses and, eventually, in the case of Altadena, most of a community.

Altadena is an unincorporated community of about 40,000 residents nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Having spent a lot of time there, I get the appeal—even something as mundane as putting the trash out, at the right time of day, is a chance to experience majestic levels of beauty. When people think of life in the hills around Los Angeles, they tend to think of millionaires and movie stars—and, for sure, there are some splendid homes and a sprinkling of celebrity residents, such as Mandy Moore, there. But Altadena is racially and economically diverse, and middle-class life remains at its center.

It was founded by two well-off brothers from Iowa in the late 1880s, and workers with jobs in the nearby city of Pasadena moved there. After a long battle against redlining, Black homeowners began arriving in the 1960s. This made Altadena one of the first integrated middle-class communities in Los Angeles, and residents today are particularly proud of this history. (One of those residents was Wilfred Duncan, the first Black fireman in Pasadena.) In 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white; in 2024, it was 46 percent white, and the bulk of the rest of the population was made up of Black and Hispanic residents.

This was partly why, when my best friend and her husband decided to move back to her native California to raise their Black and Latina daughter, they chose Altadena. The other parents they met at their daughter’s school included local business owners, house cleaners, and government employees. They made friends with their neighbors, including an older public-school teacher who’d raised her family across the street. On Tuesday night, her house burned to the ground.

In recent years—and particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the rise in remote work let people live farther from downtown and West Los Angeles—home prices in Altadena have soared. But newcomers haven’t been house flippers or private-equity firms running Airbnbs; they’ve been families looking to set down roots—like my best friend. A remarkable 78 percent of the households are owner-inhabited; it’s not unusual to meet people who’ve lived in Altadena for decades or even residents whose ties to the town go back a generation or two. That’s part of the strong community atmosphere. Neighbors make cookies for neighbors and invite one another over for drinks. Kids trick-or-treat down the streets in unchaperoned groups, and families have post-parties after the Rose Bowl parade.

The local economy was also exactly that: local. Minus a few fast-food joints and big chain pharmacies, the neighborhood was as close to mom-and-pop as one can find today. For 25 years, kids from Altadena and Pasadena have studied with Sipoo Shelene Hearring at Two Dragons Martial Arts. Locals who met at the Rancho, Altadena’s premiere dive bar, became so close that they were known to spend holidays together. If you were bored, you could take your family to the Bunny Museum and browse more than 30,000 items of collectible rabbit memorabilia.

Every single one of those businesses burned to the ground this week. One local official told NPR that “probably half of our small businesses are gone.” Five of Altadena’s public schools suffered substantial damage, as did a couple of private schools, a senior center, a public golf course, a country club, several houses of worship, and a yet-to-be determined number of homes and apartment complexes. So far, more than 5,000 structures have been reported as lost.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

An unofficial Google Doc tracking the destruction has been going around, and the pace at which it was being populated on Wednesday was terrifying. Each new address correlated to a person you knew or a business that made you love where you lived. On Facebook, a woman was looking for an older man named Willie who lived near a particular intersection. “I don’t know his last name,” she wrote. ”I speak to him on my daily walks. I’d like to make sure he’s alright.” Neighbors were texting one another videos of block after block of devastation.

So many people are in the same situation as my friend: evacuated and unsure whether their house will still hold. Ten hours after she and her family arrived at my house, they learned they’d have to flee again, when my neighborhood was evacuated too.

I’d always judged people who, faced with a natural disaster, chose to stay in place. But experiencing the situation firsthand, I understood. We were a ragtag group. Who would take us in? But how could we split up? For almost an hour, we stared at one another, paralyzed. Eventually, we heard from a generous friend in Palm Springs who had room for us. Into the cars we went.

But others did stay, or have dared to venture back. They hose off the lawns of the absent to keep the floating embers from catching, offer to break into homes at risk and grab personal photos or other belongings, and take pictures of the damage that’s left behind.

As we drove past the halo of black smoke over L.A., we saw tractor-trailers turned sideways by the wind. Text messages continued flooding in, announcing home losses and relocation plans. Most hope these moves will be temporary, but, depending on insurance payouts and school closures, they might wind up being permanent. “We hope to see you all again one day,” a father wrote to my friends’ dad group. His family was heading up north to stay with relatives and knew that they might not be able to return. Some kids leaving town with no return date in sight FaceTimed classmates to say goodbye. Still other children don’t yet understand what’s happened to the place they call home.

All of Los Angeles, regardless of socioeconomic class, is sharing in one deep, traumatic loss. Schools, cultural institutions, the businesses that make hometowns feel like home—so many have burned. But there’s a secondary sadness hovering over middle-class Altadena, and certainly over anyone on the margins of poverty. Altadena will build itself back. But how? And for whom?

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

On the Altadena Facebook group, residents are attempting to guide one another through FEMA applications and encouraging everyone to file their insurance claims quickly. But in one-on-one conversations, no one is naive. Everyone anticipates pushback from insurance companies, and payments that will be a fraction of what their homes were worth or would cost them to rebuild. Will the teachers whose homes burned down still be able to afford to live there? What about the firemen? Where will all these people go in a region that is already plagued by a shortage of affordable housing?

Even if one isn’t familiar with Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism, most Americans are, by now, well versed in its hallmarks. A natural disaster occurs, locals are forced to evacuate, and small businesses close. Their returns are delayed sometimes indefinitely by failures to restore infrastructure such as schools and electricity quickly enough. They might be stymied by red tape and bureaucracy. Needing stability for their family, they are forced to build a life elsewhere, to stop “waiting” to go home. In their place, developers and private equity swoop in, reshaping these areas for the rich and ultrarich.

This happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Superstorm Sandy in the coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Los Angeles’s economy is already in a precarious state, with a housing crisis and a glut of workers in the TV and film industry. I can easily imagine that, without government intervention and intentional counterplanning, something similar will happen here. Surviving financially in Los Angeles was already challenging; how many families can manage not to just get by, but to completely rebuild their lives?

When my best friend moved here, I was immensely depressed to lose her from my life in Brooklyn. But in the subsequent two years, I’ve visited many times, sometimes for weeks-long stints. I’d come to love it here so much, I’d call it Brooklyn West: It had that same neighborly generosity and quirky moxy that had gotten squeezed out of my hometown, one Blank Street Coffee and luxury high-rise at a time. It’s painful to imagine that Altadena could now, in this moment of speculative opportunity, suffer the same fate.

Accusations of local-government incompetence are flying around this week, nearly as forceful as the winds. But the local government has work to do now. Federal aid is crucial, but so is getting schools reopened quickly, and expediting the rebuilding of established small businesses. Altadena needs not vultures seeking to maximize profit, but creative developers who can protect and expand the kind of community Altadena was.

When they are done with mourning, I know the residents will do their part.

*Sources: Library of Congress; Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty