What Started California Wildfires? Pro-Trump Host Blindly Blames Antifa for Deadly Blazes

Pro-Trump radio host Bill Mitchell suggested Antifa was responsible for the destructive wildfires raging across California.

Mitchell, who has previously promoted anti-Semitic conspiracies about liberal billionaire George Soros and publishes articles from unreliable news websites, posted tweets linking Antifa to the blazes, which have killed at least 59 people.

"Is #Antifa setting the California wildfires?" the host of YourVoice America tweeted on Wednesday, following the initial post up with one that read "No one knows who set the 'Camp Fire' in California. One distinct possibility is domestic terrorism. #Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. As such, the question must be asked. I don't expect #Antifa to like it."

He tweeted other statements implying that Antifa was responsible for the fires.

Mitchell provided no evidence for the remarks, and he did not comment prior to publication. One user posted a derisive comment that applied the radio host's same speculative logic.

"No one knows who set the 'Camp Fire' in California, but some people are saying that Bill Mitchell hired an arsonist on the dark web. Did he or didn't he? Who knows? The question must be asked," Terry Morse wrote.

Attention has turned to electric utility company PG&E as the potential cause for the destructive Camp Fire, according to CNN. The business disclosed on Tuesday that it "experienced an outage" in a transmission line 15 minutes before the blaze erupted.

Southern California Edison said that it had an outage at its Chatsworth substation in the San Fernando Valley minutes before the Woolsey fire broke out in Ventura County, according to NBC Los Angeles.The company said there was not currently any indication that its equipment caused the blaze, according to KABC.

Mitchell's statements figure into discourse promoted by both mainstream and fringe conservative figures, who have said Antifa is a dangerous threat to democracy.

The group, which has engaged in a number of violent clashes with far-right groups, has been denounced by a politicians from both parties. Antifa has adopted a nebulous character in political discussion and is frequently brought up to counter condemnations of right-wing extremism.

After the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the president said that "I think there is blame on both sides," asking "What about the 'alt-left?'"

Many liberals have rejected this equivalency.

"Yes, antifa is not a figment of the conservative imagination. It's a moral problem that liberals need to confront," Peter Beinart wrote in The Atlantic. "But saying it's a problem is vastly different than implying, as Trump did, that it's a problem equal to white supremacism. Using the phrase 'alt-left' suggests a moral equivalence that simply doesn't exist. For starters, while antifa perpetrates violence, it doesn't perpetrate it on anything like the scale that white nationalists do."

Others have been even forceful in their juxtaposition of antifa and far-right conservative groups. "The far right is 1) large; 2) highly organized; and most importantly, 3) directly tied to the president of the United States and the Republican Party," Paul Waldman wrote in The Washington Post. "Antifa is none of those things."