Ten Contemporary Self-Proclaimed Arsonists

Arson is the willing igniting of a fire with the intention of damaging something. Normally it is a crime few would willing admit to. It is socially unacceptable. Yet, in the fiery world we find ourselves in, now a large pool of individuals proudly proclaim their desire to be arsonists. They hope to set the world on fire in the confidence that what rises from the ashes would be somewhat better, even if they perish in the flames as well. And while the contemporary fires all around us are beyond control in many ways, looking to the original arsonists can at least give us insight to how we ended up in the mess we find ourselves in and how we might prevent further fires in the future.

So here is a list of ten major arsonists to keep an eye on.

1. Mark Zuckerberg

The most prolific arsonists of this new millennium have been, for lack of a better term, the tech bros. Many of the fires that have defined our contemporary times were technological in nature and have forged mass social change and upheaval. The quote above was the initial slogan chosen by founder Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook. While not speaking of fire particularly, the spirit of throwing caution to the wind evokes images of a wildfire rapidly overtaking a forest, destroying all in its path. The ‘do now, worry about the consequences later’ attitude of this slogan speak volumes about the situation we currently find ourselves in with our technology outpacing our ethics while ramping up inequalities and leaving many behind in its wake. One’s online identity or avatar is more important than one’s identity in real life, yet is just as fragile. The push to bring everyone into this new frontier of digitalised surveillance capitalism plunges us into a utopia in which we are none the wiser, none the happier. And, overrun with content and data overload, drowning in a new depth of uncertainty, we cannot keep up, let alone differentiate the real from the fake. It would appear that by 2014, we had all moved so fast we couldn’t remember why we were tired and there wasn’t much more to break. The much less sexy slogan of ‘Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure’ replaced the old, but chaos is not a fire one can tame.

2. Elon Musk

When you think of Elon Musk and fire, you could not be blamed for picturing a rocket in the likeness of the male reproductive organ blasting off into space, the final frontier! But Musk’s arsons go beyond SpaceX and its radical shift of the funding ecosystem for scientific innovation in the US. His leadership behind Tesla, OpenAI, and other scientificentrepreneurial endeavours has not just deprived NASA, but made innovation in science and technology a game for private funds and industry in the US. Not that much public funding was going to be available anyway. Briefly serving as Special Advisor to President Donald Trump following the 2024 election, Musk was de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) where he set fire to the entire US civil service that will take years to put out and perhaps decades to rebuild and correct. On top of it all, in 2022 he bought Twitter renaming it X, a perpetual ring of fire blazing hatred and bile—which he further enflames by encouraging and supporting far right and fully-fledged fascist political parties and groups in Europe. As one of the many Americans who felt that chaos was the best weapon, tossing it like a Molotov Cocktail at every opportunity, he is a fond supporter of fighting fire with fire while remaining ignorant to the complex cascades he sets off by taking one thing out and putting it back in at a later time. As long as he comes out on top, he seems little concerned with the char and ash he leaves behind.

3. Sam Altman

A former colleague of Musk, with such an attitude towards the AI boom, it is not hard to see them as two characters cut from the same cloth. Altman is the apotheosis of the tech bro phenomenon. A college dropout, esoteric, lord of Silicon Valley, his OpenAI company strove for altruistic aims of techno utopia but his business moves and perpetual foot-in-mouth syndrome show the true colours of an emperor who has no clothes. OpenAI strives to advance AI without really knowing what that means or what that will look like. It is an absurdity beyond the blind leading the blind. And all the more worse when the Luddites of the US Senate attempted to investigate (as they have not made it as far as effectively legislating it) AI policy with a combination of ignorance and embarrassment that has led to very little formal action. Beyond that, he is leading the way for ChatGPT and other such models to further inhibit our ability to think while also throwing a grenade into already struggling education systems. Moreover, he is an apocalypse prepper, stocked up on guns, medicine, and Israel Defence Force-provided gas masks. He doesn’t care about what’s coming, but would prefer that it just get on with it and stay out of his way.

4. Peter Thiel

Many may be surprised to see that Donald Trump is not on this list. And not just for the fire-like look of his hair. While he is more than qualified, having committed all kinds of metaphorical arson, he is a part of the forest fire ignited by the Republicans, MAGA folks, and even his Vice President J D Vance. But the real arsonist behind the present Great American Fire is Peter Thiel. To some, he is ‘the intellectual architect of the Silicon Valley ethos’ and to others he is alleged Antichrist. To others still, these two labels are not mutually exclusive! As the founder of PayPal, he is a more subdued lord of the Silicon Valley tech bros, but his puppet wires run far upwards. Now leading Palantir, a surveillance company named after the mysterious and malevolent seeing stones of J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a corporation that plays its hand with military intelligence, hedging bets in Ukraine and Palestine, and even assisting ICE agents in their efforts inside American borders. As a tactical arsonists, Peter Thiel's fires burn slow, yet will burn long, and also take years to suppress and recover from as he makes substantial impacts to AI development, the politics, and the culture of the US, seeing democracy as outdated and technology as the only solution to keep people from killing each other. Of course if there is no one around, then people can’t kill each other also!

5. Terry Jones

Thus far, the list has largely focussed on tech bros and metaphorical arsonists. The Pastor Terry Jones actually was a literal arsonist who also ended up setting off many other fires in ways unprecedented and unexpected. Terry Jones was the pastor of a nondenominational Christian church in Gainesville, Florida, called the Dove World Outreach Center, that never had more than fifty members at any given time. Prior to the Dove World Outreach Center, Jones had been in and out of other church organisations, even owning a wings and chips stand at a mall, all of which he was dismissed from for his radical ideas and obsession with his self-image. In 2009, Jones authored the book Islam is From the Devil, titled after a sign he posted in his front yard. In 2010, Jones took to Twitter posting that Islam is a religion of violence that seeks to install sharia law in the US, and to stand against it he would burn copies of the Qur’an. The tweet went viral prompting a call from then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates asking Jones not to go through with his plans. Although no Qur’ans were reported to have been burnt, protests were sparked around the world that resulted in twenty deaths and substantial damage to public property, including setting buses on fire in Pakistan. But this was not the end of Pastor Terry Jones as he would eventually live out his Fahrenheit 451 cosplay dreams putting the Qur’an on a mock trial and sentencing it to being burned in 2011, burning more Qur’ans in 2012 along with effigies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, taking a year off in 2013, and then burning yet more Qur’ans on 11 September 2014 along with the ISIS Flag. Gainesville Fire Rescue fined Jones $271 for violating fire safety rules. Jones also promoted the release of the controversial film Innocence of Muslims in 2012 which earned him a death sentence in absentia in Egypt. Jones has been banned from entering Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. He was last reported to be a driver for Uber, a fire of its own in the ride-sharing world.

6. Nigel Farage

Member of Parliament for Clacton, Nigel Farage is presently the leader of Reform UK, a far-right populist party in the UK. As the quote above demonstrates, in the UK, it is Farage who lobs grenades of chaos like his like-minded equivalents in the US. As long as his name is in the headlines, he seems to have little regard for the consequences of such actions. A lifetime eurosceptic, he was also a part of the wave of elected Member of European Parliament (MEP) who also stood against the existence of the European Union. Farage was first elected MEP in 1999 and was subsequently re-elected until the UK’s exit. After a short-lived membership with the Conservative party, he first came to prominence becoming leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), another far-right party that would bet everything on Brexit. Buddying up with former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the two would light several fires of varying levels of veracity convincing the UK to leave the European Union. Once out, Farage took the position of critique to the Conservative government’s subsequent failures to ‘get Brexit done’ even after the fact stating that it wasn’t done very well. Farage would finally win a seat in UK Parliament in 2024 where his fiery rhetoric could be legitimised in the House of Commons. However, he finds more traction and airtime on Fox News, a variety of podcasts, and of course the right-wing, frothing at the mouth, GB News. No stranger to hate speech or financial discrepancies, Farage leads a band of fire-starters igniting xenophobic sentiment across the UK. And with the Conservatives cowering in the corner and Starmer’s Labour party continually shooting itself in the foot, the granted self-caricature of Nigel Farage and Reform UK should not be underestimated the next time an election is called.

7. Ursula von der Leyen

Europe as a continent has no shortage of arsonists. And it would be unwise to ignore some of the dastardliest from Marine Le Pen in France to Viktor Orbán in Hungary and all the other far right and fascists in the middle. But while we could go on for pages reporting on the rise of fascism in Europe, the hearth for these fires finds its home in Brussels where the old European way, which has frankly led to the death of Europe in many ways, burns brightest and is sacrosanct. In a Europe torn between its Christian nationalist traditions and halfhearted desires for secular utopia, that is inclusively exclusive, under constant threat from seemingly everything, stuck in the Cold War past while claiming to be looking towards the future, we find President of the European Commission, the executive wing of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen. For many, the West refers to a variety of places and nations, but for von der Leyen, the West is still Europe. And when the world falls apart, which many raised during the Cold War see as inevitable, it will be Europe versus the rest. And if von der Leyen is to have her way, it will be the United States of Europe with a well-funded high-tech military ready to set the world on fire. Military and arms deal scandals aside, von der Leyen’s largest folly with flames comes in her appeasement of the rising tide of isolationist, nationalist, and fascist in the halls of the European Union which was founded on the principal of ‘never again’. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. And while she has a solid frenemies in Putin and Trump and a crusade-like sacred cause in Ukraine, she might think she is able to control the small fires that comprise the European continent, but the question remains if she will be able to stand the heat. For in reality Europe is fragile and ageing, and the façade is slowly melting revealing that Europe is the sick man it has purported others to be and change is the only certainty ahead.

8. Vladimir Putin

With the exception of Boris Yeltsin, whose blood-alcohol content made him a rather flammable individual, arsonist could be listed as a prerequisite to becoming the leader of Russia. And few have done it better than Vladimir Putin. Forged in the fires of the KGB, Putin always knew it was burn or be burned. This philosophy has made him leader of Russia for the entirety of the twenty-first century. And the Russian constitution only has a few singe marks as a result. For most of that tenure, Putin’s fires were largely started and put out without many noticing, leading to various instances of opposition politicians and journalists ‘disappearing’ and a cultural acceptance of human rights violations and rampant corruption. While Putin was no stranger to starting fires where others aren’t looking such as Syria and throughout the Middle East where his fire was requested, the international community did not so much as raise a complaint until his full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2024. At this point his policy of starting fires under the banner of ‘domestic affairs’, using history to justify the burning of Chechnya from 1999–2000, Georgia in 2008, and even Kazakhstan in 2022 had been exhausted. Ukraine was a bridge too close to Europe and a place too white and Christian for the West to ignore, not that they would hold back at any opportunity to revive the Cold War spirit of Russians as James Bond-style supervillains. And Putin never backed down from playing the part. Yet as the United States and Europe’s causes are revealed to be less than noble, Russia’s diplomacy with the Global South is rewriting geopolitics as it has never been known. And whatever may come, Putin remains a global standard for arson.

9. Narendra Modi

The Prime Minister of India is an admirer of the symbol of fire and never spares a chance to use it in his rhetoric. And few have set India ablaze like Narendra Modi, who appears to desire to cleanse the country and purify it in mistaken nostalgia for a history that never existed. The hubris of the idea is almost unfathomable, to make such a large country with such an enormous population all one under the banner of Hindutva. While Modi has had over a decade as Prime Minister to light fires all over the country, his arsonist ways predate his taking of the highest office as he was, over a decade before, the Chief Minister of Gujarat. His tenure in Gujarat began with the image of burning trains as violence erupted in the state as attacks on the Muslim communities resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 individuals. Hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes and seek shelter in refugee camps. Many cases of mass rape and female mutilation all took place under Modi’s watch. And that was only a small preview of what would follow as when Modi ascended to the premiership further instances of violence followed, especially during the 2020 pandemic. To this day legislative moves are being taken to solidify India as a far-right Hindu nationalist state and to disenfranchise non-Hindus and especially Muslims. The fires of Islamophobia in India are not just denying people their basic human rights, but also denying India its history as it is constantly rewritten and historic markers destroyed and erased from maps. And the fires are indiscriminate, burning all non-Hindus throughout the Subcontinent. And Modi, now as a global populist icon, sees Hindutva along with its chaste traditions and racial supremacy dialogue extending beyond the borders of India, invigorating the fires of the diaspora throughout Asia, and especially in the UK and US. And racial supremacy narratives, ironically, make strange bedfellows as Hindu supremacists and white supremacists light each other’s torches as they march towards an ‘again’ that never was and frankly, never should be.

10. Benjamin Netanyahu

Most of the arsonists on this list, while careless and negligent, would at least like one patch of under touched land when all the fires are extinguished. Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be one of those individuals who would just as well watch the whole world burn. Our prototypical Nero plays his violin as Rome burns and his tough friends in the West makes sure he faces no consequences as he wages a genocide on the Palestinian people, not happy until every speck of earth in Palestine is aflame, its peoples and the imprint they have made on this planet permanently wiped from existence and memory. And while he is at it, onward to old foes Iran, Lebanon, and whatever else can be hit along the way. If it means Israel goes up in flames with it, even if it means the end of the world as we know it. Zionism, white Christian supremacy, and Hindutva form a true trifecta from hell and they are openly accepting applications for a fourth horseman to kick off this apocalypse. It is such a disgusting annihilationism that we have neither the energy or words to put to it.