LA Fires Are Just For Starters: Zuck, Skum, MAGA, Online Shitlords Blaming Diversity For Literally Almost Everything

Women, eh? They’re simply not to be trusted. Eve ate that apple; Pandora opened that horrible little box; and now women are to blame for the devastating wildfires in California. I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but it’s what Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of his generation – and one of the most powerful people on Earth – is saying, so it must be true. According to Mark Zuckerberg, another of the world’s greatest thinkers, factchecking is now passé. Still, I’m going to be terribly old-fashioned and factcheck myself here. Obviously, I’m being facetious when I say that Musk is blaming the wildfires on women. Obviously, it’s more complicated than that. To be more precise, the tech billionaire is also blaming the catastrophe – which has left at least 11 people dead and destroyed more than 10,000 structures – on minorities, diversity initiatives and various other scapegoats. Everything but the climate crisis, basically.

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Musk is not the only one trying to link wildfires to “wokeness”: all the usual suspects are at it. Donald Trump Jr has also been busy making uninspired jokes about DEI meaning DIE. The rightwing actor James Woods and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly have railed about the fire department promoting diversity. Even CNN commentator Scott Jennings blamed the wildfires on DEI policies. Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Maga crowd have blamed DEI initiatives for a tragedy. Around this time last year, they were all busy claiming that Boeing planes were falling apart because of DEI initiatives. Musk even amplified a staggeringly racist tweet suggesting students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and therefore shouldn’t become pilots. “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” he said at the time.

Rightwing agitators, who never let a good crisis go to waste, also used the assassination attempt of Donald Trump last July as an opportunity to criticize DEI efforts at the Secret Service. “There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women,” the conservative political commentator Matt Walsh posted after the assassination attempt.

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There are, to be clear, various nuanced issues that have contributed to the wildfires spreading with the ferocity that they have. But the climate crisis is clearly a major factor. According to one 2021 study, climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States. Greed and hubris are other factors: speculators keep building houses in areas that are prone to flooding and wildfires. There’s a much-cited essay from 1995 by urban theorist Mike Davis called The Case for Letting Malibu Burn that later became a chapter in a book called Ecology of Fear. In it, Davis argues that spending millions saving homes in areas never meant for neighborhoods and power lines is not just foolish, but a waste of public resources. “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” Davis told the LA Times in 2018, when the Woolsey fire broke out in Malibu. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/11/los-angeles-wildfires-diversity