Diversity caused the wildfires, apparently
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.
On Wednesday, for example, Musk took some time out from obsessively tweeting about whether the US should “liberate” Britain to proclaim that the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes”. He has continued to post spurious claims about diversity initiatives (for example, “DEI means people DIE”) for days now, along with posts insinuating that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different.
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.
Ideally, we’d just ignore these people and their bigoted – and entirely baseless – attacks on DEI (which are just thinly veiled attacks on women and minorities). Alas, we don’t have that luxury because the rightwing crusade against DEI is working alarmingly well. Companies are now slashing their DEI budgets and cutting their DEI policies in response. So we’re forced to argue over and over again that women and minorities are just as talented as white men. We’re forced to point out again and again that, rather than being the persecuted minority some of them seem to think they are, studies show that the idea that white men as a group have a harder time getting hired now is demonstrably false. Indeed, per one Wharton economist: “If anything, female and minority candidates are being penalized relative to White male candidates.”
Still, while we can’t ignore the right’s obsession with attacking DEI, we also need to ensure that we don’t get distracted. Trump and his various allies, after all, are masters of distraction. They want us all divided and engaged in culture wars so they can wage a stealth class war. And when it comes to the wildfires, they want us focused on the various conspiracy theories and misinformation they’re peddling so we don’t focus on the rather more inconvenient issue of climate change.
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.”
The fires in California are a terrible tragedy. They should also be a wake-up call. We are living in a world on fire and, unless we take our changing environment seriously, then we will continue to watch the planet burn. Alas, it seems unlikely that the incoming administration – and its de facto advisers like Musk – will treat the catastrophe in California with the seriousness it deserves. Slashing DEI departments is far easier than fixing real problems.
Jamie Lee Curtis faces backlash for comparing Palisades fire to Gaza
“[T]he entire Pacific Palisades looks like, unfortunately, Gaza, or one of these war-torn countries where awful things have happened,” said Curtis. Making such a flippant comparison to what many experts have termed a genocide is horrific. At least 74 children were reportedly killed in the first week of 2025 in Gaza. It’s unclear just how many people have died in Gaza now but a new report in the Lancet medical journal estimates there were 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury between October 2023 and the end of June 2024. And that doesn’t even count all the people starving or freezing to death. Curtis, by the way, has made her disdain for Palestinians clear before: she previously posted a photo of terrified children being bombed, claiming they were Israeli, then deleted it when she found out they were Palestinian.
Why female artists use screams to express female rage
If you feel like screaming into the void right now, you’re not alone. In Artsy, Emily Steer considers the way in which guttural screaming has appeared in many works by female artists since the mid–20th century, from those by Marina Abramović to Faith Ringgold and Tracey Emin.
Malawi’s religious leaders fight for legal abortions
Unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality in the country – which has one of the world’s strictest abortion laws – contributing to up to 18% of maternal deaths. Now some Christian and Muslim clerics have joined forces to try to overturn colonial-era abortion laws.
People are moving out of US states that have restricted abortion
Turns out a lot of people don’t like living in states that treat women like walking wombs.
French police arrest founder of website used by Dominique Pelicot
The website, coco.fr, was shut down by the French authorities in June 2024 after being linked to more than 23,000 crimes including rape, murder and paedophilia.
World’s first blood test for endometriosis could be on its way
Endometriosis is a debilitating condition that affects roughly 10% of reproductive-age women and girls globally. Despite how common it is, however, it can take “on average seven years for a woman to receive a diagnosis” and detecting the condition can involve invasive procedures. Now, a simple new blood test, developed by a team of Australian researchers, is in the works. If successful, it would mean more women could be diagnosed far earlier.
The week in pawtriarchy
It’s getting cold in south Florida, which means its time for iguana-dropping alerts. Once the temperature drops below the mid-40s, iguanas – which can be up to 6ft long – go into a cold-stunned state and can sometimes fall out of trees. If you do come across a cold-stunned iguana, the advice is to ignore it. Like a lot of us, they get very cranky when they first wake up.
