Scumbags Blaming Los Angeles Fires On DEI Just Reminding Us Who They Really Are
Believe them, etc.
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OK, let’s talk about the scumbags blaming DEI for the Los Angeles wildfires, oh my God I am so pissed off.
I had something else planned this week, the debut of what I think is a much-needed series to counter the vile messages of anti-LGBT, misogynist, racist MAGA Christian nationalists, their media and their politicians as Donald Trump takes office in a week and a half. But it can wait until next Friday, because these absolutely devastating fires have exploded in the Los Angeles area, Pacific Palisades is effectively gone, Altadena is close to it, homes are destroyed in the Hollywood Hills, Malibu is devastated, and so many other places. From what we saw on the news last night, they’re hoping maybe Saturday will bring some real reprieve from the winds that started this whole thing and continue to fuel it. We hope and pray.
I live in the South, so I’m no stranger to brutal natural disasters, but I was just in LA back in October, and I drove through many of these areas. There are many people I care about out there, and I know many of our readers here, and at Wonkette, AKA my day job, live in the area. Let us know you’re OK in the comments if/when you see this, and if you have tips for the best ways we can help, tell us that too. I’ll put a list at the bottom of good and reputable places for donating.
As I said two grafs up, the thing I was going to start this week was about countering the vile messages of anti-LGBT, misogynist, racist MAGA Christian nationalists, their media and their politicians as Donald Trump takes office in a week and a half.
Turns out they’re spewing a lot of that exactly same shit right now in response to these fires. Instead of compassion, instead of looking for the helpers, instead of doing something to be the helpers, instead of loving their neighbors, they’ve decided to scream “DEI!”
Yes, their contribution to this American disaster is that it’s time to blame Black people and LGBTQ people and women and anybody else who isn’t a straight white supremacist Christian man.
Fucking motherfuckers.
Anyone who says ‘DEI’ is just saying the ‘N’-Word
That’s it. Anybody who says “DEI” in a derogatory way, as an uneducated and unscientific way of explaining the devastation in southern California, is simply screaming the “N”-word in their own coded way. It’s not even that coded, either. Not sure you can even call them dogwhistles anymore. It’s just about the most blatant it’s ever been.
Jamelle Bouie noted this on Bluesky:
Before this, the white conservative “N”-word stand-in was “CRT,” AKA Critical Race Theory, a panic that conservative trash hole Chris Rufo admits he made up. Actual Critical Race Theory is a niche field of academic study. In American right-wingers’ hands, it became a catch-all term for everything that makes them mad or scares them, like “Marxism” or “education.”
Such it is with DEI. The ostensible target is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in companies and so forth, but really it’s just their latest way to scream the “N”-word. This one’s broader, though. It’s also them screaming all the vilest slurs at LGBTQ+ people and women and any other minority whose existence makes them feel threatened.
So all the worst people God ever shat out of his bowels and disposed of in America have settled on “DEI” to explain why these fires are so horrible. They can’t blame it on drought or Santa Ana winds or the climate change that’s turned those things into ticking time bombs. So they scream “DEI”!
It’s like a pacifier for them, a way for them to reassure themselves that if only straight white conservative Christian Nazi and fascist men were in charge, none of this would have happened.
Here’s some of what they’re saying:
Yesterday at Wonkette I had a piece about just some of the absolutely jaw-dropping things these vile people are saying in response the wildfires. It started with that tweet above, where Elon Musk was gleefully mashing the heart emoji in response to a tweet from vile racist LibsOfTikTok trash person Chaya Raichik, who we’ve met before at this newsletter, digging through Los Angeles Fire Department documents to find evidence that too many Black people are being allowed to fight fires.
She also tweeted a picture of the leadership of the department, see if you can see what Chaya is getting at here:
As Aaron Rupar notes in his tweet, Jesse Watters also used this in his monologue two nights ago, because just like Raichik, Jesse Watters is a vile scumbag piece of dogshit. On that same show, Watters said that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly,” and that “California has a program to scrub white males from the fire department.”
Oh no, the white males! But they’re the fire-putter-outers! And also all the other good and true things!
God, he’s filthy.
In that Wonkette post, Charlie Kirk was bitching that ASL interpreters were taking up too much of his screen during LA’s briefings and distracting him from the important information he needs to know (he lives in Arizona).
He really ratcheted it up, though, yesterday.
“Fire the lesbian,” he sneered, saying Donald Trump should withhold federal recovery aid for LA unless they fire the fire chief Kristin Crowley, who is both the first woman and first LGBTQ person to hold that position. Before you wonder whether any of these people are offering any actual evidence that Crowley or other leadership hasn’t done its job, LOL obviously not. (They think screaming “DEI!” is offering the self-evident kind of evidence, mind you, because they’re Nazi/KKK-level bigots.)
He demanded “the proper forest management,” because all these mouthbreathers think Trump is making sense when he babbles about raking the forest.
And he said “cut it out with California's failed diversity, equity, inclusion homeless spending.” Ding ding ding, DEI!
One of the white wingnut welfare hires who’s allowed to host a show on Newsmax, Rob Finnerty, said what’s happening in California “are not once-in-a-generation wildfires. This is not climate change. This is death by DEI once again.” Ding ding ding!
He added that it was just like what happened in New Orleans last week, which was also DEI. Ding ding ding! Then he started saying inbred bigot words about how Crowley is a lesbian, bellyached about her marching in Pride parades and baselessly said she’s incompetent.
The other day on Fox News, Jesse Watters, on top of screaming about DEI, whined that this is happening because California Governor Gavin Newsom is tearing down dams because Native Americans and fish are demanding it. Last night he said “there’s a good chance the homeless started this fire.”
On Fox Business, Maria Bartiromo tried to blame it on migrants.
Megyn Kelly, who is an even more vile and loathsome human than Raichik, Watters and Kirk put together, got in on it. On CNN, Scott Jennings, like Watters, angrily prissed that the LA Fire Department was discriminating against all the poor white men. Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett smacked him down soundly for his actual insinuation that only white men are qualified to handle these things.
"The fact is, stop trying to act as if only white men are the ones that are capable because right now, you’re sitting at a table with three very capable black women," said Crockett.
This is their response to everything now, every tragedy, everything that scares them, everything that makes them mad. Everything. Regardless of how the response to any situation actually is, they declare that it’s bad — after all if a white supremacist Christian man was in charge, he’d have snapped his fingers and fixed it! — and then proceed to point out and incite hatred against every person involved who’s a racial or religious minority or gay or lesbian or trans, etc.
Media Matters has an extensive roundup of these motherfuckers doing it with this disaster, with links back to previous disasters. There are so, so many more we skipped.
Again, every single one of these people is simply screaming the “N”-word, plus all the other slurs against LGBTQ people and women you can think of. They just think they’re doing it in cleverly coded language.
Oh wait, there’s one more Elon
Of course, disasters like this are conservatives’ favorite time for good old batshit conspiracy-theorizing. (Remember that it was the Camp Fire in California in 2021 that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed on Jewish Space Lasers.)
Elon Musk, as usual, is his own firehose of ignorant lies, conspiracy theories and disinformation. (And Christ almighty, the bullshit coming from Donald Trump’s thin lips about this.) But this one from Musk is the most special. He responded yesterday to this gem from Alex Jones:
“True,” said Elon about the obviously insane thing.
Outlets are reporting that Elon deleted that tweet, but we just clicked on it and there was his reply, plain as day. If you check and it’s gone, then it’s gone. But not when we looked.
This is who these people are.
As I said at the top, this is just so devastating and so hard to wrap your mind around. This is a time for radically loving your neighbor and helping however you can, whoever they are.
But it’s also a time to have even less patience for these liars, these bigots, these racists, these Nazis, these sowers of chaos, these vile scumbag purveyors of hateful filth who with their conspiracy theories support politicians and corporations who have been for decades ignoring the very issue — climate change! — that directly cause disasters like this. Look at this list of all the most destructive wildfires in California history and note how almost all of them are in the past 25 years or so.
No response is going to be perfect, but actually the people responding and putting their lives on the line to fight this are fucking amazing, and they need all the help they can get.
What they don’t need is the literal worst people this country has to offer using the tragedy as an excuse to scream racial and anti-LGBT and misogynistic slurs, even if they think they’re being cutesy by saying “DEI!” and proceeding to explain why only white straight Christian conservative men are qualified to do things.
Fuck these trash people so fucking hard, they’re all going to hell when they die.
LAist has this list of the best places to help right now. This is a good meme that’s going around that has some links:
Stay safe, everybody.
Only way through all of this is together.
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“Fuck these trash people so fucking hard, they’re all going to hell when they die.”
Amen. I wish I believed in hell so I could sign up to the second half of that sentence. Then again, hell IS real—it just happens to be multiple locations in Los Angeles County. Maybe we can send them all there.
What’s especially rich is that all of these people yelling DEI are completely unemployable outside the wingnut welfare bubble. Charlie Kirk and Chaya Raichik couldn’t get hired to flip burgers. Megyn Kelly’s career tanked in record time after she left Fox. As is always the case, they’re telling on themselves.