Elon Musk has been leaping about the public stage like a Rumplestiltskin just appointed jester to the royal court. A few days ago he blamed the L.A. fires on hiring programs intended to encourage “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”, or DEI. In doing so he adds to the long litany of outrage over Affirmative Action, of which DEI is the current expression. The gist is that “diversity hires” replace qualified candidates with less competent ones hired strictly because of their particular identity, which includes hiring where institutional pressure rather than law is responsible for fulfilling DEI goals.
As in Musk’s idiotic claim, the arguments against Affirmative Action and DEI are riddled with lies and tinged with racism and sexism. We can take that up in a future post. But the ugliness of the anti-DEI campaign was displayed by Fox News, Newsmax, Turning Point USA, and other right wing outlets that used Elon’s proclamation to yap on about L.A.’s gay female fire chief and two other top fire officials being women, posting their photos as if they were public enemies. Drought, funding cuts, 100 mph winds, building thousands of homes in the dry sage covered hills and canyons—nope, cherchez les femmes. In a burst of silver-tongued eloquence that Musk likely thought clinched his point, he proclaimed, “DEI means people DIE!”, surely a quotation to rival “To be or not to be”.
Whether he’s gone completely bonkers or knows exactly what he’s doing, the result is the same. Donald Trump built his own political career on scapegoating whatever group triggered the Pavlovian reflexes of his followers. Musk is playing the same game of establishing a language of blame where any- and everything is attributed to the insidious influence of targeted groups. This was the exact strategy of Hitler and the Nazis in building and holding power. Jews of course were at the top of the Nazi list, but the Nazis’ T-4 program (named for its office address) put to death at least 250,000 people viewed as useless or unworthy due to disabilities. An equal number of Roma (commonly called gypsies) were murdered by the Nazis. Labor union leaders, intellectuals, priests, Poles, Soviet nationals and POWs, and homosexuals were also exterminated on the basis of identity.
The MAGA coup hasn’t reached those depths and indeed may never despite the unsettling number of self-avowed fascists and Nazi admirers filling its ranks. It certainly has followed the Nazi blueprint by flinging insane, inflammatory accusations that various groups are fatally undermining American society. They learned Hitler’s lesson well: Repeat an outrageous lie often enough and it becomes normalized. People think there must be some truth to it because “everyone’s saying it.” And given the rise in hate crime since Trump’s 2016 campaign, once again we are learning that violence follows swift on the heels of the rhetoric of hate, no matter how unhinged it may be.
Then again, even as I was writing this (on January 13), Mother Jones issued an investigative report that the severe educational cuts pushed by Project 2025 will deprive nearly nine million children with disabilities whose education depends on the funding Republicans have explicitly targeted. In fact, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Trump ally, recently “cut $600 million in Medicaid funding for disability education services.” Of course that’s not T-4 but neither was T-4 at first. And, among other publications, Scientific American (April 2024) reported on the fears of LGBTQ young people and their parents of harassment and violence, including accounts by families driven out of their towns by attacks on their homes and kids.
“One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads.” — James Baldwin
But all this scapegoating is an essential part of the strategy developed and funded by the wealthy cadre that drives the American ultra-conservative movement. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was their watershed moment and now they are waxing triumphant. Their world view is that America is a white Christian nation devoted to the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. Accumulation of wealth is taken as proof of either pseudo-divine or pseudo-Darwinian—”we won the money game so we’re most fit to rule”—sanction. Or both. Everyone else is just collateral damage. Cutting funds for Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare; food programs; housing access; safe water and food supplies; infrastructure in poor neighborhoods; environmental protection and restoration; etc. is not about some high-sounding notion of laissez-faire capitalism, a long-obsolete term. It is about one thing—control and the benefits it allows.
A gay woman as the head of LA’s fire department becomes a target when LA falls victim to climate change. The playbook is that if something goes wrong, look for the convenient woman, gay, immigrant, person of color, etc. to blame it on. Post their pictures which, in today’s atmosphere, is a sideways invitation to harass that person or worse. And keep up the attacks as long as there is a mob on social media or rallies or huddled in a barn or basement decorated with swastikas and reeking of gun oil, to excite and incite and, in the case of Trump, Musk, and today’s Republican Party, to embrace.
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