Anti-Wokeness Is a Mental Autoimmune Disorder

The LA fires have nothing to do with DEI

Yesterday, I wrote this opinion piece for Newsweek on the causes of the L.A. fires. I hope you’ll read it.

I’m obviously no expert on wildfires. But I care a great deal about L.A., the city my wife is from and where most of her family still lives, and where I lived myself for close to 12 years. So I’ve tried to take seriously the question of why the city is on fire, and why this keeps happening, because that discussion is taking place almost nowhere online.

There’s a meme going around right-wing Twitter and conservative media right now that “DEI” is somehow connected to the fires being out of control. Or maybe that’s not the claim — it’s hard to tell, because most of the time the tweets are just juvenile insults and you’re left to infer what exactly the argument is. But for the critique to make any sense at all, it requires assuming that firefighters are somehow doing a bad job fighting these fires, which as far as I can tell is nowhere in evidence. And evidence wouldn’t help in any case, since the people making the claim deny they’re suggesting what they obviously are. The whole talking point is just completely incoherent.

The “argument” doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t have to. It’s not actually an attempt to describe what’s happening in the world; it’s a magic mind control spell to stimulate your lizard brain’s reactionary erogenous zones. The point is merely to associate “DEI” or “wokeness” with the Current Thing in order to channel your despair over an unfolding tragedy into outrage over the poster’s pet political cause. It’s the exact same thing the right accuses liberals of doing whenever they turn a school shooting into a call for more gun control, except it’s even more cynical than that, because at least the easy availability of guns has something to do with how certain psychopathic children are able to get their hands on them. By contrast, there is zero evidence that diversity policies have had any impact on the response to the fires, nor that the response itself has been somehow lacking. Literally the only evidence cited is a couple of dumb LAFD PR hits — a fluffy interview with a friendly local TV reporter and a woke promotional video by a viral media company — that are somehow supposed to prove that the department is so obsessed with diversity that they’ve let their standards slip, and that this is to blame for the fires being out of control.