You’ve gotta hand it to Elon Musk: if he’s not good at anything else, he’s good at making himself a nuisance. And he can do it by using just one word.
If you have the stomach to still be on his X platform, which he transformed from being Twitter, a legitimate social media network to a far-right extremist wasteland, you may notice that he posted the word “absolutely” in response to Shaun Maguire – a tech exec who once claimed that Google discriminated against him – posting that “DEI kills people, literally.”
This was followed by a lot of bellyaching about DEI from some truly spiteful people in the wake of a deadly plane crash Wednesday night at Regan National Airport that killed 64 people aboard an American Airlines flight and the crew of a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter.
President Trump, at a Thursday press conference blamed DEI initiatives in the Federal Aviation Admnistration were the cause of the crash – something which he had zero evidence of, but said as though it were fact. This follows a real mess that started with Musk’s beef with former FAA chief Michael Whitaker.
It’s a convoluted tale, but it leads to Trump’s policies causing short staffing at the agency, and the air traffic control tower at Reagan National Airport – all because of his anti-DEI railing. It’s not yet clear what the racial background of that worker was on Wedneday, but it doesn’t matter. A congressional document referring to the nation’s ATC workforce made the understaffing clear.
All this is to say Trump’s claim that DEI is to blame for the crash is irresponsible and most of all, a lie. But with all these facts in front of him, Musk apparently doubled down on what Trump said. Now, that’s actually to be expected. As an open hater of diversity initiatives, he’ll line up to anything Trump and his MAGA cult says about it.
Now, the reality is DEI, and affirmative action before it, primarily benefited white women. According to a 2024 McKinsey & Company study white women occupy 19 percent of C-suite positions, while nonwhite women hold 4 percent. That still leaves 77 percent taken up by…you guessed it: white guys.
But what’s unnerving, based on the responses to Musk’s post is the number of people willing to go along with him, despite clearly having no evidence that what Trump says is true. There is a lengthy list of people willing to die on the hill that DEI initiatives are some kind of detriment to America and meritocracy is better. What they really fear is that it does some kind of damage to wealthy and privileged white people, who generally do not have a history of meritocracy themselves, given the institutions that for centuries have favored white males in their policies and decisionmaking.
The reality they either can’t or refuset to see is that Trump is more than willing to use DEI as a scapegoat for his own incompetence, which was probably the plan all along. With Musk and people like him echoing his nonsense, you can expect more of the same.
———————-
Madison J. Gray is a New York-based journalist. He blogs at www.starkravingmadison.com