Within a day of wildfires igniting in Los Angeles, right-wing media and influencers began blaming the scale of the destruction on efforts to reduce systemic social inequality, notably diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Billionaire Elon Musk helped circulate screenshots of the Los Angeles Fire Department's four-year-old 'racial equity action plan,' writing "They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes."
The city's fire chief, a 22-year veteran firefighter, happens to be the first woman and openly gay person in that role. The chief, her fire department and the city government quickly became targets in right-wing media.
"When you focus your government on diversity, equity, inclusion, LGBTQ pet projects, and you are captured by environmentalists, we have been warning for years that you are worried about abstractions, but you can't do the basic stuff," Charlie Kirk, founder of the Trump-aligned nonprofit Turning Point USA, said on his podcast this week. He's one of many critics amplifying what's become a common refrain on the right when all kinds of disasters and tragic events hit, including the Baltimore bridge collapse last March and the Secret Service's performance during the attempted assassination of now President-elect Donald Trump over the summer.
After a plane panel detached mid-flight on a Boeing aircraft last year, Fox News host Laura Ingram said, "We can't link the diversity efforts to what happened — that would take an exhaustive investigation, but it's worth asking at this point, is excellence what we need in airline operations or is diversity the goal here?"
Commentary on leading, national news stories is a tried and true way for partisan media figures to drive engagement online. But stoking anger about diversity efforts in particular is also shorthand for a much larger story, said Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author "Dog Whistle Politics."
"The story is something like this: We as a society used to hire on the basis of competence and meritocracy. But that system has been hijacked by powerful minorities," he told NPR.
"Again and again, we see these efforts to trigger people's latent resentments against groups that historically have been socially marginalized, socially reviled in terms that do not embrace a blatant direct bigotry, but that instead seek to clothe themselves in some form of neutrality or even a commitment to fairness or excellence."
It's the definition of a dog whistle, said Haney López, and it's been happening in various forms since at least the end of the Civil War.
As for the impact of DEI policies on putting out wildfires, "I give it only slightly more credibility than the Jewish space laser theories," said Mike Beasley, who heads the board of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. In 40 years of firefighting, he says he has watched wildfires become more extreme and "meaner."
"There is no number of people that will stop all the fires in the middle of a hot, dry season with the climate charged fuel aridity. There just isn't," said Beasley.
"With these Santa Ana winds happening, it's just about getting people out of the way. It's not really about putting the fire out until the winds calm down."
Beasley says there are many legitimate discussions these fires should raise about climate change, firefighting budgets, water management, housing development, insurance and outdated infrastructure.
"No fire agency is going to sacrifice training and fundamental fire control and fundamental operations at the expense of DEI training," said Beasley, who said diverse teams are better at tackling complex challenges, working under pressure and fostering community trust during emergencies.
The backlash against DEI programs
The day-to-day work of helping make workplaces less discriminatory is incredibly mundane, according to Lily Zheng, who's been a DEI consultant for about 10 years.
"Something that's often lost in these conversations is that DEI practitioners themselves have actually been critiquing DEI from within for decades," said Zheng. "We've called attention to the 30 minute lunch-and-learns that aren't going to solve racism overnight."
The 2020 murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police sparked a national reckoning on race that led many public, private and educational institutions to launch new efforts to make their environments less discriminatory and more inclusive.
Zheng said they've seen waves of rising and falling support for DEI over the years, but backlash has picked up since around 2021.
"The impact of this toxic discourse has been a chilling effect on people's ability to talk about DEI and to communicate their commitment to it," they said.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump vowed to crack down on diversity programs, including at universities. Several states, including Florida, Texas, Alabama and Iowa, have already banned DEI offices in their public universities.
Just this week, Meta and McDonald's joined a growing list of companies including Walmart, Ford, Lowe's and Toyota, that are scaling back their DEI initiatives. The change at McDonald's – which will emphasize "inclusion" instead – came just days after the fast food company was targeted by anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck who has led social media campaigns pressuring companies to drop their programs.
DEI efforts, Zheng says, are attempts to push the status quo towards meritocracy. But popular distortions about it, as well as Critical Race Theory, have been fueled by right-wing think tanks and influencers like Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
On his YouTube channel last year, Rufo laid out his strategy for how to attack university DEI programs.
"What happens is that the left will say, 'Well you're opposing DEI, you don't like diversity, you don't like equity, you don't like inclusion,'" Rufo said. "And you can say no, those are false words, those are Orwellian terms, what I really don't like is using taxpayer money to fund left-wing racialist ideology that seeks to divide students into oppressor and oppressed and create separate standards of judgment based on where their ancestors came from."
The playbook is simple, said Zheng.
"Take some usually progressive or even centrist idea about equality or CRT or DEI, — ideally one that is not well understood — character assassinate it by associating it with everything bad under the sun," they said. "It's anti-American. It's anti-meritocracy. It's evil."
Zheng added, "They're trying to flip it back and saying, 'No, no, no, it's you. That's the problem. The status quo is perfectly fine.'"
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