Why right-wing influencers are blaming the California wildfires on diversity efforts

Sigh…:

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.”

he 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.

Source: Why right-wing influencers are blaming the California wildfires on diversity efforts