JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Right-wing media and influencers have been blaming the scale of wildfire destruction in Los Angeles on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Billionaire Elon Musk and others circulated screenshots of the LA Fire Department's racial equity action plan. The city's fire chief also happens to be the first woman and openly gay person in that role. The chief, her fire department and the city government have become targets in right-wing media. NPR's Lisa Hagen reports on how it's part of a wider pattern.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Here's what it sounds like to blame a national tragedy on workplace diversity training. This is Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, on his podcast this week.
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CHARLIE KIRK: 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.
HAGEN: This has become a common refrain for some on the right for all kinds of disasters and tragic events, including the Baltimore bridge collapse, aircraft safety failures and the effectiveness of the Secret Service. Stoking anger about diversity efforts is shorthand for a much larger story, according to Ian Haney Lopez.
IAN HANEY LOPEZ: 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.
HAGEN: He's a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on evolving forms of racism.
HANEY LOPEZ: Again and again, we see these efforts to trigger people's latent resentments against groups that historically have been socially marginalized, socially reviled, but to do so in terms that seek to clothe themselves in a commitment to fairness or excellence.
HAGEN: It's the definition of a dog whistle, he says, and it's taken various forms since at least the end of the Civil War. As for DEI's impact on putting out wildfires...
MIKE BEASLEY: Well, I'd give it only slightly more credibility than the Jewish space laser theories.
HAGEN: Mike Beasley is with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. He fought fires for 40 years and says there are many serious discussions these fires should raise - about climate change, funding firefighters, water management, housing development, aging infrastructure. But...
BEASLEY: No fire agency is going to sacrifice training and fundamental fire control, fundamental operations, at the expense of DEI training.
HAGEN: Lily Zheng has done DEI consulting for 10 years.
LILY ZHENG: 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.
HAGEN: Zheng says DEI efforts are attempts to push the status quo toward meritocracy. But popular distortions about it and things like critical race theory have been fueled by right-wing think tanks and influencers like Chris Rufo. Here he is on YouTube last year.
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CHRIS RUFO: We want to say it over and over and over. We want people to be thinking about DEI, people to be debating about DEI, talking about DEI in policy language. But then we want to translate this into a concrete and emotional space.
HAGEN: Here's Zheng again.
ZHENG: And the playbook was very simple. Take some usually progressive or even centrist idea, ideally one that is not well understood. Character assassinate it by associating it with everything bad under the sun. It's antimeritocracy. It's evil.
HAGEN: In LA, investigators are still working to determine what sparked the fires. More of the extreme Santa Ana winds that have made firefighting nearly impossible there are expected to return. Lisa Hagen, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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