Bourbon Street hadn’t even reopened when House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., was settling on what he saw as one of the main culprits behind the deadly New Year’s truck-ramming attack: DEI.
In a Thursday interview with a talk radio station in New Orleans, Scalise claimed that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives bore part of the blame for law enforcement’s failure to disrupt the attack that left 15 people dead and dozens more injured.
Pressed repeatedly for evidence by a conservative radio host, Scalise returned to his DEI talking points. He also claimed that the truck attack was the first instance of terrorism in a decade, glossing over multiple attacks that include a strikingly similar truck rampage by another adherent of the Islamic State in 2017.
“Their main focus is on diversity and inclusion as opposed to security.”
“Some of these agencies have gotten so wrapped up in the DEI movement — call it wokeness, call it whatever you want — where their main focus is on diversity and inclusion as opposed to security,” Scalise said. “And they’re two very different things. We’ve got to get back to that core mission.”
Scalise’s comments were the latest example of DEI as the ultimate conservative scapegoat for the alleged failings of law enforcement and the military, no matter how tenuous the connection.
In the wake of the July assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Republican members of Congress were quick to blame DEI policies for the Secret Service’s failures. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., described the head of the Secret Service, a woman, as a “DEI hire.”
Appointees in the upcoming administration have also suggested they would install policies that effectively repudiate even long-standing diversity initiatives. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has said women should be excluded from combat roles, remarking that he would try to fire “woke” generals.
Photo: Matthew Hinton/AFP via Getty Images
“Are You Just Speculating?”
In turning the conversation around the Bourbon Street attack to DEI initiatives, Scalise was offering up a reliable piece of red meat. What he could not offer to WWL radio host Tommy Tucker was any kind of evidence.
Tucker asked several times whether there were any signs that law enforcement had missed, or whether Scalise had any evidence to back up his claims.
“Do you have any proof that diversity, equity, and inclusion contributed to missing this guy that drove his truck down Bourbon Street, or are you just speculating as to this?” Tucker said at one point.
“I mean, each agency has a mission, Tommy, and when you move away from your main mission — Homeland Security, I’ll start there, their mission is to keep Americans safe in our homeland, and they have started to move away from that,” Scalise said. “At some point if you’re moving away from that mission, then you’re missing out on what you’re supposed to be doing. And that’s when things get missed.”
Later on in the interview, Scalise said there had not been a terror attack on U.S. soil in a decade. While the definition of “terrorism” is often disputed, federal authorities have deemed several attacks during the past decade as such — including the mass shooting at a congressional baseball game practice in 2017 that left Scalise and others grievously wounded.
After the interview was over, Tucker, the conservative radio host, noted that in October 2017 another man claiming fealty to ISIS used a truck in a vehicle-ramming attack on Manhattan’s west side that left eight people dead.
“Just to be clear, on October 31, 2017, a guy drove a rented pickup truck into cyclists and runners for about a mile on Hudson River Park’s bike path,” Tucker said. “That was during the Trump administration. So, to throw the Homeland Security Department under the bus and say there was no attack prior to this, I don’t think is completely accurate.”
”Let’s clear up what happened here, before we start making partisan political points.”
