The Brief

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 Ingraham 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 of "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."

A destroyed mobile home park in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Jan. 10, 2025.

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Zoë Meyers

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"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.

Why 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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The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Destiny Torres

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.

California’s unemployment agency kept paying cellphone bills for 4 1/2 years without checking whether its workers actually were using the devices.

That’s how it racked up $4.6 million in fees for mobile devices its workers were not using, according to a new state audit detailing wasteful spending at several government agencies.

The Employment Development Department’s excessive cellphone bills date to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it shifted call center employees to remote work and faced pressure to release benefits to millions of suddenly unemployed Californians.

It acquired 7,224 cellphones and wireless hotspots by December 2020. State auditors analyzed 54 months of invoices since then and found half the devices were unused for at least two years, 25% were unused for three years and 99 of them were never used at all.

The investigation, which auditors opened after receiving a tip, identified 6,285 devices that were unused for at least four consecutive months, and said the department spent $4.6 million on monthly service fees for them.

From the beginning, the department had about 2,000 more cellphones than call center employees, according to the audit. The gap widened over time after the pandemic ended and the department’s staffing returned to its normal headcount.

As of April, the audit said the department had 1,787 unemployment call center employees, but was paying monthly service fees for 5,097 mobile devices.

“Although obtaining the mobile devices during COVID-19 may have been a good idea to serve the public, continuing to pay the monthly service fees for so many unused devices, especially post-COVID-19, was wasteful,” the audit said.

Department officials told auditors they were unaware of the spending, but auditors pointed to regular invoices from Verizon that showed which phones were not being used.

“We would have expected EDD management to have reconsidered the need to pay the monthly service fees for so many devices that had no voice, message, or data usage,” the audit said.

The unemployment department began acting on the auditors’ findings in April, when it canceled service plans for 2,825 devices. It has since implemented a policy to terminate service plans for devices that go unused for 90 days.

The California state auditor highlighted the mobile devices in its regular report on “improper activities by state agencies and employees.” The audit also showed that the California Air Resources Board overpaid an employee who was on extended leave as he prepared to retire by $171,000.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.