House Majority Leader Steve Scalise partly blamed the deadly truck attack in New Orleans on law enforcement agencies being too woke.
Scalise (R-LA) claimed in an interview Thursday that too much emphasis was being put on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the expense of security.
He was asked what Homeland Security might have missed in the tragedy on Bourbon Street that led to the deaths of 14 people, with many more injured, when a terrorist drove his truck into New Year’s Eve revelers. Authorities say a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran from Texas was responsible for the attack—he was killed by law enforcement at the scene.
“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. And they’re two very different things. We’ve got to get back to that core mission,” Scalise said in an interview with WWL talk radio in New Orleans.
“And this has happened in the DoD as well,” he continued. “We have pointed that out in DoD, we’ve pointed it out in Homeland, we’ve pointed it out in the FBI. If nothing else, let’s get back to these agencies focused on keeping America safe, period.”
Scalise said he’d been in touch with Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry “to make sure they have everything they need.”
“The disappointing thing is that it’s after the fact. You don’t want to look back and see what we missed. Clearly, there were things we missed here,” he told radio host Tommy Tucker.
Tucker asked Scalise if he had “any proof that diversity, equity, and inclusion contributed to missing this guy,” or if he was “just speculating.”
“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. And we have pointed that out for years now,” he continued. “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.”
“It seems the further away we get from September 11th, the closer we are to September 10th. It’s the attitude of, ‘It can’t happen again.’ It just did…I think they let their guard down and are focused on things other than keeping our homeland safe… When they lose focus lives are lost,” added Scalise.
Scalise claimed in the interview that there had not previously been a terror attack in the U.S. in a decade. Tucker pointed out that an ISIS terrorist used a vehicle to kill eight people in New York in 2017.
“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,” he 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 and I hate when politics enters into this… Let’s clear up what happened here, before we start making partisan political points.”