There are few conversations more frustrating than the fight over DEI. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, the term – like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory – used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, DEI has become yet another catch-all bogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

For example, after a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet this month, X’s Elon Musk, among others, launched a series of tirades against DEI. The idea, if it can be called that, was that efforts to diversify airline workforces had contributed to the accident. The problem was that there was zero evidence that these efforts had anything to do with it. In fact, the airline industry is much safer than it was when it was a virtually all-white enterprise decades ago.