There’s now a very noticeable pattern that plays out every time we witness a colossal failure on the national stage. It happened after the Secret Service allowed Donald Trump to get shot in the head in Pennsylvania. It happened after Harvard’s president was exposed for plagiarism, and after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election.
Here’s how it usually goes: Conservatives pointed out that DEI was involved in some way. And then everyone on the Left acted with shock and indignation at the mere suggestion that DEI might have backfired.
DEI, they tell us, is an essential mandate that always adds value. It’s vital to every organization. And then, in the same breath, they tell us that DEI can’t possibly be related to any failure by any organization or government agency that practices DEI. In other words, DEI is either critically important or not important at all, depending on how things are going.
As entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles are destroyed by fires, once again, we’re seeing this familiar pattern play out. As we talked about yesterday, conservatives have pointed out that DEI has infected every aspect of the government of Los Angeles, and in particular its Fire Department. And in response, as they usually do, the Left has insisted that DEI actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the fires, or the disastrous response to them. And they’re wagging their fingers at anyone who suggests otherwise.
Rolling Stone, in particular, was upset with my response to the wildfires. The published an article the other day entitled, “RIGHT-WINGERS ARE BLAMING THE L.A. FIRES ON DIVERSITY.” Here’s part of it: “Climate-denying conservatives are instead blaming the devastation on California’s ‘woke’ policies. … ‘Los Angeles deliberately set out to exclude white men from becoming firefighters, and now they don’t have enough firefighters to prevent their city from burning to the ground,’ wrote right-wing commentator Matt Walsh in one post endorsed by Elon Musk. ‘DEI is a cancer that destroys everything it touches.’”
Now, first of all, I had to look up who wrote this article, because it reads like something our PR department would come up with. The whole article is just a series of quotes — from myself, Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Megyn Kelly, and so on. And sure enough, the author is one Nikki McCann Ramirez, a former Media Matters staffer. She’s apparently found another organization that’s willing to pay her to write articles about my tweets, after Elon Musk sued Media Matters into the ground.
The only original contribution that Nikki Ramirez made to the article is this line of commentary at the end. It reads: “There’s no evidence that the fire department’s push for diversity has any effect on its ability to fight fires.”
It’s a line that made me realize we need to do another deep-dive on DEI in the Los Angeles Fire Department, because it’s completely false. But a lot of people on the Left are still repeating it. And they’re repeating this line because they think it’s safe. In their minds, it’s impossible to find a “smoking gun” that proves DEI leads directly to failure. After all, DEI is a bureaucratic system. And the whole point of bureaucracy is to make it impossible to assign blame.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Unfortunately for Rolling Stone and the rest of these activists, the leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department haven’t been subtle about their DEI policies, and the impact these policies have on their job performance. In fact, they’ve actually been quite direct about it. Here’s a video of Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, the head of the Fire Department’s “Equity and Human Resources Bureau.” You may have seen a shortened version of this video online, because it’s going viral. I found a longer, unedited version of it. And it’s worth watching because it implicates both the LAPD and the LAFD. And it also includes the context, to the extent you need it. Here it is:
It looks like some kind of AI-generated parody, but it’s not. So let’s review what we just saw.
The first claim from the Deputy Fire Chief is that, when you have a medical emergency or when your house is on fire, all you care about is seeing first responders who “look like you.” You don’t care if they’re good at their jobs. You’re not worried about their CPR certifications, or their ability to put out fires. Instead, the most important thing is the appearance of the firefighter — meaning their skin color and gender. And the LAPD sergeant agrees with that.
This isn’t a claim that needs to be broken down and dissected in a million different ways. But just for fun, let’s do that.
First of all, let’s assume this is true. Let’s assume that, when white people call 911 in Los Angeles because their house is burning down, they really don’t want to see black firefighters show up. So when a team of all-white firefighters show up, in Kristine Lawson’s worldview, it would be totally normal and appropriate for the white homeowner to say, “Thank God they didn’t send any black firefighters.” After all, he wants to see people who look like him. What’s wrong with that?
Of course, what Kristine Larson really means is that non-white firefighters should want to see non-white firefighters respond to their house. But there’s still a big problem here. I’d wager a lot of money that there’s not a single black person on the planet who would react with relief or joy, if they called 911 and someone like Kristine Larson waddled up to their door. That would be a moment of sheer panic for anyone, regardless of skin color. That would be the moment they knew that their life was over.
But even if we assume that black people demand to be saved by overweight black lesbian firefighters like Kristine Larson, there’s still another problem with Larson’s explanation, which is this: How exactly would dispatchers know what race of firefighters to send to a particular call? Should the dispatcher demand to know the callers’ race? Should they dispatch race-matching fire crews? Is any of this happening right now in Los Angeles? By the logic of the Deputy Fire Chief, it should be happening.
And then, of course, comes the second part of the video, in which Larson responds to someone who’s worried that, as an overweight black lesbian, she won’t be able to lift a man and remove him from a house fire. Larson’s response is that the man shouldn’t have put himself in that position in the first place.
She couldn’t be making it any clearer that DEI hiring compromises the fire department’s ability to do its job. She thinks it’s a laugh line, apparently. This is how DEI hires at the highest levels of the Los Angeles Fire Department are talking about the impact of DEI on their jobs.
But Larson has never been disqualified or punished in any way. She has a job paying well over $300,000 a year at the Los Angeles Fire Department, in which she enforces various equity mandates while she laughs at people who ask why she’s so overweight. And part of that job apparently entails weeding out alleged “bigots” in the ranks of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Watch:
This is reminiscent of Lloyd Austin’s big plan to purge the Pentagon of “extremist white supremacists,” by which he meant, white people who support Donald Trump and refuse to take the COVID shot. It’s the kind of thing that no public agency in the United States should be doing, for about a million reasons.
First of all, the idea of “racism” in fire departments and police departments has been stretched beyond all recognition, to the point that it’s completely meaningless. As we discussed earlier this week, fire departments all over the country are getting sued right now for “racism” because they attempt to enforce basic standards of literacy and competence in the admissions process.
Secondly, this is a department that’s now very short of manpower during a historic crisis. Barring extreme circumstances, they should not be weeding out any competent firefighters right now. The Los Angeles Fire Department should be focused on retaining as many firefighters as possible — not firing them for liking an offensive meme or something. And if you doubt that, take a look at Ferguson, Missouri, or Minneapolis, or Baltimore. Have any of these cities become safer, after the BLM revolution? Of course not.
The real purpose of all of these purges is to punish anyone who thinks an unapproved thought that also happens to be true. They don’t want people to make obvious observations like this one: Women shouldn’t be firefighters at all. Any effort to include more women is by definition an effort to make the fire department less equipped and less capable.
The same is true for police departments, which are being gutted all over the country in the name of equity. Just this week, the Maryland State Police agreed to a $3 million settlement with Joe Biden’s DOJ over their hiring practices. As one local news station reports: “The lawsuit claimed that the Maryland Department of State Police violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it used a certain physical fitness test and a certain written test to hire entry-level troopers. The lawsuit claimed the tests disqualified more women and African American applicants than others and were not job-related.”
In other words, in the world of policing, physical fitness and literacy are no longer “job-related,” apparently. This is how many police and fire departments now operate. They know they have to hire and promote incompetent people.
This is the kind of deliberate sabotage that has directly contributed to the disaster that’s unfolding in Los Angeles. Instead of spending every moment thinking about protecting their state, the leadership of California has been busy appointing “equity” overseers. So, when a disaster occurs, they have no idea what to do.
That led to this clown-car performance from Gavin Newsom yesterday. He told a constituent he was on the phone with Joe Biden. Then, when she asked to talk to Joe Biden, he admitted he didn’t have cell service. Watch:
If thousands of people weren’t having their lives destroyed right now, the incompetence would be pretty amusing. Instead, given the staggering nature of this catastrophe, it’s infuriating. And people are very, very tired of this kind of thing. They want competence to make a comeback.
That would mean the Los Angeles Fire Department would have to fire some overweight lesbians who are making $300,000 a year. But it would also mean that, the next time a massive wildfire engulfs the city, Los Angeles might actually have water in the fire hydrants. They might have a mayor who’s on the scene, coordinating a response, instead of pandering in Africa. They might have enough firefighters to put out the blaze.
That’s a turn of events that outlets like “Rolling Stone magazine” desperately wants to prevent. But at this point, it’s looking more likely than ever. DEI has been tried, and it has failed in spectacular fashion. Now it’s time for competent people to take over — even if they happen to be white men. The residents of Los Angeles might not understand much, but they understand survival. And at this point, that’s exactly what survival will take.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
There’s now a very noticeable pattern that plays out every time we witness a colossal failure on the national stage. It happened after the Secret Service allowed Donald Trump to get shot in the head in Pennsylvania. It happened after Harvard’s president was exposed for plagiarism, and after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election.
Here’s how it usually goes: Conservatives pointed out that DEI was involved in some way. And then everyone on the Left acted with shock and indignation at the mere suggestion that DEI might have backfired.
DEI, they tell us, is an essential mandate that always adds value. It’s vital to every organization. And then, in the same breath, they tell us that DEI can’t possibly be related to any failure by any organization or government agency that practices DEI. In other words, DEI is either critically important or not important at all, depending on how things are going.
As entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles are destroyed by fires, once again, we’re seeing this familiar pattern play out. As we talked about yesterday, conservatives have pointed out that DEI has infected every aspect of the government of Los Angeles, and in particular its Fire Department. And in response, as they usually do, the Left has insisted that DEI actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the fires, or the disastrous response to them. And they’re wagging their fingers at anyone who suggests otherwise.
Rolling Stone, in particular, was upset with my response to the wildfires. The published an article the other day entitled, “RIGHT-WINGERS ARE BLAMING THE L.A. FIRES ON DIVERSITY.” Here’s part of it: “Climate-denying conservatives are instead blaming the devastation on California’s ‘woke’ policies. … ‘Los Angeles deliberately set out to exclude white men from becoming firefighters, and now they don’t have enough firefighters to prevent their city from burning to the ground,’ wrote right-wing commentator Matt Walsh in one post endorsed by Elon Musk. ‘DEI is a cancer that destroys everything it touches.’”
Now, first of all, I had to look up who wrote this article, because it reads like something our PR department would come up with. The whole article is just a series of quotes — from myself, Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Megyn Kelly, and so on. And sure enough, the author is one Nikki McCann Ramirez, a former Media Matters staffer. She’s apparently found another organization that’s willing to pay her to write articles about my tweets, after Elon Musk sued Media Matters into the ground.
The only original contribution that Nikki Ramirez made to the article is this line of commentary at the end. It reads: “There’s no evidence that the fire department’s push for diversity has any effect on its ability to fight fires.”
It’s a line that made me realize we need to do another deep-dive on DEI in the Los Angeles Fire Department, because it’s completely false. But a lot of people on the Left are still repeating it. And they’re repeating this line because they think it’s safe. In their minds, it’s impossible to find a “smoking gun” that proves DEI leads directly to failure. After all, DEI is a bureaucratic system. And the whole point of bureaucracy is to make it impossible to assign blame.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Unfortunately for Rolling Stone and the rest of these activists, the leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department haven’t been subtle about their DEI policies, and the impact these policies have on their job performance. In fact, they’ve actually been quite direct about it. Here’s a video of Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, the head of the Fire Department’s “Equity and Human Resources Bureau.” You may have seen a shortened version of this video online, because it’s going viral. I found a longer, unedited version of it. And it’s worth watching because it implicates both the LAPD and the LAFD. And it also includes the context, to the extent you need it. Here it is:
It looks like some kind of AI-generated parody, but it’s not. So let’s review what we just saw.
The first claim from the Deputy Fire Chief is that, when you have a medical emergency or when your house is on fire, all you care about is seeing first responders who “look like you.” You don’t care if they’re good at their jobs. You’re not worried about their CPR certifications, or their ability to put out fires. Instead, the most important thing is the appearance of the firefighter — meaning their skin color and gender. And the LAPD sergeant agrees with that.
This isn’t a claim that needs to be broken down and dissected in a million different ways. But just for fun, let’s do that.
First of all, let’s assume this is true. Let’s assume that, when white people call 911 in Los Angeles because their house is burning down, they really don’t want to see black firefighters show up. So when a team of all-white firefighters show up, in Kristine Lawson’s worldview, it would be totally normal and appropriate for the white homeowner to say, “Thank God they didn’t send any black firefighters.” After all, he wants to see people who look like him. What’s wrong with that?
Of course, what Kristine Larson really means is that non-white firefighters should want to see non-white firefighters respond to their house. But there’s still a big problem here. I’d wager a lot of money that there’s not a single black person on the planet who would react with relief or joy, if they called 911 and someone like Kristine Larson waddled up to their door. That would be a moment of sheer panic for anyone, regardless of skin color. That would be the moment they knew that their life was over.
But even if we assume that black people demand to be saved by overweight black lesbian firefighters like Kristine Larson, there’s still another problem with Larson’s explanation, which is this: How exactly would dispatchers know what race of firefighters to send to a particular call? Should the dispatcher demand to know the callers’ race? Should they dispatch race-matching fire crews? Is any of this happening right now in Los Angeles? By the logic of the Deputy Fire Chief, it should be happening.
And then, of course, comes the second part of the video, in which Larson responds to someone who’s worried that, as an overweight black lesbian, she won’t be able to lift a man and remove him from a house fire. Larson’s response is that the man shouldn’t have put himself in that position in the first place.
She couldn’t be making it any clearer that DEI hiring compromises the fire department’s ability to do its job. She thinks it’s a laugh line, apparently. This is how DEI hires at the highest levels of the Los Angeles Fire Department are talking about the impact of DEI on their jobs.
But Larson has never been disqualified or punished in any way. She has a job paying well over $300,000 a year at the Los Angeles Fire Department, in which she enforces various equity mandates while she laughs at people who ask why she’s so overweight. And part of that job apparently entails weeding out alleged “bigots” in the ranks of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Watch:
This is reminiscent of Lloyd Austin’s big plan to purge the Pentagon of “extremist white supremacists,” by which he meant, white people who support Donald Trump and refuse to take the COVID shot. It’s the kind of thing that no public agency in the United States should be doing, for about a million reasons.
First of all, the idea of “racism” in fire departments and police departments has been stretched beyond all recognition, to the point that it’s completely meaningless. As we discussed earlier this week, fire departments all over the country are getting sued right now for “racism” because they attempt to enforce basic standards of literacy and competence in the admissions process.
Secondly, this is a department that’s now very short of manpower during a historic crisis. Barring extreme circumstances, they should not be weeding out any competent firefighters right now. The Los Angeles Fire Department should be focused on retaining as many firefighters as possible — not firing them for liking an offensive meme or something. And if you doubt that, take a look at Ferguson, Missouri, or Minneapolis, or Baltimore. Have any of these cities become safer, after the BLM revolution? Of course not.
The real purpose of all of these purges is to punish anyone who thinks an unapproved thought that also happens to be true. They don’t want people to make obvious observations like this one: Women shouldn’t be firefighters at all. Any effort to include more women is by definition an effort to make the fire department less equipped and less capable.
The same is true for police departments, which are being gutted all over the country in the name of equity. Just this week, the Maryland State Police agreed to a $3 million settlement with Joe Biden’s DOJ over their hiring practices. As one local news station reports: “The lawsuit claimed that the Maryland Department of State Police violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it used a certain physical fitness test and a certain written test to hire entry-level troopers. The lawsuit claimed the tests disqualified more women and African American applicants than others and were not job-related.”
In other words, in the world of policing, physical fitness and literacy are no longer “job-related,” apparently. This is how many police and fire departments now operate. They know they have to hire and promote incompetent people.
This is the kind of deliberate sabotage that has directly contributed to the disaster that’s unfolding in Los Angeles. Instead of spending every moment thinking about protecting their state, the leadership of California has been busy appointing “equity” overseers. So, when a disaster occurs, they have no idea what to do.
That led to this clown-car performance from Gavin Newsom yesterday. He told a constituent he was on the phone with Joe Biden. Then, when she asked to talk to Joe Biden, he admitted he didn’t have cell service. Watch:
If thousands of people weren’t having their lives destroyed right now, the incompetence would be pretty amusing. Instead, given the staggering nature of this catastrophe, it’s infuriating. And people are very, very tired of this kind of thing. They want competence to make a comeback.
That would mean the Los Angeles Fire Department would have to fire some overweight lesbians who are making $300,000 a year. But it would also mean that, the next time a massive wildfire engulfs the city, Los Angeles might actually have water in the fire hydrants. They might have a mayor who’s on the scene, coordinating a response, instead of pandering in Africa. They might have enough firefighters to put out the blaze.
That’s a turn of events that outlets like “Rolling Stone magazine” desperately wants to prevent. But at this point, it’s looking more likely than ever. DEI has been tried, and it has failed in spectacular fashion. Now it’s time for competent people to take over — even if they happen to be white men. The residents of Los Angeles might not understand much, but they understand survival. And at this point, that’s exactly what survival will take.
“}]]
