California prioritizes fighting “toxic masculinity” and promoting DEI instead of fighting wildfires.
I hate to appear flippant at a time when Los Angeles is going through an apocalyptic natural disaster, but the people of California should be outraged at state leaders. It is the California Democratic political machine—not “climate change”—that has ensured the Golden State will suffer through an endless cycle of cataclysmic fires.
Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., who has firefighting experience and has been a vocal proponent of federal legislation to improve fire management, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday night that the Pacific Palisades fire is “a symbol of modern wildfire dysfunction.”
I have to agree.
For years, I’ve written about how poor land and water management is creating the conditions for major fires in the West—and especially California. Misguided environmentalist policies peddled by both federal and state governments for generations have led to the current crisis. No state has gone more all in on stopping climate change than California, and yet it burns anyway.
Los Angeles was clearly unprepared for this disaster. Fire hydrants are running out of water, they don’t have enough firefighters to man their posts, and the whole situation is starting to look like last year’s disaster in Maui, Hawaii—which was also the result of failed leadership.
Even if all that the Left says was true about climate change, there’s no excuse for Democratic lawmakers not to make fire prevention a top priority.
But instead of addressing the issue by prioritizing controlled burns, building reservoirs, and investing in aggressive preventative measures, California’s politicians continued to invest in useless “green” projects. Worse, Gov. Gavin Newsom, when pressured by the previous Trump administration to prioritize fire prevention, he instead turned to #resistance.
Newsom made some token public attempts to change course, but they were nothing more than a mirage.
“In 2019, Newsom issued an executive order to devote more than $1 billion to wildfire prevention,” City Journal reported. “But a 2021 investigation found that the governor had misled the public about the acreage of fuel-reduction projects completed in the state: just 11,399 acres, versus his claim of 90,000.”
Here’s the lord of ashes, standing in the rubble and complaining about how Trump was trying to “politicize” the disaster while having no answers for why large swaths of his state burn down every year. All he has to account for the state’s failure is “climate change! Trump!”
Newsom was so happy back in 2021 to tell everyone how President Joe Biden’s winning the presidency meant that California would be better able to combat fires.
How’s that working out? Not well. The president was briefly awoken from his slumbers to appear with Newsom to talk about the Los Angeles blaze, but he somehow managed to make his incoherent ramblings about himself.
But blame for the response to the Los Angeles fires can’t just be laid at the feet of Newsom. City officials bear responsibility, too.
As Los Angeles pumped money into various “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts, they also decided to pull money out of the fire department’s budget. A local Los Angeles ABC News affiliate reported that L.A. reduced the fire department’s budget by $17.5 million just months before fire season.
And what about Los Angeles fires besides the rank incompetence of Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass—who was in Ghana while her city burned and stood in silence as a reporter asked her basic questions about her non-handling of the disaster—is the state’s total commitment to DEI initiatives over everything else.
DEI isn’t the reason the Los Angeles area is burning. Southern California is historically dry and arid, the Santa Ana winds are essentially a natural, nuclear-level bellows, and the state and federal governments failed to conduct proper land management long before DEI became the totality of ruling class ideology.
But it’s hard to ignore the fact that California’s leaders, from the governor’s mansion to the Los Angeles mayor’s office to the L.A. Fire Department, put “diversity” and identitarianism over all other goals. California by some measures has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on DEI initiatives. Virtually every state and local bureaucracy prioritizes DEI, too. That even infects fire departments.
Here’s Los Angeles Fire Department Assistant Chief Kristine Larson, who runs the DEI bureau, talking about how her job is to root out racism and sexism.
She said in a promotional video that what people want is for firefighters who show up to put fires out at your house to “look like you.”
Yes, because when you are asphyxiating from smoke inhalation and see a man with the wrong color skin coming to save you, your first thoughts are: “Wrong race. Let me die.”
In some ways, this video gets worse when Larson says that if you complain about female firefighters not being able to carry a man out of a fire, the issue is that the man got himself in the wrong place.
It wasn’t just a woke assistant chief pushing this nonsense.
Here’s Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley talking about her vision for the department’s future, which included a “three-year strategic plan to increase diversity.”
She said that that would help attract the best and brightest for the job.
Yeah, right.
If they really cared about bringing in more talent maybe they wouldn’t have removed 113 firefighters from duty in 2021 because they wouldn’t take the COVID-19 vaccine.
This is the sort of ideological management that’s absolutely ruining my home state.
The tragic fires in Los Angeles will leave a deep and permanent scar on the city, much like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They are also becoming symbolic of California’s many, many failures under decades of disastrous one-party rule.
