The fire story has brought attention to many issues that conservatives have been warning about for years – the dangers of catering to an extremist environmentalist fringe, incompetent leftist government – as well as some I’d never heard of, such as the “expanding bullseye effect” that CO posted about yesterday.
While there are obviously many contributing factors to the disaster, one that has deservedly gotten a lot of attention in the last several years is getting even more now: the DEI priorities that led to so many incompetent people ending up in crucial positions in the LAFD.
Thankfully, amongst all of the green flags popping up in the late, flailing stage of the Biden/Harris administration that culminated in Trump’s re-election, most people now seem to be decisively rejecting DEI. But it’s a shame that it took this long, or that it’s necessary even now to explain to some people what’s wrong with DEI.
I think it’s hung around so long partly because leftists are experts at using language to obscure painful realities. Sometimes euphemistic language arises out of good intentions, and in limited circumstances, it may even be helpful. If calling someone “retarded” sounds harsh or insulting, then substituting “mentally challenged” and eventually “special needs” is compassionate. Moving from “crippled” to “handicapped” was probably good.
But even in those cases, there’s a tendency to go too far and try to deceive yourself and others by eschewing clearer language in favor of comforting euphemisms. When some advocates tried to move on from “handicapped” to “handi-capable,” it didn’t take, because it was too obviously an absurdly positive spin that edged into deception.
When I was a young miscreant in the 1970s, many schools made a terminology switch from calling underperforming kids “slow learners” or “remedial students” to those who “progress at their own speed.” It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t change the reality.
And because kids are semi-feral a-holes in need of civilizing, six minutes after the new term was rolled out, playgrounds were ringing with taunts of, “Ha ha! Billy progresses at his own speed!”
In politicians’ hands, such euphemisms quickly degenerate from well-intentioned to deceitful. If you can get people to think of illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” and then “undocumented Americans,” you have deceived them.
If you can transform “vagrants” “winos” and “bums” into “the homeless” and then “the unhoused,” you can squeeze billions out of naïve leftist voters for your pet causes.
The same phenomenon happened in the mid-1960s, when a plan for “compensatory” or “remediating” discrimination soon became known as “affirmative action.” “Discrimination” sounds bad, but taking “affirmative action” sounds bold, and forward-thinking. It’s got “affirm” right there in the name!
It was initially sold as a tiny bit of favoritism, used only in the rarest of circumstances, to break what was essentially a tie between two nearly identical candidates for a job or a scholarship. In reality, it pretty quickly became a huge thumb on the scale which required draconian quotas and giving some groups a multiple-standard-deviation boost in test scores or GPAs over the general population.
And the word “quota?” No bueno. Supporters soon were forced into verbal gymnastics, insisting, “We don’t have any quotas. Only goals and targets.”
Fast-forward a few decades, and the detrimental results of affirmative action had become so obvious and the program so unpopular that it could no longer be sustained. So the lefty elite said, “Okay, we had good intentions, and we tried, but our plan is a failure. So we’re learning from our mistakes, admitting error, and dropping it.”
HA! I kid.
They actually flew their private jets to a hidden mountain lair near Davos (Because: climate change, shmimate change.) and engaged in a two-week brainstorming and re-branding retreat.
And then came out with… you knew where this was going… Diversity, Inclusion and Equity!
Then someone pointed out that that spelled “DIE.”
And George Soros said, “Schiff!” And had several subordinates killed, and all of the posters re-printed and the web sites edited.
And DEI was born.
Annnnddddd… the president of Harvard is a dimwitted plagiarist, a dude who dressed like Captain Kangaroo’s homely wife is Assistant Health Secretary, Kamala is VP, and LA is burning to the ground.
Just like affirmative action before it, DEI is a lose-lose-lose proposition. Those being discriminated against obviously lose, but so do the “beneficiaries” of the discrimination, who are stigmatized with the suspicion that they didn’t earn their position, even if they did. Also, when they get artificially boosted into a position for which they are not qualified, they fail.
And the larger society loses, because it ends up with less qualified people in government, academia and some businesses. Sometimes the effects are just aggravating, as when mediocre professors get tenure, or when you get terrible service at the DMV. But sometimes you get petite firefighteresses who can’t carry a Pomeranian puppy out of a burning building, and people die.
For 30 years, my dad worked with twenty guys on street crews for the Northern Illinois Gas Company. Everybody there worked in two-man teams in which partners rotated every 2-3 weeks or so. Everybody was trained and periodically tested on their various tasks, and if job applicants failed welding or equipment operating tests, they didn’t get hired, or else were let go.
Responding to an affirmative-action push, the company hired two women to join the street crews. Both women were stronger and more sturdily built than most women, and both were pleasant people and did their best. One was better at welding and machinery operating than the other, but in those areas, both were roughly equivalent to at least the lower half of the guys. The most physically taxing part of his job was jackhammering.
But neither of them had the body mass or upper body strength to work a jackhammer. The two-man teams would split the jackhammering duties, and generally, the younger or stronger of each pair would do a little more than half. But whenever a guy was paired with one of the women, he knew that for the next 2-3 weeks, he’d do all of the jackhammering. Toward the end of my dad’s career, he’d had a few back injuries, and he dreaded the rotations with a female partner.
He ended up retiring a couple of years before he wanted to – with a lower pension than he would otherwise have had – because he couldn’t get medically cleared to work on a street crew anymore. I can’t say for sure that that was partly due to the company’s affirmative action/DEI hiring policy. But the fact that it’s even a possibility illustrates the problem.
In his documentary with Dennis Prager called “No Safe Spaces,” the great Adam Carolla told a story about his experience as a would-be LA firefighter. (I taught that documentary as part of my “Analyzing Propaganda” course in the last two years of my teaching career, and it was always gratifying to see that most students found the doc persuasive, even though many of them were little libs.)
Right after high school, Carolla applied to be a firefighter, and he was told that there was a long wait for white male applicants to get an appointment to take the required exam. He went to work on construction sites, and SEVEN YEARS later, got a letter inviting him to come in and take the exam. When he was waiting in line, there was a short, petite female of color next to him.
He asked her when she had applied, and she said, “Wednesday.”
Carolla makes the point that he would have been a great firefighter. He was young and strong, and had the kind of physical courage edging into foolhardiness typical of many young men.
Carolla never got the chance to be a firefighter, but he has done very well for himself in the intervening years. But the citizens of LA lost a very qualified firefighter – and many other hundreds or thousands like him – because their political leaders valued identity politics and DEI double standards over the lives and property of Californians.
Hopefully, after these fires are put out, they will have learned their lesson, and will vote accordingly.
If they STILL don’t wise up, they’ll once again get what they’ve been voting for, good and hard. And hot.
Martin Simpson 