Our leaders praise diversity without prioritizing what the public really needs

There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.Perhaps after the wildfires devastation in Los Angeles this week we might also say that a person who has fallen out of love with the cult of “diversity” is a liberal whose home just burned to the ground.Investigators are looking into the claims of multiple arson attacks that may well have started or whipped along these fires.A lot of blame is going to have to be apportioned in the direction of an awful lot of people.But we can already say one thing with certainty.

Which is that the authorities in Los Angeles failed catastrophically.And there are reasons.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was holidaying in Africa when the fires broke out.

She stayed in Ghana despite a red-flag warning being issued in the place she is meant to govern.When she did return yesterday even she could not have been blind to the utter devastation.More than 18,000 acres of Los Angles has been burned to the ground while she was away.And while she first avoided media questions and then stumbled her way through a shambolic press conference, perhaps she began to sense that recently cutting millions of dollars from the LA fire department’s budget was not the wisest thing to do.In the last city budget Bass slashed an incredible $17 million from the LAFD.

And while individual firefighters have fought heroically to try to put out the blaze the fact is that the department was badly under-resourced.Yesterday morning I sat down with a local woman and her teenage son whose house and entire neighborhood had just burned to the ground.Nothing was left standing.

Did she see any fire trucks, I asked? “No.Not a single fire truck entered our area,” she said.

“Not one.”Other residents noted the number of fire hydrants which firemen went to only to find out they had no water in them.How can anyone fail so badly at their job that the one thing they are meant to do — keep the water on — is something they failed a...