Gender doesnt matter to an inferno: LA fires lay waste to DEI agenda

Over the last devastating week of wildfires, there are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs — and more women firefighters isn’t one of them. This isn’t to slight the contribution of female LAFD personnel who are out there giving it their all in dangerous conditions, but to note that of all the phenomena that don’t care about race and gender, a rampaging inferno must top the list. Either someone is there to try to extinguish the flames, with adequate resources (including working hydrants), or not.Nonetheless, Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters, as if gender diversity somehow makes it easier to rescue people and put out fires. Back in 2022, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the Los Angeles Fire Department’s “first-ever Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bureau,” focused “on building and fostering a Department committed to engaging the voices and respecting the humanity of all its members, reflected in how it handles recruitment and hiring, workplace conduct, retention and promotion.”It’s not clear how the LAFD “respecting the humanity” of its employees was going to help fight fires, nor is it clear that anyone who crafted or celebrated this initiative particularly cared. In a widely mocked public-relations video from 2019 that emerged during LA’s catastrophe, the head of the department’s diversity bureau, Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, said that if she’s not strong enough to lift a man out of a burning building, well, “he got himself in the wrong place.”Perhaps the hypothetical man injured in a fire and needing life-saving assistance will make better choices next time. Larson also maintained that people want to see someone responding to an emergency that “looks like you,” although the vast majority of people simply want someone who is responsive and competent. Surely, if a Filipino immigrant’s house was saved by the LA...