How DEI Policies And Government Failure Fueled The Palisades Fire

America has a lot of built-in safety backups and redundancies. But every once in a while, when tradition, science, time-tested protocols, and common sense are ignored, a fragile system utterly collapses. [emphasis, links added]

Usually, an iconic event reveals how vulnerable the entire country has become, and predictably occurs when suicidal ideologies and nihilism, in perfect-storm fashion, wreak havoc.

The media, academia, the bureaucracy, and higher education can mask the dangers of their political agendas—at least until their sheer incompetence or toxicity can no longer be hidden or excused, and a predictable disaster ensues.

Take the January 4-5, 2025, Pacific Palisades fire that destroyed an entire historic neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The embers had not even cooled when we were lectured that “climate change” was responsible for the historically predictable annual autumn and early winter Santa Ana winds that whip up horrific fires before the first winter rains arrive—a phenomenon documented for over two centuries.

The media, in reporting the conflagration, downplayed human culpability.

But over the next few weeks, outraged former homeowners and independent journalists began cataloging the real symptoms of a total system failure that turned the normal end-of-year fire season into a catastrophic inferno.

A lot of things had to go wrong to utterly destroy an ancient, coveted neighborhood. But DEI managed to do all of that with ease.

First, we learned that the incompetent mayor, Karen Bass, had cut the fire budget.

Then, despite warnings of dry hillsides, underfunded fire protection, and predicted high winds, Bass was nowhere to be seen during the most dangerous weeks of the year.

Why? She was junketing in Ghana, an African nation rarely considered vital to the running of the third-largest city in the United States.

The now-convicted felon, Deputy Mayor Brian Thompson, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat to the city hall. So a mayoral apparatus did not exist.

Next, the clueless and vastly overpaid Janisse Quiñones, the CEO and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, was likely hired based on diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria despite a prior uninspiring record in her administrative roles at PG&E. She was utterly unprepared for the fire.

When the fires swept in, a key reservoir that might have saved the community had been bone dry for months while under superficial repair. Dozens of fire hydrants were nonfunctional.

Unhinged environmental mandates had prevented homeowners from clearing nearby combustible brush on the hillside, the proverbial fuel of the Santa Ana wind-powered fires.

The chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Kristin Crowley, had bragged about her diversity hiring but had done little to ensure her firefighters had enough water to put out the fires.

In other words, the wages of electing, appointing, or selecting officials on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, or making policy on the basis of radical green orthodoxy, rather than proven meritocracy and empiricism, finally came due in a systems collapse of the city government, utilities, fire protection, and prevention.

There have been lots of Palisades events in the past. And there will be far more to come in the future, as our ever more complex society that requires meritocratic operators cannot afford social engineering and ideological agendas at the expense of lives and property.

Read rest at American Greatness