DEI Must DIE – Before We All Do

At what point did we start believing that hiring someone based on their race or their gender or who they sleep with will actually produce the best results? How many of these disasters do we have to suffer through before we learn the lesson? The Mayor of Los Angeles only credentials for the job she now holds is that she is a woman of color and a member of the LGBTQ community. And when you hire someone for an important job based solely on those criteria, you should not be surprised when she prioritizes those criteria over actually doing the job she was hired to do. That is why she was in Ghana on January 7, celebrating the inauguration of the new Ghanaian President and not running her city when she was warned five days earlier of the imminent threat of mass wildfires. Her priority was celebrating someone else’s blackness and not actually performing the duties of mayor of her city. 

But cities like Los Angeles have been prioritizing skin color over safety in their community for years. In 2020, Los Angeles allowed Black Lives Matter to riot and burn major parts of the city to the ground because acting out against social injustice is more important than protecting lives and property. Those things are merely collateral damage. And that thinking goes back 30 years in Los Angeles when the city was allowed to be destroyed during the Rodney King riots of 1992. These people believe that giving minority communities the space to smash, burn, loot and maim innocent people is the appropriate response to injustice. We used to say two wrongs don’t make a right, but they believe that two injustices make justice. 

And justice to them is hiring someone based on their DEI status not on their ability. So, guess who was put in charge of the Los Angeles fire department? Kristin Crowley, a lesbian. When Crowley assumed the role of head of the Los Angeles Fire Department in 2022, her priorities were not fire prevention and preparedness. She said her priority was promoting a "work environment that is free of harassment, discrimination and hazing", and encouraging programs that increase diversity in the department, claiming that a diverse department is needed to serve a diverse city. In June 2024, Crowley was a grand marshal at Los Angeles Pride Parade.

I am not claiming that a woman or a lesbian cannot make a great fire chief, but in order to be great she must make her priority stopping fires, not diversity, not pride parades. Her priority should have been her department being fully prepared to stop the wildfires which blow through Los Angeles County almost every other year. The hydrants were dry in her city during the worst wildfires her city ever faced. That’s job one for a fire chief – having enough water.  I asked my six-year-old, “how do you put out a fire?” And he said, “water.” Wouldn’t you think the fire chief would know the water situation in the community she is responsible for? I bet she knows how many LGBTQ people work in the mayor’s office. 

These wildfires should have taken no one by surprise. You would think, preventing and stopping wildfires would be the top priority for the Los Angeles fire chief considering that deadly destructive wildfires swept through California in 2018, 2020, and 2021. And yet they didn’t have enough water; they didn’t have a plan of action to stop wildfires; they didn’t have a plan of action to prevent wildfires. They did have a plan to increase diversity in the fire department which has never stopped one fire even once.

Having enough water to fill the needs of the Los Angeles community was not even a top priority for the CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quiñones. She spoke of her priorities on the radio in July when she said, “It’s important to me that everything we do, it’s with an equity lens and social justice, and making sure we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective.” You don’t right past wrongs by creating future disasters. As the CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, it was her job to ensure that the city of Los Angeles had enough water, including enough water to fight wildfires, but she was more concerned with righting past wrongs, and creating diversity.

These people are popping up everywhere in this tragedy. The Assistant Fire Chief in Los Angeles, Kristine Larson, who also happens to be a lesbian woman of color recently stated her priority for hiring in the fire department, “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease knowing that somebody might understand their situation better." Actually, you want to see the person who responds to your emergency as being actually good at their job, someone who can actually save your life. But as a fire fighter, saving someone’s life is not even a priority to Kristine Larson. When asked if she, as a woman, was strong enough to carry a man out of a fire, she responded, “he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire." So much for not blaming victims. There are over 500 people pulled from burning buildings each year. So, if every fire fighter was a woman like Kristine Larson, that would mean 500 more people would die in fires each year.

And this is where we end up when the priority for hiring is anything but who is the best qualified person for the job. We barely sidestepped a tragedy last July, when our President elect, Donald J Trump, came within millimeters of being assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania. There were numerous failures by the Secret Service which led Trump getting shot in the ear from an assassin’s bullet. It came out later that the Secret Service has been mired in DEI hires for years, and the end result is some 20-year-old kid climbing on top of a barn and firing bullets at our next President. The Head of the Secret Service, Kimberely Cheatle, who resigned after the assassination attempt, had written, “we must embrace diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) across the agency. DEIA must be demonstrated by all employees — leading by example — through ‘every action every day.’” Her priority for the Secret Service was DEIA, and the leading Presidential candidate was almost murdered under her watch.

It was not just the leaders in Los Angeles who are culpable for the tragedy in Los Angeles. California Governor Gavin Newsom cut $100 million from the fire prevention budget in his state while at the same time, he was giving illegal immigrants free health care, free housing, and free schooling. Everyone feels morally superior when they are shifting $100 million in the budget to give to poor illegal immigrants until the city of Los Angeles is burning to the ground from lack of fire prevention and preparedness.

Lunatics like Barbra Streisand are blaming these wildfires on climate change. It doesn’t matter that these wildfires are occurring during the winter months when the temperatures are the lowest of the year. But that’s what they claimed after each of the previous wildfires, so the state spent billions on climate initiatives rather than using that money to make sure they have enough water to fight fires, or they cleared brush in the hills that has been allowed to build up for the last 30 years, which acts like kindling to wildfires – an issue that state and local officials have been warned of after each wildfire the last ten years, but were dismissed because lunatics like Streisand convinced them that the real culprit was climate change.

Many of these fires start in homeless encampments, but cities like Los Angeles refuse to do anything about the homeless encampments out of compassion for the homeless, so the homeless are allowed to burn fires in public spaces to keep warm and those fires have a tendency to spread and create wildfires. So, their misguided compassion has cost 14 people their lives and destroyed major parts of the city. And now tens of thousands of more people are homeless in Los Angeles.

Diversity is NOT our strength. America’s strength is finding the most qualified people to do the jobs regardless of race, gender, or social status. Our strength is that in America, anyone can become anything they want in life. It doesn’t matter what you look like. The only determining factors are your ability and your work ethic. And if you or people in your community are not succeeding as you would like, you should look inside yourself not look outside to blame others for your failures. So, diversity is not our strength, but the blind pursuit of diversity has proven to be one of our fatal weaknesses.  

I am not claiming that women or people of color or LGBTQ members cannot do the job, but when you are hired because you’re a woman or a person of color or an LGBTQ member, and you are praised for having accomplished something simply because you are one or all of those things without ever having accomplished anything of note in your position, you are fooled into believing that just being one of those categories equals success. And that delusion leads to disastrous consequences as we are witnessing in Los Angeles.

Juxtapose that to Notre Dame Head Coach Marcus Freeman. After his team beat Penn State to advance to the National Championship game, ESPN reporter Molly McGrath asked him, “you are the first black head coach to go to a national championship game in college football, how much does this mean to you?”

Freeman responded, “I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team. It is an honor, and I hope all coaches — minorities, black, Asian, white, it doesn’t matter — great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. This ain’t about me, this is about us, and we’re going to celebrate what we’ve done because it’s something special.” That mindset is one of the reasons why he and Notre Dame have been so successful this year, and the leaders in Los Angeles having the opposite mindset is the reason why their city is burning to the ground. 

Freeman was hired because he was good, not because he was black. The leaders in Los Angeles were hired because they fit the DEI profile, not because they were good. When you hire incompetents, you get incompetence. And those incompetents have cost 14 people their lives, thousands of homes have burned to the ground and tens of billions of dollars of damage in Los Angeles. Interesting, if you make a DEI hire at Notre Dame, the team goes 5-7 but no one dies. If you do it at the mayor’s office and in the fire department people die and lives are destroyed. So, stop doing it.

__________________________________________________________

Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.