Here’s a hypothetical: You’re about to board an international flight to Sydney. Or, perhaps, you’re about to have your chest split open for an 11-hour, high-risk heart operation. The common denominator is that you’ll be placing yourself in a vulnerable situation, and without proper vetting, your life will be in mortal danger.
So what kind of qualifications would you demand of your pilot or heart surgeon?
For most of us, the answer is so stupidly, blatantly obvious, the question would be met with a puzzled expression: “Whoever’s the best at their job. Duh.”
I mean, it would be nice if the pilot or surgeon was a super-awesome, super-kind human being. That would be the icing on an already-baked cake. But in life-and-death situations, you can’t focus on superficialities.
It’s not safe.
In a very literal sense, it’ll get you killed.
Instead, it’s all about competency: Can the person do the job at the highest level?
More than anything else, this is the heart of MAGA. You can’t make anything “great” if you’re not “great” at what you do. The MAGA philosophy can be summarized thusly: America used to be great but lost its way. Our leaders focused on the wrong things. But we can reclaim our greatness by reorienting our priorities (and getting rid of braindead, incompetent leaders, of course).
This is the problem that MAGA was designed to solve.
The Democrats viewed the world very differently. For them, the problem wasn’t competency, greatness, or reclaiming America’s place in the world. Those are all distractions; feeble attempts by the racist, bigoted, homophobic Patriarchy to distract us from what’s REALLY important: Representation.
Los Angeles Fire Department Assistant Chief Kristine Larson (Who, it seems, makes $399,000 annually; the median national salary of a fireman is $51.7K annually.) is very candid with the people of California. Larson pulls no punches: According to her, when your house is on fire, your #1 priority isn’t extinguishing the fire, but knowing that the fireman “looks like you.”
During a fire, “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,” Larson said in a promotional video that the LA Fire Department deliberately released! “It gives that person a little more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.”
Whew! She’s right, of course: When your house is on fire and Granny’s trapped in the second-story bedroom, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief when the fireman’s skin color is the same as yours.
Furthermore, Ms. Larson (who makes six times more than the median fireman’s salary!) is refreshingly honest about her limitations as a female firefighter. You can accuse her of many things — i.e. being overpaid, underqualified, underprepared — but she deserves credit for her honesty:
Of course she’s not strong enough to carry your husband out of a fire!
Larson actually lampooned the question:
“‘Is she strong enough to do this?’ Or ‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire,’” Larson asked of herself. “Which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’” [emphasis added]
Watch the video yourself:
LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 9, 2025
"Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place." pic.twitter.com/BofTVr6dWP
For people like Larson, the “problem” that the L.A. Fire Department was designed to solve is so utterly divorced from competency that the question itself is absurd: It’s not about fires — it’s about hires.
The purpose of the Fire Department is to expand diversity.
Period. End of story.
Even if the new fireman can’t physically carry a person out of a burning fire. After all, that was YOUR FAULT for being there in the first place. (Stop being such a troublemaker.)
It’s probably worth noting that the biggest villain in the DC superhero world — the Joker — is famously motivated by wanting to “watch the world burn.” The L.A. Fire Department has actually gone one step further: Not only is the world burning, but it has hired firefighters who can’t even carry victims out of burning buildings.
And just like that, the fever dream of Left Coast Liberalism went up in smoke. (By the way, I’m pretty sure a flaming, smoldering, fiery Los Angeles produces a considerable carbon footprint. Gavin Newsom will need to double down on the carbon offsets for the next few centuries.) Everything was destroyed.
And if the clean-up crews, construction workers, and rebuilders are hired via the same “employment standards” as the L.A. Fire Department, the City of Angels will never again be a City of People. Instead, it’ll serve as a cautionary tale — the ultimate shrine to competence-free governance.
Come visit the embers and see for yourself.
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