A Poisonous Philosophy Has Been Exposed by Disaster

Contra the old adage, firelight is going to turn out to be the best disinfectant

I will risk no hurt to the Ring. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain. The markings upon the band begin to fade. The writing, which at first was as clear as red flame, has all but disappeared. A secret now that only fire can tell.

• The Fellowship of the Ring

As Los Angeles burned this week, there has been no shortage of shocking, maddening, and awful video for its evacuating residents to tear their hair out over as they flee for their lives. But there is one video clip which has come to symbolize the staggering levels of incompetence, hubris and flat-out indifference of our State and City’s governing class more than any other. It is one which features LA Assistant Fire Chief Kristine Larson, a lesbian of color she wants to make sure you know, saying some pretty shocking things while at the same time, seeming to be completely unaware of how shocking her comments are.

The line that has gotten the most attention is the one where she mocks those asking if she’s physically up to the job. “You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire…” she says, an impish grin on her face before lowering the boom… “my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” Imagine being so inside your own ideological bubble that you feel comfortable saying something like that on video. It’s so unbelievable that I had to watch it several times to make sure I was really hearing what my brain told me I was hearing.

It is good and just that people have mainly focused on this line because these are the words of a true psychopath, and this particular psychopath has somehow been put in charge of keeping safe a population for which she seems to harbor nothing but hatred.

But to my mind, the other comment Ms. Larson makes in this now infamous video is much worse because it reveals the cultural rot at the heart of the Progressive Project… an article of faith that is laying waste to industries and institutions across the country in ways that are going to be very difficult to recover from.

Says Ms. Larson… “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 this person might understand their situation a little better.”

I’m reminded here of my favorite line from “Taps”, spoken by actor Ronny Cox who could very well have been responding to Ms. Larson rather than a confused and misguided military academy cadet… “Well that’s the worst kind of all the kinds of bullshit there is.”

Make no mistake, what Ms. Larson is making here is a call for complete racial and gender segregation of every industry, agency and institution in America. She wants you to believe that when a person is in mortal danger, the thing they are most concerned with is the skin color or wedding tackle of those who come to rescue them. Worse, she seems to be suggesting that you can tell everything you need to know about a person the instant you first lay eyes upon them, simply by observing the color of their skin. This is racism straight up, and Larson is proud of it.

But this isn’t just one rogue official accidentally exposing her own bigotry. This is an attitude that has infected nearly every institution in America over the last twenty years. Larson is reflecting a belief system that she has been taught, and which she must espouse in order to get and keep her job. We know this because it’s the only thing that explains her obvious comfort with admitting her biases on camera. She didn’t make this video alone in her basement…. it was produced, approved and released on purpose, by her own agency.

Two weeks ago I wrote about Hollywood’s Progressive past and how the Civil Rights movement could not have been as successful as it was, as quickly as it was, if not for the movies Hollywood made about race and the willingness of its stars, filmmakers and executives to publicly back the movement. I went on to write about how despite all of this admirable history, Hollywood somehow allowed itself to be convinced by craven activists wielding a weapon of mass destruction called “cancellation”, that the industry is actually deeply racist and actively works to prevent women and creatives of color from achieving success. Out of this dynamic rose the corrosive concept of “representation” in movies, an idea which is functionally identical to the one espoused by Larson… that people won’t go to the movies unless the actors “look like they do.”

This is obviously, provably ridiculous, and if you want to understand all the reasons why, I invite you to read the essay. For now, suffice it to say that this corrosive philosophy… hell, let’s call it what it is, racism… has infected the movie industry, just as it has infected the business of civic governance in Los Angeles. And it has done so in ways that are going to be very difficult to counteract precisely because the grift has been incredibly lucrative for those who profit from the status quo.

But in this most recent disaster, which has primarily affected those who work in the movie business, there are perhaps the beginnings of a new political awakening. Larson’s video is being passed around person-to-person and folks are commenting to one another that the most shocking thing about the video is how comfortable Larson seems with her bigotry. Many of us have begun to wonder, is this the great Progressive future we’ve been working so hard for? Because it looks and smells a lot like the ugly past we all thought we were trying to put behind us.

Corrupt systems don’t necessarily collapse when the lies at the heart of the system are exposed, everyone in Los Angeles already knows that our leaders lie to us as a matter of course. Rather, systems collapse when the psychological burden, the humiliation of pretending to believe the lies becomes too much to bear, when the veil of fear lifts and the proles finally begin to say the unspeakable out loud.

To that point, one of the more common jokes being bandied about greater Los Angeles these days, even among Resistance Progressives is this… “hey, it’s a pretty wild coincidence that the most qualifed people for the three top posts in the LAFD all happen to be Lesbians named Kristen.”

When the mockery starts, it’s a sure sign that they no longer fear you, and there is nothing more terrifying to the petty tyrant than that.

There is no doubt that five years from now, Los Angeles will look very different than it did five days ago. I like to think that the public sector careers of Governor Newsom, Mayor Bass, and the bigots like Kristine Larson whom they employ have been ended by this tragic episode. But that’s not enough. These people didn’t spring forth from a mysterious crack in the Earth, fully formed… they were made… made by a system which has been re-oriented away from merit and competence and towards an awful kind of racial and gender vengeance.

The system which made them is evil and it must be ripped from the ground root and branch. The danger is no longer theoretical. Lives are in danger. And for the first time in a long time, people seem willing to say so, even if it damages the political movement which defines their social status.