Los Angeles Doesn't Need Bill Maher - or Anyone Who Thinks Like Him

Los Angeles is burning. This city is my home. Yes, I have lived all over the country, and currently reside in the Atlanta area, but never in my life did I feel like I was?home?until I arrived in LA, and after 23 years, the longest I'd ever lived anywhere by more than 2.5x, I am a full-fledged daughter of the city. A naturalized Angeleno. I can't stop the tears as I type these words.

My home was hit by a literal hurricane of fire, an unstoppable force of 100 mph winds and embers and dry tinder...and mismanagement. Decades of mismanagement.

Mismanagement that?did not start?with a Black mayor and a lesbian fire chief.

So Bill Maher and everyone else blaming this horrendous tragedy on DEI hiring practices can go suck it. And I mean that with all my heart. Please, if anyone feels this way, I invite you to go ahead and suck it.

I mention Bill Maher only because Larry Wilmore was a guest on his show this past Friday, and I've known Larry for over two decades, and some mutual friends reached out and said he nailed it, brought the funny, held his own, etc., and so I wanted to watch. And yes, Larry was great. I was even fascinated listening to the right-wing political operative who was Bill's other guest.?

Then, Bill Maher launched into a diatribe about the failures of DEI, and those being the reasons this fire was handled so badly. He actually referred to the fire chief,?Kristin Crowley, as "the best lesbian for the job."

As if the LA Fire Commissioners decided to hire a lesbian and went looking for one, instead of what they did, which was conduct a broad search and chose the person who?passed the firefighters' exam 27 years ago in the top 50 out of more than 16,000, who joined the LAFD 25 years ago and has held the roles of firefighter, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, captain, battalion chief, assistant chief, fire marshal and deputy chief.

Bill Maher has an entire team of researchers at his disposal.?

He could have gotten that right.

I got it with a 20-second Google search.

But that narrative doesn't feed into his faux-progressive outrage at being a white man having to see jobs always held for people who look like him go to others, and then holding those others to impossible standards that no "traditional" holder of that job ever had to live up to.?

When Bill Maher looks at anyone who doesn't look like him in a job where they are breaking barriers and his only thought is, "Must've gotten the job because of diversity!" instead of bothering to find out just how qualified -- and often grossly?overqualified -- they are for the job, he is proving our need for DEI! Many of those in hiring positions need to be forced to hire qualified diverse candidates?because?it is assumed they are unqualified! If not, the job will go to the same old beneficiaries of the privilege of mediocrity as always.

Do we need any further proof of that than watching an old white man yesterday be given a job (after undermining the very ideals he swore to uphold by refusing to allow a peaceful transfer of power after he was previously fired from that same job), when the "hiring committee" had the option of a highly qualified Black woman instead??

When Kristin Crowley took the top job in the LAFD,?half the uniformed women in the department — along with 40% of Black, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander firefighters — felt sexual or racial harassment was a problem.

Do you know what you get when people don't feel safe or included in their workplace?

Massively underperforming teams!

We know this from every workplace study done on the topic.?

We don't want underperforming first responders, especially if it's because they can't trust their co-workers not to hate and harass them.?

People need physical and psychological safety to do their jobs well. That is the baseline.?

Maher went on to mock?LAFD Battalion Chief, Kris Larson, quoting a video in which Larson addressed concerns about female firefighters’ physical capabilities. In response to someone saying, "You couldn't carry my husband out of a fire," she?supposedly?said, "He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire."?

To no one's surprise, the Internet has gone ballistic over this statement, as if she was blaming someone for needing to be rescued from a fire.?

This five year-old video was not an interview, it was part of a promo for the Fox show,?911, and there is a clear edit right before the incriminating sentence.?

Again, Maher has a team of researchers.?

They could have put in a modicum of effort to discover the context, or even what the original statement was. Who knows why she said that? Maybe that was a line fed to her by the director of the promo shoot. I've been on both sides of the camera on shoots like that, and have several friends who work in Reality TV (or rather, "reality" TV) and nothing you see on those shows is real. Nothing!

(Remind me sometime to tell you of the friend who rented her house to the star of one of those shows, painted and remodeled it to the star's specifications, then watched dumbfounded, as the entire first episode was about how the star found "her dream house," but there was someone already renting it so she had to scheme to get them kicked out. This was filmed with actors in the house she had been paying rent on for months!)?

If anyone actually cares to learn what a committed, qualified human being Larson is for the job, they need only watch?this far more recent video.

Bill Maher knows all of this!

His research team knows this!

His writing staff knows this!

And poor Larry Wilmore had to sit across the desk from him and watch him claim, in effect, that Diversity and Inclusion is the reason Los Angeles burned.

What if the chief was a Black man instead of an LGBT woman? Would Bill have been as comfortable saying he only got the job because of his identity and that was the reason for the failure? Or a Muslim? Or in a wheelchair? Which is it that made Maher feel so free to attack - that she was a woman, or that she doesn't have any need for men in her life - including him?

No matter which marginalized group you denigrate, it's all still despicable!

I could go on quoting all the soulless Conservabots making claims that this was preventable if only the LAFD was not so obsessed with diversity, and I could easily refute all of them, but you get it.

Blaming DEI policies and practices is easier than actually fighting problems like climate change and it lets certain parties score points against "woke" California, the fifth largest economy in the world, responsible for 14% of the country's GDP.

The outrage machine must be fed, and when better to point fingers and score political points than when thousands of people have lost everything they worked their whole lives for, and at least 27 people have died, and a sparkling jewel of a city has been reduced to ash??

To Bill Maher and all those who spout off as he does, in the immortal words of?Joseph Welch: "Have you no decency,?sir?"??

It has always been my belief and will always remain my belief that voices of hate will be silenced and better days will come. I still know that to be true. Even today, as we watch career government workers and military leaders be fired simply for not being white men, while liars and the sycophants that kowtow to them assert that they got the job simply because of identity, and not the decades of work and amassed qualifications these dedicated women, men of color, immigrants and LGBT human beings have to show for themselves.

Hopefully whatever you did yesterday to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was joyful and uplifting. Mine was spent hearing inspiring speakers and watching performers show us the possibility of a far brighter future. I know we will see that day in my lifetime.