On NPR yesterday, they were talking about Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs and how this would mean a return to colorblind, merit-based hiring, which would only lead to “diversity” if the most qualified candidates happened to tick those diversity boxes. And they made it sound like this was a bad thing. I wanted to yell at the radio, a la JD Vance, “are you even listening to yourselves?” If I’m stuck in a burning building, I want my rescuer to look more like The Rock or like Michael Jordan than like me.
Women should not be firefighters. FULL STOP. They don't have the upper body strength. They shouldn't be infantry either. These are male jobs for male bodies.
I’m a female vet. I wouldn’t have been able to meet the standards for infantry when I served. This is completely fine. There were plenty of other jobs where I easily met the standard.
That said, if a woman can meet the standards, she should be able to serve. Regardless of sex. She has to really be able to do the job. But, if she can, why not?
I read a FB post by someone whose daughter was "so angry and sad" after listening to NPR -- must have had to do with this -- her white mother corroborated how awful it is, and the two of them bonded, the mother wrote, over hatred of Trump. Talk about missing a teachable moment -- this mother teaches in a university -- could she at least have instructed her teenage daughter on reading a variety of perspectives?
I'm seeing one garment rending post after another, ruing the dismantling of what actually WAS SYSTEMIC RACISM: DEI.
Yeah, 100%. A lot of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in my director's meetings, and I sometimes want to just reality check the room - so everyone thinks it's righteous to explicitly hire people based on their innate sexual characteristics and ethnic background? Does anyone realize how demeaning this is to the candidates? I'm usually the most melanated person in the room, so it is tempting to do this, but I also value my sanity. I try to push back in more measured ways.
The meeting in the fire station with the president last night struck me as nothing less than an intervention. Here is the ultimate Democrat party run state, and one of its historically most leftist policy inebriated major cities, lying face down in the vomited results of its orgiastic 60 year weekend bender. After decades of emphasis on racial and sexual identity at the expense of merit…after decades of self flagellating virtue signaling about ‘the environment’ that has resulted in enacting overreaching policies that elevate the habitats of field mice and small fish over the habitats of humans….after decades of accumulated demoralization resulting in de facto endorsements of rampant drug use,( connected quite directly to homelessness)….and after decades of taking for granted basic infrastructure and thereby neglecting the maintenance of it, just what were we to expect?
So right. I don't give a hoot if the emergency personnel look like me. I just want them to be capable of doing whatever they're supposed to be doing. Is that too much to ask?
In theory, it makes sense to manage underbrush, hire for merit -- especially for critical emergency roles, facilitate water infrastructure, and prioritize humans within an environmental plan. In practice, the opposite of each of these public policies appears to be consequentially costly. Maybe this fire is a wake up call? I'm not so sure. If not this one, maybe the next or the one after that. But sooner or later, California will pivot. I'll know they're ready when they connect the available pipelines from Cadiz without endless regulatory and litigious harassment. The supply is there. Just waiting on the demand and the politicians who chose vulnerability over preparedness.
I don't know. I imagine that there are some people in LA regretting not voting for Rick Caruso. I am not against the modern gentle virtues of empathy and inclusiveness. But the progressive movement worships these to the exclusion of the virtues that preserved our species for millennia -- honor, courage, and strength. The old virtues can seem irrelevant when everything is more or less fine. And the progressives are very good at the new ones. But contrary to the progressive firepersons in LA: when a situation calls for strength and courage, diversity and inclusiveness are unsatisfactory substitutes.
We can cultivate both. We can have a genuine diversity -- one where empathetic, inclusive progressives enjoy poetry readings in bookstores that are saved from fire by strong, brave firemen who save them. And if one lacks all of the virtues of the other, that is okay. To be its best, our country needs all types. And if some of the people with the toughest jobs have a rough side, we should forgive them and say "thank you". I have no sense if CA voters will vote for the R, but they should allow some grace for anyone who wants to help fix demonstrable avoidable problems that are now burning so brightly.
The term "empathy" is often used for what is actually "enablement". When we give free food to the homeless, this enables more homeless to come. Every time money is spent on the homeless, you get more homeless. For drugs, "empathy" suggests giving free needles. This brings more addicts and creates more addicts. Every dollar spent to help addicts creates more addicts.
What is needed is not enablement and empathy. What is needed is tough love. Stop helping the homeless - luckily the SCOTUS ruling means that homeless are no longer protected. Cities and towns are going to be a lot tougher on homeless. We should be as hard as possible. Homelessness should not be a comfortable situation, as it is today in many places.
Yes; exactly that. A clarifying exercise: replace "if" with "to" -- rewarding someone if they do something is synonymous with rewarding them to do that thing. So make sure it is something that we should want more of, because we'll get it. Actually empathetic people shouldn't see a fellow human in the gutter and think up ways to make the gutter nicer; we should encourage them to get out of the gutter.
Thank you for sharing your story and here’s to all the regulations disappearing to make a quick recovery even if much can’t be recovered.
I would like to hear more about your friends, “former Angelenos who fled to Mexico”? Given the state of LA, was it better where they were going? Or was it an existential fear? Or literal concern due to immigration status despite being Angelenos?
I wanted to end the piece with them leaving on an irrational and misplaced fear of Trump, which instead should've been placed on the current leaders of the state. They love Mexico and its so cheap to live there but the access to health care as they age is not worth it.
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
I have family in LA, near the Palisades, and I sense they are simply shrugging their shoulders like victims about climate change and reassuring themselves about how the fires could he stopped if only all the ignoramuses who vote GOP would get on board with EVs and renewable energy.
Does a beautiful essay like this ever make its way to then? If it did, what would it take for them to not dismiss it as hate speech? Even after their house is burnt down, will they cling to their sense of moral superiority and their own ignorant superstitions?
It appears so.
I am learning to never underestimate some people’s capacity for self deception and their need to feel superior.
All of this helps me understand, even though I disagree ,why some on the other side crudely and heartlessly say let it burn.
Karen backward is "Nera-K". The female Nero was sipping elegant cocktails in Africa while LA burned. Her budget hatred for Angelenoes is clear - she took money from the LAFD and used it to bring more homeless. She is an incompetent moron. But she will probably be re-elected, because she is a black woman. The stupidity of CA voters is endless these days.
Such a compelling piece, Michelle. As a former Angeleno, my heart aches for what the city is experiencing now — and what it has been experiencing for decades, as you’ve described so eloquently. I’m hopeful that a rebirth is possible in Los Angeles and the rest of our country.
No lies here. I live in an ultra-blue city and I have yet to see an ounce of "progress" in the most strident versions of "progressivism". Everyone proudly asserts that Value of the Moment is so important, meanwhile the safety, reliability, cost, and quality of nearly everything is rapidly declining. It's sad that it has to reach a point of disaster for people to notice, but at least a few people are noticing.
'He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out in a fire,' is everything wrong with liberal crime policies. It would be great if we could agree on anti-crime programs that combined both liberal and conservative ideas and practices, but I doubt either side could stop thinking of the other side as evil to accomplish that. Next up we've got conservative policies, unrestricted by liberal ideas, which will prove just as gawdawful.
There is no evidence that the few women who worked at the Fire Department were unqualified and that this was a reason for the uncontrolled fires.
Everyone who works there must meet strict physical requirements necessary for the job. Though some women can lift a 200 pound man over her shoulder, I’m not sure that is necessary to do a fire fighting job. It is necessary and a requirement to carry 100 pounds of equipment around. Being smaller, as women tend to be, can be an advantage to rescue people out of smaller spaces.
In a nutshell, DEI has nothing to do with the failures of the fire department. We should look at the failure to put sufficient resources into fire fighting in the age of global warming with more severe droughts and severe weather events that fuel fires. We should look at the fact that fire hydrants were not properly maintained and actually failed during the fires.
We also should stop scapegoating homeless people for the fires. We don’t know how these fires started. Fallen power lines have often sparked fires. Has the gas & electric companies buried power lines? Why not? Homelessness has grown in LA and elsewhere because of skyrocketing rents. What we need is more affordable housing. You can’t arrest and sweep your way out of the homeless crisis when
people have no place to go. For those in RVs, how about RV parks with electric hookups? Our society has failed poor people and shouldn’t be scaoegoated for these fires.
I wonder if all the places where the individual fires started actually even had power lines running over them. And certainly there was no lightning. Much more likely that a criminally careless moron flicked his cigarette away, or a homeless guy lit a fire, or an arsonist wanted to have fun.
For what it's worth, most of the fires we've had on the East Coast this autumn were caused by careless people and drug-addled vagrants -- in our parks, along highways.
I’m sorry but I need to call this out. I so value what FAIR is doing to be a reasonable pushback on excesses of DEI, and it’s unfair that the organization gets incorrectly tagged as “extremist” or right-coded in media so that people won’t listen to their classical liberal messaging. Your comment is racist and not representative of what FAIR stands for.
Who you gonna believe, Al Sharpton or your lyin' eyes? Facts are facts. I know that the current fashion is to call these beliefs racist. They are not. Blacks are 5x as likely as whites to be criminals. Blacks commit 90% of the murders in big cities. If there is a knife fight in HS, you can bet that one or more of those involved will be black. You mention "gangs" - who is in the gangs? Gangs are groups of fatherless black youth in inner cities.
There is some truth to this, unfortunately. Most of the 'empathy' deployed over the past several years has been done to protect black criminals. Much of the performative empathy over the past several years has been white people throwing away common sense in order to signal virtue by voting for people who explicitly say they care only about their own kind (black). See Lori LIghtfoot, a nightmare racist subsequently replaced by white progressives with Brandon Johnson, another nightmare. So here we are.
On NPR yesterday, they were talking about Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs and how this would mean a return to colorblind, merit-based hiring, which would only lead to “diversity” if the most qualified candidates happened to tick those diversity boxes. And they made it sound like this was a bad thing. I wanted to yell at the radio, a la JD Vance, “are you even listening to yourselves?” If I’m stuck in a burning building, I want my rescuer to look more like The Rock or like Michael Jordan than like me.
Women should not be firefighters. FULL STOP. They don't have the upper body strength. They shouldn't be infantry either. These are male jobs for male bodies.
I’m a female vet. I wouldn’t have been able to meet the standards for infantry when I served. This is completely fine. There were plenty of other jobs where I easily met the standard.
That said, if a woman can meet the standards, she should be able to serve. Regardless of sex. She has to really be able to do the job. But, if she can, why not?
Agreed. So long as it’s the same standards for all applicants, men or women. None of this “well you only have to lift X because you’re female.”
@PhDBiologistMom: I would love to listen to this segment. Was it on OnPoint?
I think it was this episode of The Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/podcasts/the-daily/trump-executive-orders-office.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Thank you!
I read a FB post by someone whose daughter was "so angry and sad" after listening to NPR -- must have had to do with this -- her white mother corroborated how awful it is, and the two of them bonded, the mother wrote, over hatred of Trump. Talk about missing a teachable moment -- this mother teaches in a university -- could she at least have instructed her teenage daughter on reading a variety of perspectives?
I'm seeing one garment rending post after another, ruing the dismantling of what actually WAS SYSTEMIC RACISM: DEI.
Yeah, 100%. A lot of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in my director's meetings, and I sometimes want to just reality check the room - so everyone thinks it's righteous to explicitly hire people based on their innate sexual characteristics and ethnic background? Does anyone realize how demeaning this is to the candidates? I'm usually the most melanated person in the room, so it is tempting to do this, but I also value my sanity. I try to push back in more measured ways.
The meeting in the fire station with the president last night struck me as nothing less than an intervention. Here is the ultimate Democrat party run state, and one of its historically most leftist policy inebriated major cities, lying face down in the vomited results of its orgiastic 60 year weekend bender. After decades of emphasis on racial and sexual identity at the expense of merit…after decades of self flagellating virtue signaling about ‘the environment’ that has resulted in enacting overreaching policies that elevate the habitats of field mice and small fish over the habitats of humans….after decades of accumulated demoralization resulting in de facto endorsements of rampant drug use,( connected quite directly to homelessness)….and after decades of taking for granted basic infrastructure and thereby neglecting the maintenance of it, just what were we to expect?
I couldn’t find the words to explain my own thoughts but you nailed it. And intervention! Yes indeed.
So right. I don't give a hoot if the emergency personnel look like me. I just want them to be capable of doing whatever they're supposed to be doing. Is that too much to ask?
In theory, it makes sense to manage underbrush, hire for merit -- especially for critical emergency roles, facilitate water infrastructure, and prioritize humans within an environmental plan. In practice, the opposite of each of these public policies appears to be consequentially costly. Maybe this fire is a wake up call? I'm not so sure. If not this one, maybe the next or the one after that. But sooner or later, California will pivot. I'll know they're ready when they connect the available pipelines from Cadiz without endless regulatory and litigious harassment. The supply is there. Just waiting on the demand and the politicians who chose vulnerability over preparedness.
Will CA voters vote for the R?
I don't know. I imagine that there are some people in LA regretting not voting for Rick Caruso. I am not against the modern gentle virtues of empathy and inclusiveness. But the progressive movement worships these to the exclusion of the virtues that preserved our species for millennia -- honor, courage, and strength. The old virtues can seem irrelevant when everything is more or less fine. And the progressives are very good at the new ones. But contrary to the progressive firepersons in LA: when a situation calls for strength and courage, diversity and inclusiveness are unsatisfactory substitutes.
We can cultivate both. We can have a genuine diversity -- one where empathetic, inclusive progressives enjoy poetry readings in bookstores that are saved from fire by strong, brave firemen who save them. And if one lacks all of the virtues of the other, that is okay. To be its best, our country needs all types. And if some of the people with the toughest jobs have a rough side, we should forgive them and say "thank you". I have no sense if CA voters will vote for the R, but they should allow some grace for anyone who wants to help fix demonstrable avoidable problems that are now burning so brightly.
The term "empathy" is often used for what is actually "enablement". When we give free food to the homeless, this enables more homeless to come. Every time money is spent on the homeless, you get more homeless. For drugs, "empathy" suggests giving free needles. This brings more addicts and creates more addicts. Every dollar spent to help addicts creates more addicts.
What is needed is not enablement and empathy. What is needed is tough love. Stop helping the homeless - luckily the SCOTUS ruling means that homeless are no longer protected. Cities and towns are going to be a lot tougher on homeless. We should be as hard as possible. Homelessness should not be a comfortable situation, as it is today in many places.
Yes; exactly that. A clarifying exercise: replace "if" with "to" -- rewarding someone if they do something is synonymous with rewarding them to do that thing. So make sure it is something that we should want more of, because we'll get it. Actually empathetic people shouldn't see a fellow human in the gutter and think up ways to make the gutter nicer; we should encourage them to get out of the gutter.
Love this. Thank you.
It would help. We need some balance.
Thank you for sharing your story and here’s to all the regulations disappearing to make a quick recovery even if much can’t be recovered.
I would like to hear more about your friends, “former Angelenos who fled to Mexico”? Given the state of LA, was it better where they were going? Or was it an existential fear? Or literal concern due to immigration status despite being Angelenos?
Thank you for writing this.
I wanted to end the piece with them leaving on an irrational and misplaced fear of Trump, which instead should've been placed on the current leaders of the state. They love Mexico and its so cheap to live there but the access to health care as they age is not worth it.
Reason Magazine
California's Fire
Catastrophe Is Largely a
Result of Bad
Government Policies
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
Thank you for this essay.
I have family in LA, near the Palisades, and I sense they are simply shrugging their shoulders like victims about climate change and reassuring themselves about how the fires could he stopped if only all the ignoramuses who vote GOP would get on board with EVs and renewable energy.
Does a beautiful essay like this ever make its way to then? If it did, what would it take for them to not dismiss it as hate speech? Even after their house is burnt down, will they cling to their sense of moral superiority and their own ignorant superstitions?
It appears so.
I am learning to never underestimate some people’s capacity for self deception and their need to feel superior.
All of this helps me understand, even though I disagree ,why some on the other side crudely and heartlessly say let it burn.
Karen backward is "Nera-K". The female Nero was sipping elegant cocktails in Africa while LA burned. Her budget hatred for Angelenoes is clear - she took money from the LAFD and used it to bring more homeless. She is an incompetent moron. But she will probably be re-elected, because she is a black woman. The stupidity of CA voters is endless these days.
Such a compelling piece, Michelle. As a former Angeleno, my heart aches for what the city is experiencing now — and what it has been experiencing for decades, as you’ve described so eloquently. I’m hopeful that a rebirth is possible in Los Angeles and the rest of our country.
Michelle Thank you for writing this. It’s really impactful.
Thank you Benjamin
No lies here. I live in an ultra-blue city and I have yet to see an ounce of "progress" in the most strident versions of "progressivism". Everyone proudly asserts that Value of the Moment is so important, meanwhile the safety, reliability, cost, and quality of nearly everything is rapidly declining. It's sad that it has to reach a point of disaster for people to notice, but at least a few people are noticing.
Wonderfully written, heartfelt article.
'He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out in a fire,' is everything wrong with liberal crime policies. It would be great if we could agree on anti-crime programs that combined both liberal and conservative ideas and practices, but I doubt either side could stop thinking of the other side as evil to accomplish that. Next up we've got conservative policies, unrestricted by liberal ideas, which will prove just as gawdawful.
There is no evidence that the few women who worked at the Fire Department were unqualified and that this was a reason for the uncontrolled fires.
Everyone who works there must meet strict physical requirements necessary for the job. Though some women can lift a 200 pound man over her shoulder, I’m not sure that is necessary to do a fire fighting job. It is necessary and a requirement to carry 100 pounds of equipment around. Being smaller, as women tend to be, can be an advantage to rescue people out of smaller spaces.
In a nutshell, DEI has nothing to do with the failures of the fire department. We should look at the failure to put sufficient resources into fire fighting in the age of global warming with more severe droughts and severe weather events that fuel fires. We should look at the fact that fire hydrants were not properly maintained and actually failed during the fires.
We also should stop scapegoating homeless people for the fires. We don’t know how these fires started. Fallen power lines have often sparked fires. Has the gas & electric companies buried power lines? Why not? Homelessness has grown in LA and elsewhere because of skyrocketing rents. What we need is more affordable housing. You can’t arrest and sweep your way out of the homeless crisis when
people have no place to go. For those in RVs, how about RV parks with electric hookups? Our society has failed poor people and shouldn’t be scaoegoated for these fires.
It's obvious that you have learned nothing from the last 2 months. Democratic stupidity is pretty much bottomless.
I wonder if all the places where the individual fires started actually even had power lines running over them. And certainly there was no lightning. Much more likely that a criminally careless moron flicked his cigarette away, or a homeless guy lit a fire, or an arsonist wanted to have fun.
For what it's worth, most of the fires we've had on the East Coast this autumn were caused by careless people and drug-addled vagrants -- in our parks, along highways.
What has happened is that black voters and black politicians have taken over cities, and this brings disorder and destruction.
I’m sorry but I need to call this out. I so value what FAIR is doing to be a reasonable pushback on excesses of DEI, and it’s unfair that the organization gets incorrectly tagged as “extremist” or right-coded in media so that people won’t listen to their classical liberal messaging. Your comment is racist and not representative of what FAIR stands for.
Who you gonna believe, Al Sharpton or your lyin' eyes? Facts are facts. I know that the current fashion is to call these beliefs racist. They are not. Blacks are 5x as likely as whites to be criminals. Blacks commit 90% of the murders in big cities. If there is a knife fight in HS, you can bet that one or more of those involved will be black. You mention "gangs" - who is in the gangs? Gangs are groups of fatherless black youth in inner cities.
There is some truth to this, unfortunately. Most of the 'empathy' deployed over the past several years has been done to protect black criminals. Much of the performative empathy over the past several years has been white people throwing away common sense in order to signal virtue by voting for people who explicitly say they care only about their own kind (black). See Lori LIghtfoot, a nightmare racist subsequently replaced by white progressives with Brandon Johnson, another nightmare. So here we are.