Remember, remember, this fifth of November, not to celebrate bonfire night in California. Here, a recent legal case should really set our political sirens going about the potentially dire impact of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) measures upon local fire safety standards. Back in 2022, a Chinese fireman, Gabriel Shin, was beaten up by a colleague with a hydrant wrench outside his home, breaking his arms. Only when a neighbour threatened the assailant with a gun did he back off.
Naturally, being so badly beaten, the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD) gave Shin plenty of time off – namely, forever. Shin says the SFFD took away his workplace health insurance cover after he refused to let the matter lie and cease to press charges, even receiving a reported “direct order” to do so. Eventually, he was “let go” by his employers.
By contrast, said Shin’s attorney, his client’s alleged assailant never so much as missed a paycheque, nor faced any internal disciplinary procedures. Why not? Well, the wretch with the wrench was called Robert Muhammad, and he happened to be a black man (and presumably a Muslim too, given his surname?) Shin was ‘only’ Chinese, though, and therefore occupied a rung lower down upon the hierarchical DEI rescue-ladder of codified ethnic victimhood. This was Shin’s view, anyway, and he decided to sue the SFFD for “Race and Colour Discrimination” – although, according to this legal summary of his efforts, he wasn’t really very successful, with courts refusing to allow several of his complaints to proceed.
According to media summaries of the lawsuit’s original content, Muhammad had displayed “dangerous volatility” and “a history of threatening, bullying and aggressive behaviour” for over a decade, whilst “high-ranking SFFD officials knew of this history yet failed to take any corrective action”, supposedly even going “so far as to attempt to interfere with a criminal investigation to cover up the violent crime”. It is said Shin’s superiors even refused to supply police with a photo of Muhammad, thereby delaying his arrest. Not until this October did a judge finally announce the spanner-maniac’s ultimate punishment: no jail, just enrolment upon a “mental health diversion programme” instead.
Black, mad, violent, possibly Muslim… what an ideal employee Muhammad was in DEI terms! Was this why he was hired into the SFFD in the first place?
The PC Brigade
Certain San Francisco residents certainly feel less than well-disposed towards the traditionally white and male make-up of their city’s fire brigade, at least to go by a quite astonishing online essay, ‘Why I Hate Firemen’, by an SF resident named Molly Martin, which features inflammatory far-Left anti-fireman rhetoric like the following:
I hate firemen. Not firewomen, only the men. And not the firemen of colour. Only the white men. Whenever we have occasion to honour firefighters… I stand back and think to myself, I hate these mofos. When I tell anyone I hate firemen, the reaction is always shock… [But] I’m sticking with my prejudice, formed by years of interaction with woman-hating racists in the San Francisco Fire Department. I may never get over it… The idea that firefighters are heroes to be worshipped not only had an unfortunate effect on the culture at the firehouses, inflating already overinflated egos. It also made opposing the white men more difficult. They used the positive stereotype to their advantage, calling on the testimony of citizens whose lives and property had been saved.
The bastards! Just imagine that: saving people’s “lives and property” before accepting thanks and praise from those they had helped. Is there no limit to how low such sickos could possibly sink? Not in Molly’s estimation.
Formerly a closed shop for those with straight Anglo-Saxon penises, once women and non-whites were eventually allowed in too, alleges Molly, all the neo-Nazi firemen started persecuting their new colleagues, pooing in their boots before call-outs, drawing swastikas and, supposedly, trying to throw women and ethnics off roofs. They were also homophobic, spending their time between fires watching 100% non-gay, straight pornography (albeit no doubt some did involve the occasional lesbian guest-appearance) whilst drinking beer. Supposedly, the leading cause of such booze-addled firemen’s deaths was drunkenness – alcoholics tend not to be good on ladders.
The man who solved all this was Willie Brown, the black former San Francisco Mayor, down whose well-greased pole none other than Kamala Harris herself once slid, her youthful 1990s affair with the man helping launch her own DEI-fuelled career in politics. In 1996, Brown appointed a fellow named Bob Demmons, head of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association (SFBFA), to be Chief of the SFFD, with a mission to clean the place up, diversity-wise.
Once Brown had switched on his intersectional hose and flooded the SFFD with DEI hires, the scene was set for Jeanine Nicholson later to be appointed as its Chief, the woman in charge at the time of Shin’s close encounter with a highly diverse hydrant wrench. Nicholson announced her sudden retirement from this position in July, a mere month after Shin gave his first public interview about the case, citing “unforeseen medical issues” (she did once have cancer).
Gay Firemen Polish Helmets
Despite having no hose of her own, Jeanine Nicholson was by all accounts a very good firefighter, who was appointed on merit. Yet this was not how she was marketed to the media when being made SFFD Fire Chief in 2019. In which publications would you expect to be able to read about this happy news? The San Francisco Chronicle? Naturally. American Firefighting Monthly? Of course! Leading U.S. gay magazine the Advocate? Um, no…
Ah, but, as a piece by the Advocate’s unacceptably named hack Jacob Ogles had it in its headline, ‘San Francisco Just Swore In First LGBTQ Fire-Chief: Jeanine Nicholson Has Made Herstory’. “Despite San Francisco’s long history of [being] a gay haven,” the outlet complained, “no out [queer] firefighter ever rose to the top post in the department,” just several secretly gay ones. But, thanks to the intervention of DEI-obsessed London Breed, the current marvellously melanated Mayor of SF who appointed Nicholson, that had all now changed.
Nicholson has a degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Colgate College, where, to judge by some of the minority-worshipping tweets the SFFD put out under her leadership, she had really brushed up on her knowledge of intersectionality:
You Can Do It When You BEQ It
As further evidence for their failed prosecution, Gabriel Shin’s lawyers should have produced a 2020 encomium to Nicholson in BEQPride Magazine, BEQ meaning ‘Business Equality’. Here, Nicholson tells us she was recruited (into firefighting, not lesbianism) by a female firefighter at a Gay Parade in 1991. This proves how, in order to achieve her current position in life, “I stood on the shoulders of people who came before me.” Is she a dwarf now, too?
“Diversity and inclusion are top of mind for Nicholson,” BEQPride tells us. As a result, “Nicholson places high importance on increasing recruitment and visibility within the city’s diverse neighbourhoods”. But why? Who sane cares whether their firefighter is a homosexual? How will one even know, unless he or she arrives on the scene dressed in bright pink latex, rather than the usual yellow dayglo? Because, the article continues:
The importance of having a diverse department cannot be overstated in Nicholson’s opinion. She remembered earlier in her career she was called to assist with the death of a Chinese woman… [Emergency services] draped a cloth over the woman’s body but her family insisted that the cloth not cover her head because it was part of their cultural practice. “They wanted her to be able to see her way to where she was going [i.e., the Chinese afterlife, not the nearest morgue], but that’s not something any of us knew,” Nicholson said. “Having people from different backgrounds in the department means they’re trusted in different ways that maybe we weren’t before because we represent the community. Diversity helps us serve the community better.”
Perhaps the best way to actually “serve the Chinese community better” would be not to continue employing mad people who enjoy attacking them with large metal implements, just because they happen to be black, though? That’s what Gabriel Shin might have been expected to say, anyway. I wonder how that Chinese woman Nicholson mentioned died in the first place? A large wrench-wound to the skull, perhaps?
Bonfire of the Vanities
This may all seem a distant concern, but sadly, just like with AIDS, what starts in San Francisco doesn’t stay in San Francisco. Here’s the edited highlights of a 2018 piece by a probable Russian homosexual named Corinne Bendersky, from Harvard Business Review, demonstrating how far the DEI rot has now spread (emphasis mine):
Picture a typical firefighter. Who comes to mind? If you imagined a white man, that’s understandable: 96% of U.S. career firefighters are men, and 82% are white… Many fire departments recognise that their lack of diversity is a problem and say they’re committed to increasing racial and gender diversity… Yes, they’re fighting fires, which requires climbing ladders, hauling hoses and carrying victims from burning buildings. But this is only a small subset of the job… To succeed as a firefighter, stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough… And yet, in my research on reducing gender bias and my work conducting training on general diversity and inclusion with fire departments, I find that… when the topic of female firefighters came up, the importance of physical strength was consistently and spontaneously invoked to justify the relative absence of women in the fire service, but the importance of compassion (a female-stereotyped trait) was rarely, if ever, brought up to argue for bringing more women into the profession.
In what sense is “compassion” more valuable in a firefighter than “physical strength”? So that grieving mothers can be told by an agreeably weepy all-female fire-crew just after the tragic event “So sorry we couldn’t save your baby, we were too weak to put the ladder up. Here’s a nice batch of home-made cookies to cheer you up instead! Sorry they’re all burned, by the way.”
Here is the sadly more realistic assessment of a (necessarily) anonymous male U.S. firefighter about the actual effects of such DEI hiring practices:
Outcome based hiring is nothing short of a joke and a disaster waiting to happen. The fire department I work for hired several female firefighters that are very short and they have trouble raising ladders… [They] struggle primarily due to a lack of upper body strength more so than being short. As the incident commander, I have to assign the crew with those females to a job other than ladder work. This is unacceptable to me due to the nature of firefighting where time is essential in most of what we do. Life safety/rescue is number one at every fire scene we respond to. Delaying a rescue because the female crew is incompetent is what my city’s management has made as its top priority.
I suppose, as this is anonymous, some could accuse the whistleblower of just making this up. Others would prefer to guess there’s no smoke without fire.
No Wonder London’s Burning
And this deadly woke bin-fire is now raging here in the U.K. too. In 2019, Lincolnshire Fire Brigade axed kids’ TV character Fireman Sam as their mascot because he wasn’t Firewoman Samantha, bemoaning “the subconscious image the term ‘fireman’ has created as an issue in our recruitment”. Another Fire Chief further complained that “most of the job is nothing like it is portrayed” in the animated show in question; no, and Postman Pat never has to deal with any letter-bombs, either.
Also in 2019, London Fire Brigade (LFB) sprayed out the following tweet after a fictional 2D talking animal in an episode of Peppa Pig dared refer to “firemen”, not “firefighters”:
They could always pop a helmet on her own head and enlist Peppa herself as a recruitment mascot, I suppose – although, from a DEI perspective, that may also have the unintended side-effect of discouraging any future Muslim applicants. Is #Firefightingsexism really now as important as #Firefightingfires?
On the LFB website’s “Workforce Diversity” section, they claim they need millions more women/blacks/Muslims/robots/vampires to join the workforce because, “Some of the most vulnerable people in society come from diverse backgrounds and we need to understand their lifestyles in order to safeguard them against risk of fire.” Otherwise London’s many Indian females might burn themselves alive when committing suttee or something.
As far back as 2005, the LFB had attempted to recruit lesbians by running adverts in gay magazines with the tagline “Fancy pulling an older woman… Out of a car, from a burning building or just out of danger?” Just imagine the LFB running an ad in Escort aimed at heterosexual males humorously implying one of the main benefits of the job was that it would get you free sexual favours from grateful non-incinerated housewives.
Supposedly, all these DEI measures will have no impact whatsoever on the subsequent quality of recruits. Not so. In 2019, it emerged that, in pursuit of a wholly arbitrary goal of having 60% female recruits and 35% non-white ones, the West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) had allegedly doctored its in-house recruitment tests.
One may have thought the best way to ensure large numbers of black and brown applicants would have been simply to remain based in the West Midlands, but instead chiefs altered entry tests so that white males would need to score 70% to pass, but all others only 60%. How can this not lead to a lowering of recruitment standards? The wokery-ridden WMFS is reportedly not currently a happy ship; maybe it just made the wrong DEI hires?
Yet again, actual human lives are being put at potential risk here, and all for the sake of some stupid woke ideology. DEI makes people DIE!
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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