The Revenge of the Blue Collar White Guy

Preamble to Any Commentary

For anyone who wants to do more than just have opinions about the California fires, I have a few recommendations for you. Here are some links to folks who are doing good, reliable work. The first is here. And here is a link to Grace Community. And a friend in California thinks that Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse is on the ground there. I may update links here as I learn about more options, and I am leaving the comments open so that needs can be made known there.

Remember that a lot of the long haul relief work will not be able to begin until the fires are out.

Also remember that God has a lot of His people who are still in California, and so indiscriminate hooting and derision is out of line. There are still many people there who hate what has happened to their state, including the causes of what has happened to their state. Targeted criticism is fully appropriate, and most necessary, for which please see below, but a lot of mercy work needs to be an ongoing commitment for us. Consider a donation to be the ticket price for the privilege of making fun of rainbow fire hydrants.

Pure and undefiled religion doesn’t go along with any of the assumptions of the California ruling class. It really does keep itself unstained by the world, and that includes not participating in the various insanities of the world. But it also includes caring for the fatherless and the widow (Jas. 1:27).

So with all that said, there are certain obvious things about this situation that need to be said now. When the hand of the Lord is heavy, that is the time to seek an understanding of what He is doing.

Introduction

When it comes to identity politics, the California fires have set quite the dilemma before us.

On the one hand, for a generation or more, the kind of people who want to fight fires, who are really good at fighting fires, and who know how to prevent fires, have been systematically discriminated against . . . in hiring, in promotions, in recruitment, and all the rest of that stuff. I speak, of course, of the blue collar white guy. On the one hand, if jobs in line area were obtained according to the principles of a strict meritocracy, there is little doubt that the blue collar white guys would be heavily represented. At the same time, we live in an era that automatically assumes that any disproportionate representation in any area is de facto evidence of bigotry, discrimination, hatred, malice, and prejudice. Which is, of course, demented. So that’s one thing.

On the other hand, the cavalcade of nonsense that led to SoCal burning down has been presided over by someone who is whiter than Woodrow Wilson’s thighs in the wintertime. I speak, of course, of Gavin Newsom, a white guy governor type, right out of central casting. Behold the color of the man who saved the fish, didn’t clear the brush, let the reservoir go empty, hired a slew of DEI lesbians, and wouldn’t let fire trucks from other states come help fight the fires without passing a vehicle inspection first. That list could go on. Now I use the phrase “presided over” deliberately, in the full knowledge that Newsom didn’t do all these things personally. Of course not. But he governed in full agreement with the leftist woke vibe, and now we are all watching what happens then. Not only so, but he was quintessentially white the entire time he was doing it.

Now suppose you rush to the keyboard to type me a hot letter because your cousin has a friend who is a Pacific Islander, who has worked for the Sacramento fire department for fifteen years, with distinction, and he is clearly not a blue collar white guy, and what do I say to that, hey? I reply with two observations. First, I grant your point about the gentleman in question. I am sure he is a superb fireman. And second, you and your reflexes are precisely the reason California is on fire right now. What is the ancestry of firemen even doing in the discussion?

When We Will Know That DEI Has Finally Burned to the Ground

I phrase it in this way because, to be frank and honest, we do not yet know if DEI actually has burned to the ground. It ought to have burned to the ground by this point, all the way out to Malibu Beach, but we shall still see. There’s a lot of denial still left in the California Hive Mind. So we shall see.

After this debacle, one of two things will happen. Either common sense will reassert itself, and California will red pill, on the one hand, or California will refuse the lesson, and the steady stream of people already departing from California will turn into a massive exodus, and those remaining behind will continue on with their blue cult death spiral, oblivious to any and all shouted warnings from outside. I honestly don’t know which way it is going to go, but I am pretty confident that those are the two options. If you pressed me, I suspect that the death cult will not be put off by approaching death, that being the point of death cults. As wisdom says in Proverbs, all who hate me love death (Prov. 8:36).

But let us not forget the rest of the country, those staring at this spectacle aghast. The purpose of this particular discussion is to state the conditions under which those of us out here can know that DEI has actually assumed room temperature. Even if the obvious lessons are wasted on the leadership of California, they need not be wasted elsewhere. Strike the fool, and the simple might learn wisdom (Prov. 19:25).

We have all heard of mission drift, but DEI is actually something more akin to mission abandonment. Or perhaps we should call it mission seppuku.

The letters DEI stand for Diversity Equity & Inclusion, and it is the banner under which historic institutions have been induced to abandon their assigned tasks abruptly, in order to take up a completely different task, one that is entirely disconnected from their original mission—not to mention being entirely irrelevant to their actual reason for existing in the first place.

Armies are supposed to be composed of war-fighters. Fire departments are supposed to be composed of fire-fighters. Police departments are supposed to be composed of crime-fighters. When headlines celebrate the appointment of the very first lesbian fire chief of Inuit descent, this is a pretty good indication that not only has that woke train jumped the tracks, it now bouncing across the meadow. The forward progress of the train is initially pretty enthusiastic, but at some point in the very near future that forward progress will be non-existent. After everything has burned down, there is no need for a fire department at all, lesbian leadership or no.

When the Argument is Done, As In, Completely Over

Put simply, the arguments over DEI will not be over until the point when defenders of that monstrosity are simply too embarrassed to mount any arguments. They might still have such arguments somewhere in their heads, because they can remember making them in the halcyon days of yore, back before the real world ear holed them.

DEI is not going to be refuted on paper because its advocates will accept no refutation. But there will come a point, and I think we are almost there, when its advocates will refuse to step up to the microphone. They will not go up to the microphone because they know they will not be met by the conservative counter arguments that they have been dismissing for decades. No, they will not seek to make their case because if they tried, they would be met with a roar of disapproval. They will not argue their case any more because the time for argument is past, and for anyone with sense, the time for simple firings and layoffs has now arrived.

An example of what I mean would be the promise of our soon-to-be president—that on the first day, all the trannies in the military are going to be discharged. The time for discussing all this is past. No, we are not going to listen to anything. “Here are your papers.”

In many parts of the country, this vibe shift is manifestly underway. Whether or not California will abandon the DEI madness, a lot of others around the country are abandoning it.

Types of Judgment

I was asked the other day if I thought that these terrible fires in California were God’s judgment. My answer to that was yes, but we really do need to make some distinctions first.

There are two types of judgment. One is where the judgment is apparently unconnected in any causal way to the behavior that supposedly summoned forth the judgment, while the second kind is a man-reaps-what-he-sows kind of thing.

California is most definitely in the second category. If you consistently vote for something other than good management, at some point you are going to be afflicted with mismanagement. Not only that, but the effects of such mismanagement can be really disproportionate. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind (Hos. 8:7).

In this scenario, there is a linear connection between the behavior of the judged and the way the judgment comes down. If a man gets falling down drunk, attempts to drive home, and wraps his car around a tree, is this a judgment from God? Yes, it is, but in a reap-what-you-sow kind of judgment.

But the first kind of judgment is what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Brimstone from heaven does not have any apparent causal connection to the men yelling on Lot’s front porch. There can be a connection in the mind of God, but we make that connection by faith, and not by an understanding of billiard ball physics. If San Francisco passed some perverted or blasphemous ordinance or other, and the very next day a giant asteroid landed on San Francisco, there would be a number of us who saw this as the judgment of God. But it would be divine intervention judgment, and not a form of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” judgment.

Divine intervention judgment is more difficult to determine. I believe that it is possible for us to do, but a larger degree of caution is needed. Job’s three friends were too quick to assign a meaning to his suffering (Job 4:1ff). The disciples were too quick to ask whether it was the blind man’s sin or his parents’ sin that resulted in his blindness (John 9:2).

But in order to assign responsibility for the “God is not mocked” kind of judgment, the only qualification necessary is to have a working pair of eyes in your head.