While Gov. Newsom met with President Trump in Washington, Trump envoy Ric Grennel was in Los Angeles observing the city’s effort to recover from the devastating firestorms. The former acting director of national intelligence was surprised to find DEI practices hindering the work.

Efforts to find “the right mix” of DEI-approved contractors had slowed efforts to remove debris from burned-out Pacific Palisades and that was not acceptable. “We want people to be able to do the job and get it done,” Grennel told EPA and local officials, “and not hold up because we have some quota system.” As it happens, California had already dealt with such a system nearly 30 years ago. (RELATED: Bass and Newsom’s Woke Shame and DEI Incompetence)
The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot, banned racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. The disaster the quota forces predicted never took place, and as Thomas Sowell showed in Intellectuals and Race, graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics actually improved. Contrary to woke opinion, the measure did not eliminate “affirmative action.”
The state could still cast the widest possible net and lend a hand up on an economic basis. Even so, the state’s ruling class fought CCRI from the start. Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom both opposed the measure and California has since established a vast DEI bureaucracy that wastes money and serves no practical purpose. (RELATED: A Well-Deserved Takedown of the California Political Class — From Newsom to Bass)
In a similar style, California’s major cities seem unaware that in 2020 voters rejected Proposition 16, which would have overturned CCRI, and continued to hire on the basis of DEI quotas instead of merit. Los Angeles Deputy Fire Chief Kristine Larson, who heads the LAFD Equity and Human Resources Bureau, is on record that if she’s not strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building “he got himself in the wrong pl...