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Dec. 20, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
26:25
Ep. 166 - Professor Demands More Diversity In Fire Departments

A UCLA professor claims that fire departments aren’t inclusive and diverse enough. What does this tell us about the madness of left-wing identity politics? Also, a famous Hollywood actor tries to appease the #metoo mob. Finally, I received a hilarious parenting lecture on Twitter. We need to talk about it. Date: 12-20-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, a professor at UCLA is concerned that fire departments are not inclusive enough.
Also, a Hollywood actor is trying to appease the Me Too mob.
Not a smart move.
And I had an encounter with a hilariously pretentious self-appointed parenting expert, and I need to tell you what I learned from that exchange.
It's great.
Trust me.
So we'll talk about that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
I want to say something very briefly here at the top before we get going.
Andrew Klavan here at The Daily Wire has been growing a beard recently.
And as I'm sure you've noticed if you watch his show, which I hope you do.
And I've heard through the grapevine, that is through Twitter, that there has been a campaign among some people within the company to try to convince him, pressure him to shave his beard.
Now, I'm not going to name any names, Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro.
In case you missed that.
Let me just say this.
I stand with Clavin and his beard.
As a fellow beardsman, I have myself experienced beard-related harassment and abuse.
You could not possibly understand the persecution that our community faces because of our faces.
Unless you've been there.
Because of my beard, I have been told that I look like a hobo, a yeti, an unemployed lumberjack, a desert island castaway.
I've been called unkempt and disheveled.
And this is just my wife talking, okay?
You can only imagine what everyone else says.
So I stand in solidarity with my fellow bearded Daily Wire host, and I stand firmly against follicle discrimination.
And in an act of protest, I will be growing my beard even longer.
I will grow it until it is down to my knees, or until such a time as when my wife's complaints are growing too loud.
Whichever comes first.
Alright, I just wanted to say that to begin with.
Because this is a very important issue to me.
All right, here's a story, the story I really wanna start with today.
I think it perfectly encapsulates the fatal flaws in the left's identity politics, and that's why I wanna talk about it.
And this was, there was a report on this in the Daily Wire yesterday.
You can go see.
A UCLA professor named Corinne Benderesky wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, Making US Fire Departments More Diverse and Inclusive.
Oh yes, you know this is gonna be good.
And it exceeds expectations, alright?
So here's how the article begins.
It says, picture a typical firefighter.
Who comes to mind?
If you imagined a white man, that's understandable.
96% of US career firefighters are men, and 82% are white.
This is striking, especially when you compare it to the U.S.
military, which is 85% men and 60% white, and local police forces, which are 88% men and 73% white.
Many fire departments recognize that their lack of diversity is a problem and say that they're committed to increasing racial and gender diversity.
And then she goes on a bit later, she says, to succeed as a firefighter, stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough.
I agree.
You also have to know how to put out fires.
She says, though, that firefighters also need the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to deliver medical emergency aid, support each other through traumatic experiences, and engage intimately with the communities that they serve.
Engaging intimately.
That is a key skill set for firefighters.
Intimate engagement.
Whatever that means.
She says, and yet in my research on reducing gender bias and my work conducting training on general diversity and inclusion within fire departments, I can only imagine, wouldn't you love to sit in on one of her training sessions?
She says, I find that when evaluating fit and competence, firefighters tend to default to a reductive set of traits.
Physical strength evaluated through strict physical fitness, for example, It's evaluated through strict fitness tests, that is, and these only serve to maintain white men's dominance in the fire services.
She goes on then to complain more about the lack of women in the fire service, and then she complains that there aren't enough black people as well.
Then, of course, you guessed it, she's also mad that there aren't enough gay firefighters.
She writes, the fire service's challenges with diversity go beyond gender and race.
Openly gay men are exceedingly rare in the fire service.
The few who are out of the closet face severe social exclusion.
And then she quotes a gay firefighter talking about his challenges.
And then she goes on to talk about the things that fire departments are doing to diversify and attract more women and do what she wants.
But she says that those efforts are not good enough.
They never are, obviously.
So she suggests that the whole idea of being a firefighter, it needs to be changed.
The whole paradigm needs to be shifted.
Liberals are always looking to shift paradigms and so they need to shift this paradigm too.
She says that we find that reframing the professional prototype of what it means to be a firefighter, to emphasize the importance of legitimate, stereotypically feminine traits like compassion, has promising effects on creating a more inclusive environment for women.
We had active duty firefighters and members of the general public watch videos of a white male fire captain describing the most important traits of a successful modern firefighter when he listed compassion first, followed by team orientation and physical strength.
So the ability to fight fires isn't even on this list at all.
She says, Viewers' perceptions of female firefighters' abilities and support for gender diversification policy were much more positive than they were when they watched him present those same traits in reverse order.
When you're fighting a fire or responding to a medical emergency, the most important thing is that you feel compassionate.
Not that you have the skill, strength, stamina, courage, knowledge, technical proficiency.
Not any of that.
No, you have to feel compassionate, right?
And obviously if you're ever trapped in a burning building, and let's say there are two people, firefighters, outside.
One of them is going to rush into the building to save you, right?
And let's say one of the firefighters is especially strong and especially good at rescuing people from buildings, and the other firefighter isn't as good, but he's very compassionate.
Which one would you want rushing into the building when your life is on the line?
Obviously the compassionate one, right?
Because if you both burn to death, at least, you know, he can give you a hug while you're dying amidst the flames, I guess.
Now, we could ask the question, why is it actually a problem?
That there aren't more female and gay firefighters.
And this is almost a scandalous question these days, because it's just assumed that it must be a problem when a certain profession or sector of society is dominated by one gender or one race or whatever.
Well, it's only a problem if it's dominated by men, and especially by white men.
If there are plenty of professions that are dominated by women, nobody... Have you noticed that?
Nobody is saying, hey, what can we do to make sure that we get more men involved in hairdressing or we get more men involved in social work.
What can we do about that?
Have you noticed, we're never looking to diversify those professions.
The professions, and there are plenty of professions like this, where women are the dominant force.
No, we don't want diversity there.
We're fine without diversity there.
No, we only want diversity in areas where men are the predominant demographic representative.
But why?
Why does it matter?
Are straight, white, male firefighters less effective than female firefighters?
Are they less effective than transgender firefighters or gay firefighters?
If they aren't less effective, and if indeed, perhaps, when it comes to men versus women, they're more effective, then who cares?
Who cares about the lack of diversity?
It seems that the people who complain about a lack of diversity, they still have not figured out why a lack of diversity matters.
Have you noticed that?
That all the complaints about diversity, nobody can explain What exactly is the actual, tangible, practical benefit of having diversity?
No one can ever explain that.
So they say, well, there's a lack of diversity.
Okay, so?
Well, it's bad because a lack of diversity means there won't be diversity.
This is obviously the problem with treating diversity as if diversity itself is this objectively desirable thing in every context.
It's a very modern, it's a very Western concept that says that anything and everything can be improved with diversity, yet nobody, again, can actually explain how that works.
And they won't even try, you know?
They just insist on it.
Well, in the case of firefighters, diversity is, at best, irrelevant.
You're not going to find any study proving that more diverse firehouses are somehow more effective in performing their actual jobs, because that's obviously not the case.
You aren't going to make a firehouse more effective by replacing some of the men with women.
I think, if anything, very likely it will go in the opposite direction.
Here's another thing to consider.
Just dismisses the idea that firefighters need to be physically strong and tough, which is absurd, obviously.
The author lists other qualities like compassion and the ability to engage intimately with the community.
Still haven't figured out what that means.
But you notice what she didn't list?
If we're going to list things besides just physical strength, And I certainly agree that firefighters need to have other things besides physical strength, although physical strength is clearly extremely important.
But there are other things, too, that she didn't list that are not necessarily related to physical strength.
How about fraternity, camaraderie, unity?
Now, I've never been a firefighter, but I imagine that these things are important in a firehouse.
And when it comes to fraternity and unity and camaraderie, then in those contexts, commonality, not necessarily diversity, is what facilitates that.
If you've got people working full-time at a firehouse and they've got this stressful job and they're doing dangerous things, you want them to be unified, you want them to care about each other, to be on the same page, to get along, I think you would want all of that.
It's going to be easier to facilitate that and to engender that when you have commonality.
So, even when you look at some of the intangible things, sometimes, if you want to put it this way, a lack of diversity can be beneficial even in those areas.
Because the fact is, people relate and get along with men Relate differently to men, they get along differently with men than they do with women.
That's just a fact.
But oddly enough, she doesn't mention that.
All right, moving on to this.
The actor Idris Elba, Stringer Bell for those who have good taste in TV shows.
was trending on Twitter the other day.
And usually when a male celebrity trends randomly on social media, you know what's coming next.
But there was a curveball this time because he was trending sort of for the opposite reason.
He was trending because people were complimenting him.
Women and feminists especially were complimenting him.
Now, it's not unusual for women to compliment Idris Elba.
But in this case, everybody was very delighted with comments that he made about the Me Too movement.
In an interview he was asked if it's difficult to be a man these days in the era of Me Too and he responded very succinctly.
He said, well it's only difficult if you're a man with something to hide.
That was his response.
People were very impressed with this.
I am not so much Impressed with it.
Because this is precisely the logic that has justified every witch hunt ever in history.
The whole thing that makes the MeToo crusade difficult for men is the air of suspicion, the accusatory light that it casts on all men.
So let me ask Idris Elba this.
If a man is falsely accused, Would you say that it shouldn't be difficult for him because the accusation is false and thus he has nothing to hide?
No, it's difficult precisely for that reason.
Now, I know that, of course, Elba was not really trying to necessarily communicate a fully coherent thought here.
He was actually just trying to keep the pitchfork mob from showing up at his doorstep by placating it with stuff like this, but that's not going to work, unfortunately.
And that's the other mistake that people make when it comes to witch hunts and pitchfork mobs.
They think that they can avoid being targeted by going along with it and by encouraging them, but see, that's...
It doesn't work that way.
We've seen how this ends.
And it never ends well, that's for certain.
One other thing, just in general.
Just in general about this, if you don't have anything to hide, cliche.
Because that logic is never, never good.
It has never been employed to advance any good cause, ever.
Anytime someone is saying, anytime someone is using this argument, saying, well, if you don't have anything to hide, You know that whatever they're trying to justify by using that argument is terrible.
You automatically know it.
For reasons that I've explained, but also because everybody has something to hide.
As in, everybody has things that they don't want to be made public.
But that doesn't make those things evil or illegal, okay?
Just because a person has certain things that they don't want out there in public view, things that they want to keep private, that doesn't mean that they're guilty of anything at all.
It's like if a stranger walked up to you and said, or if a cop, if a cop walked up to you and said, I'm going to need to look through your phone.
And you say no, and then they say, well, what?
Do you have something to hide?
Are you doing something illegal?
Well, I'm not doing anything illegal, but yeah, I have something to hide from you.
I want to hide the contents of my phone from you, not because there's anything bad or illegal in there, but just because it's none of your business.
That's why.
I just want to keep it private, because there are things that I want to keep private, because I have a private life.
The fact that I don't want to open it up for public consumption doesn't mean that I've done something wrong.
So, that whole logic, that whole idea is incredibly, dangerously flawed.
All right, one other thing.
And this starts with a funny story about my son.
So yesterday, I was at home, and my son calls up from the basement.
And he says, I just hit Jeremiah.
I'm going into a corner.
Let me know when I can come out.
So my son, he smacked his brother and then he put himself in timeout for doing it, which
you really have to respect because the kid, I guess, he kind of, he looked at the pros
and cons, he weighed the risks and rewards, and he decided that the reward of pummeling
his brother was worth kind of the consequences.
And then he faced those consequences like a man.
He owned up to it.
So that makes me very proud.
And I mentioned this on Twitter, just as a funny parenting anecdote, the fact that my
son hit his brother and then put himself in timeout for it.
So I mentioned it on Twitter and people responded by laughing about it and so on.
But there was one response that was just absolutely incredible.
A woman responded to my tweet with a 10-tweet thread lecturing me on my parenting.
And I want to read this to you because it's just marvelous, okay?
Now, here was my original tweet.
This is what I said.
I said, my son just hit his little brother and then put himself in timeout.
That was the whole tweet.
That's all I said.
And then this from Heather.
And here's her whole thread in response to what I said.
This might be a little bit out of order, but this is what she said.
She said, To me, that speaks to some possible problems with your parenting style.
Children often imitate what they see adults do with everything, but here I am talking about hitting.
In other words, he hears you say that hitting is wrong, but perhaps he's been spanked when he's made a mistake.
So then he's confused because hitting is wrong, but my dad hits me when I do something wrong.
If you have modeled hitting either through spanking or some form of domestic violence, then your child may be imitating your actions.
However, he knows that it is wrong because you've taught him with your word that hitting is wrong.
This is called cognitive dissonance, and it's very distressing to a child.
Use timeout carefully because she's still going, okay?
She's still going.
Use timeout carefully because punishment comes with all sorts of collateral challenging behavior and possible psychological damage.
It can be very effective for acute challenging behavior like severe self-injury, but it isn't really a good idea to punish minor challenging behavior like sibling rivalry.
Also, she's still going on, timeout is only effective as punishment, making the behavior happen less in the future, if time in is reinforcing.
In that case, timeout is actually reinforcing his escape from kid work and you are shooting yourself in the foot.
He's getting what he wants and getting out of the task.
In short, if I were providing parent coaching for you, professionally, we would have a lot of work to do.
That was like 10 or 11 tweets because of like 12 words that I said about my son.
So there you go.
Heather is, and by the way, this was not a joke.
She wasn't being satirical.
I thought at first maybe she's kind of being satirical and trying to be funny, but no, she's 100% serious.
Heather is not only a parenting expert, but she also has ESP.
Because you notice, I never said anything at all about spanking.
I never said one way or another about that.
But she looked into her crystal ball and she diagnosed my whole existence as a parent.
Which is very, very impressive.
Incredible.
Incredible stuff.
Now, I share this with you because, first of all, it's hilarious.
But second, it is an extreme example of a very common phenomenon.
It's a phenomenon known on the internet as the sanctimami.
And Heather is like the, she is like the alpha.
She is the mommy of all sancta mommies.
And sancta mommies are women who believe themselves to be parenting experts and also believe that everyone in the world is hungry for and in need of their advice.
So that anytime you mention your kids or parenting or family or anything at all, even remotely related to raising children, they will parachute in like Navy SEALs and start offering corrections and criticisms and everything else.
Now, women have to deal with this kind of thing much more often than men.
Women are much more often the targets of sanctimamis like Heather, and they are judged often much more harshly for their perceived parenting lapses than men are.
But women are also pretty good at sniffing out the sanctimamis.
You know, every woman has other women in her circle who are like this, and so she knows not to bring up certain subjects around that woman because then she's going to have to endure a lecture about it.
But it's because of these sorts of people.
And it's not just, you know, I say sancta mommies.
Sometimes there are sancta daddies.
That is not nearly as common, but they do exist.
And it's because of them that everything about parenting has become controversial.
Every aspect of parenting is now a matter of dispute and debate.
No matter what you do as a parent, no matter what, no matter what it is, there will be someone out there ready to tell you that it's wrong, it's abusive, it's neglectful, you're ruining your child's life forever.
No matter what it is, it really does not matter.
Parenting is hard enough as it is.
Parenting is a difficult job.
But now it's even harder because parents feel like they have to navigate this minefield, and if they take one small step in the wrong direction, they're going to destroy their children.
Because that's what people like Heather have told them.
And that is why, here's the moral of the story.
It's because of people like Heather, And those who are in her camp, though, perhaps have a less severe case of whatever she has.
But it's because of that, that's why I have, as a parent, I have long been at the point
where I just don't care at all what anyone else thinks about my parenting.
It makes no, your opinion about my parenting makes no difference to me.
It is the least relevant thing to me in the world.
I couldn't possibly care any less than I do about what strangers think about my parenting.
And I think that if you want to function as a parent in modern society,
you have to get to that point where you really just do not care at all
what other people think and say.
Because if you do care, then you're going to start second-guessing everything you do, and as I said, everything's going to feel like a minefield.
And here's the other thing.
When you hear someone imparting their parenting wisdom and giving parenting advice, keep in mind that Nobody actually has any idea what they're doing, okay?
None of us do.
As parents, none of us have any idea what we're doing.
We're just kind of fumbling along in the dark here.
We're trying this out.
We're trying that out.
We're trying to see what works.
I mean, we're dealing with... A child is a person.
A child is a whole other human being, separate from yourself.
They have their own mind, their own personality.
There's only so much you can do to account for that.
There's only so much you could do to control them.
And there's only so much you should try to do to control them.
So you're dealing with every child is really different and every parenting situation is different.
And so there are some general principles and ideas and approaches that might work,
but on a case by case, everyday kind of basis, it's just you're really, we're all kind of lost and
confused.
That's the dirty little secret that nobody will say.
We're all just trying to figure it out as we go along.
And certainly, if you're talking to another parent who's in the thick of it with you, then they're not any more of an expert than you are.
Now if you talk to someone who's in their 60s and they went through the whole parenting thing, now that might be someone who can have some good advice.
My mom and dad have good parenting advice that they can offer.
But even people who are older, you also have to keep in mind that They parented kids 20, 30 years ago.
They don't actually know what it's like to parent a kid in today's world.
And so there are different challenges now that we face that they didn't.
And there are challenges that they face that we don't.
So it's just, it's different.
And we always have to keep that in mind.
So you just figure it out as you go along.
And you hope that you're not screwing up your kids too bad.
And that's what parenting is.
Alright, that's all.
Alright, I'll leave it there.
That's my parenting advice.
Just don't screw up your kids too much.
That's all you can hope for.
I'll talk to you guys tomorrow.
Godspeed.
Hey, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, you can't know what you should do if you don't know who you are.
And that's the problem America has, both in our overseas military commitments and in our politics here at home.
We're going to take a look at Trump's withdrawal from Syria and Paul Ryan's farewell.
Plus, we've got a special Christmas message.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
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