From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

Victor Davis Hanson, Wednesday on Newsmax, slammed the implementation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria in fire department hiring practices in California.

During an appearance on “Finnerty,” Hanson said these policies prioritize DEI above essential firefighting qualifications like experience and physical readiness. Hanson said that hiring workers based on DEI led to an ill-equipped workforce in the state.

“The DEI fire chief, 70% of her hires have been based on DEI. Not muscularity, not experience, not size, not competence. The primary criterion was DEI. And so the only… thing that is different about this is that this was not the inner city. This was, as Donald Trump mentioned, and I’ve taught at Pepperdine, I just got back from there. This is the most elite area of California,” Hanson told Rob Finnerty.

Hanson also said that there’s a broader failure in California’s management of natural resources and emergency preparedness.

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“This could have been prevented long-term. We’re letting out all of the water that comes out. 90% of the water from the northern rivers goes out to the sea,” Hanson said. “The aqueduct transfers that water down to LA. They should have had more water. They don’t. The insurance system is completely broken because of overregulation, fraud, and mismanagement by the state. So you cannot buy fire insurance in most cases.”

Hanson said that the systemic failures not only threaten the physical landscape but also risk the financial stability of California’s wealthiest communities, potentially resulting in billions of dollars in losses.

“These are the wealthiest zip codes. And if these people, and many of them didn’t have insurance, even they couldn’t, some of them get insurance. And if this is not going to be rebuilt, they’re going to lose billions of dollars of taxpayers, productive citizens,” Hanson said.

Hanson said there is a need to return to merit-based hiring and sensible state management policies to prevent such disasters in the future.

“And it all could have been prevented had we had meritocratic hiring, had we had plenty water, plenty full of water, if we had a different forest policy, a different firefighting policy, a different insurance policy,” Hanson said.

Actor James Woods also criticized how he said the government handled the crisis as wildfires ravaged Los Angeles. He specifically targeted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and called him a “blithering idiot.” Woods said the state’s inadequate fire preparedness and response was the result of Newsom’s repeated mismanagement.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

The liberal parliament in the United Kingdom is on the brink of a collapse after a scandal involving mass rape perpetrated by migrant gangs rocked national politics across the pond.

Jess Phillips, the Home Office Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls and a Labour Party member, blocked an inquiry by the town of Oldham into Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s conduct while overseeing the prosecution of a migrant grooming gang’s sexual abuse of children in the town from 2011 to 2014, according to a Jan. 2 report from the Telegraph. The move prompted mass outcry and renewed attention to the UK’s ongoing crisis involving organized migrant grooming gangs, largely consisting of Pakistani nationals, stemming from waves of unchecked immigration.

Chiefly, critics accuse Starmer of failing to tackle migrant rape gangs when he headed the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 and 2013, complicating his political situation amid calls for his resignation and a tanking approval rating. Starmer, in his capacity as prime minister, allowed illegal immigrants to apply for asylum even after arriving in the UK, according to the BBC.

In 2009, the CPS under Starmer dropped charges against a Pakistani grooming and rape gang in Rochdale — despite the prosecution having DNA and hours of video evidence of the crimes — claiming the teenage victim wouldn’t have been viewed as a “credible” witness, the BBC reported in 2012. The case was reopened in 2012 when Nazir Afzal took over as a prosecutor for the CPS, where he secured convictions for eight men involved in the gang.

Ex-detective Maggie Oliver, who helped uncover the abuse in Rochdale, said that Starmer is complicit in the mishandling of the investigations into the rape gangs, according to The Telegraph.

“The time is long overdue for a full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal,” Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, said on X Jan. 2. “Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years, but no one in authority has joined the dots – 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.”

The Labour Party, led by Starmer, has had a historic polling collapse according to Sky News polling released Dec. 22., and for the first time, the party’s polling dipped below 27% despite winning one of the largest majorities in parliament history just five months prior. It is currently projected to lose its majority in the upcoming May election, and the Reform UK party, started by conservative politician and architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage, could supplant the Labour Party as the most popular in the UK and win a majority of seats, according to an analysis by the Telegraph.

The UK’s immigration policies remain one of voters’ top concerns, according to YouGov polling from Jan. 6. As of 2022, 14% of the UK’s population was foreign-born. Asylum seekers made up 4% of the foreign-born population in the UK the same year, and a majority were from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India and Bangladesh, according to Migration Observatory.

Foreign nationals living in the UK are three times more likely to be arrested for sex offenses than British nationals, and twice as likely to be arrested for crimes in general, The Telegraph found.

Billionaire tech mogul and President-elect Donald Trump’s confidant Elon Musk, who has become increasingly outspoken about UK politics, accused Phillips on X of trying to protect Starmer amid his political struggles by squashing the national inquiry request. Musk’s interest in the scandal and recent involvement brought the issue international attention.

Starmer, in response to the public outcry, accused people of “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-right” for calling attention to the issue.

“It is so disrespectful it is beyond belief,” Sammy Woodhouse, activist and independent reporter covering the grooming scandal in the UK, said on X. “[Starmer is] branding people again as ‘far-right.’ This is not being ‘far-right,’ this is people having genuine concerns and outrage [sic] … we are talking about children being groomed, abused, raped, tortured, trafficked, murdered, blamed, ignored, impregnated, criminalized.”

Multiple local reports over the years have detailed the astonishing extent of sexual abuse by foreign migrants.

In 2014, a report from the town of Rotherham found that at least 1,400 girls were sexually exploited, mostly by Pakistani migrants, between 1997 and 2013. Local authorities were also apprehensive about identifying the ethnic background of the perpetrators for fear of reprisals. 

Ten members of the Labour council wrote to the Home Secretary, Conservative Amber Rudd, in 2016 claiming that allegations of abuse in the town of Telford were “sensationalized,” according to the Free Press. It was later revealed by The Mirror in 2018 that “up to” 1,000 underage girls were raped and abused there in what was deemed an “ongoing” crisis at the time, that started in the 1980s. The report claimed that authorities feared accusations of “racism” for sharing details about majority-Asian assailants.

Starmer’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.