During the LA wildfires, I noted that the LAFD was being run by three lesbians named Kirsten. (Not a joke.)
Crowley’s status as the first LGBTQ fire chief appears at the top of her bio on the LAFD site. It’s what got her on the Kelly Clarkson show under the headline, “Meet LAFD’s First Female & LGBTQ+ Fire Chief”. Kristina Kepner, the first lesbian Assistant Chief and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School for Managing Diverse Organizations, was accused of a domestic violence incident involving her girlfriend. Kristine Larson, who has a degree in Sociology, headed ‘Equity on Fire’, an organization complaining that the LAFD was sexist and racist, was then rewarded with the title of the LAFD’s first lesbian Equity Bureau Chief with a $399,000 salary. Meanwhile, Jamie Brown became the LAFD’s first lesbian Training Commander
Crowley, Kepner, and Brown were all paramedics, not firefighters. Diversity mandates led to paramedics being referred to as ‘firefighters’ and being promoted to fire captains and battalion chiefs and then to the top echelons of the LAFD.
Paramedics who did not understand how to fight fires were running one of the biggest fire departments in the country.
New York City is about to profit by their experience.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has chosen the city’s next fire commissioner.
Lillian Bonsignore, a well-respected retired EMS chief, will be the next fire commissioner.
Bonsignore is a trailblazer for the LGBTQ community, who will serve as the FDNY’s first openly-gay commissioner.
Although she never served as a firefighter, she’s confident that won’t matter.
Who needs to be a firefighter to run a fire department anyway? The important thing is she’s a ‘trailblaizer’. The LA trailblazers sure blazed some trails. Now NYC can look forward to more of the same. We’ve gone from firefighters who climbed to the top of the WTC to ‘firefighting is optional, but identity politics is mandatory’.
