Watching the meetings and town halls in Los Angeles featuring the nitwits in charge getting yelled at by enraged homeowners as the city burned was enlightening. Again and again, the ridiculous Mayor Karen Bass, an openly communist revolutionary, brought up a persistent theme: the cult of safety.
The term “safetyism” became popularized in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It refers to the way modern society is overprotective and overbearing, the ultimate helicopter state, which has led to excessive and even destructive regulations that don’t actually keep you safe, and which in fact may endanger you.
During President Trump’s visit to Pacific Palisades and the round table meeting he held with California’s worst supervillains, Karen Bass repeatedly admonished the angry, devastated Palisades homeowners that “the most important thing is your safety.” The homeowners were angry about the timeline they had been given by L.A. County officials. According to the bureaucrats, it would take 18 months to clear the burned-out lots. Bass insisted they would be able to start rebuilding “immediately.” When pressed on the 18-month clean-up the city was planning, she hedged with, “Well, you know that you will be able to soon. The most important thing is keeping you safe.”
President Trump countered: “Safe? They’re not safe now.”
The “safety” that Bass was fighting for was the mandatory EPA Phase 1 clean-up of their lots. A doctor named Muntu Davis with the L.A. County of Public Health issued an order forcing all homeowners to wait for the EPA to complete their hazardous waste removal before anything else can happen to the destroyed lots. This, as Mayor Bass keeps reminding everyone, is for “your safety.”
God forbid a piece of “highly toxic ash” touches your skin! God forbid a hazardous particle enters your body! Karen Bass is here to keep you safe as you sit in a cramped hotel room with your children and your dog, or on your friend’s couch.
This overreach by the L.A. County Department of Health is the same playbook they ran during the pandemic. Schools were closed, toddlers were forced to wear masks outside, and you had to show a vaccine pass to get into a restaurant for your safety. Everyone in L.A. started ending conversations with admonitions to “be safe!”
At the same time, violent riots and looting were permitted to take place. LAPD officers often stood around and watched helplessly as unmasked hordes smashed plate glass windows and cleaned out retail stores. Targets were picked clean and then set on fire. But if you tried to walk into a grocery store, you would be hounded out by angry women who screamed that you were putting their “safety” at risk.
It was all fake. A mirage. A real culture of safety would have made sure that fire departments in fire-prone areas were not short staffed. They would pre-position fire trucks in the spots of highest risk. And most importantly, they would have working fire hydrants. Across the Palisades and Altadena, where some 9,000 homes burned to the ground in the span of 12 hours, there were few working hydrants.
You’d think a mayor and a county public health department so concerned with “safety” would care about testing hydrants and making sure reservoirs can’t run dry in residential areas. Fire hydrants seem a lot more essential to keeping my family safe than a federal review of the ash in my area.
And what about physical safety from crime? Where was Mayor Bass when psychotic murderers stabbed Brianna Kupfer to death in a furniture store on La Brea? Why was a gang war taking place in Pasadena and Altadena in 2022 between the Pasadena Bloods and Crips, and no arrests were ever made? I was caught in one of their drive-by shootings in October of 2022; an N95 mask would have been scant protection against the bullets that were fired from behind my car.
Is it “safe” to allow fentanyl to proliferate on the streets and enter the drug supply? The dangerous open borders policies that Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom worship have led directly to the fentanyl crisis that is killing upwards of 150,000 young people each year. Chemical warfare is being waged by China and Mexico, which supply the chemicals and labs, and by Honduras, which supplies the hordes of street dealers in L.A. and San Francisco. Does Mayor Bass care about the safety of kids who get addicted to this poison? Based on her attitude toward illegal immigration and border controls, the answer must be no.
Instead, she relies on Dr. Muntu Davis of the L.A. County Department of Health to impose his version of “safety” on the rest of us. Dr. Davis is paid $600,000 a year of taxpayer money to issue occasional dictates from his office at the County. It’s worth it: after all, it’s for your safety!
As part of the reform craze sweeping the country, it’s time to reject the mindless cult of bureaucratic “safetyism” that doesn’t actually keep anyone safe. It simply grants the Left new means and new reasons for control — for political power that creeps ever further into the private sphere for our safety.
Last month, the passengers on a PSA flight from Wichita to Reagan National all took their shoes off and went through TSA security checkpoints before boarding their flights; they were all buckled safely in their seatbelts. What did this safety theater do to combat the real danger they faced — whether some DEI hire in the Air Traffic Control tower (a known issue at FAA) or behind the controls of either aircraft, miscommunication between the tower and the Black Hawk helicopter, or simply an overcrowded airport?
This week, a regional Delta jet flipped while landing in Toronto. Details are still unclear as of this writing, but some sources have confirmed it was a young female pilot controlling the landing with a more experienced “trainer” watching her. Once again, real safety seems to take a back seat to performativity and “equity.”
Safetyism theater empowers a creeping tyranny, but it also obscures the real and glaring issues that just took 28 lives in Los Angeles and 67 lives in the Potomac River, and nearly took 80 more in Toronto. It’s time to choose sanity instead.