There’s an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.

Perhaps after the wildfire devastation in Los Angeles this week, we might also say that a person who has fallen out of love with the cult of “diversity” is a liberal whose home just burned to the ground.

Investigators are looking into the claims of multiple arson attacks that may well have started or whipped along these fires. A lot of blame is going to have to be apportioned in the directions of an awful lot of people.

But we can already say one thing with certainty: The authorities in Los Angeles failed catastrophically. And there are reasons.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Africa when the fires broke out. She went to Ghana despite a red-flag warning being issued in the place she is meant to govern.

When she did return yesterday, even she could not have been blind to the utter devastation. More than 18,000 acres (28 square miles — larger than Manhattan) of Los Angeles has burned to the ground while she was away.

And while she first avoided media questions and then stumbled her way through a shambolic press conference, perhaps she began to sense that recently cutting millions of dollars from the LA fire department’s budget was not the wisest thing to do.

In the last city budget, Bass slashed an incredible $17 million from the LAFD. And while individual firefighters have fought heroically to try to put out the blazes, the fact is that the department was badly under-resourced.

Yesterday morning I sat down with a local woman and her teenage son whose house and entire neighborhood had just burned to the ground. Nothing was left standing. Did she see any fire trucks, I asked? “No. Not a single fire truck entered our area,” she said. “Not one.”

Other residents noted the number of fire hydrants to which firemen went only to find out they had no water in them. How can anyone fail so badly at their job that the one thing they are meant to do — keep the water on — is something at which they failed?

There will be many reasons. But one is that putting out fires seems not to have been a priority of the leadership of the LAFD in recent years. You can tell this from the appointment and statements made by the woman in charge, Kristin Crowley.

Her biography on the LAFD’s website makes plain her priorities — and those of the LAFD´s leadership.

“Kristin M. Crowley is the 19th Fire Chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD). With her wife and children by her side, Chief Crowley took the oath of office on March 25, 2022 — becoming the first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief in the LAFD.”

How thrilling! How exciting! Can’t you just hear the glass ceilings shattering?

Her official bio witters on: “Chief Crowley leads a diverse department. Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley’s priorities.”

Which is strange, because most fire chiefs strive to promote a culture of putting out fires.

But not Crowley, or the syrupy, stone-cold stupid media in California that fawned over her. In one recent TV interview, Crowley was asked about her new bureau in the LAFD.

Guess what this exciting new bureau was? A bureau of diversity, equity and inclusion. As she told local media: “So, by creating this new bureau — our diversity, equity and inclusion bureau — now we actually have the staff to do the work when it comes to doing a deep dive in regard to how we do business, how we take care of one another.”

Does that sound like anything other than a Kamala-esque word salad? It is full of every cliché used by incompetent woke bureaucrats: “do the work,” “deep dive,” “take care of one another.”

Crowley had one job — to make sure people don’t burn to death in their homes. But that was too much for her. She was too busy “doing the work” and “taking care of one another.”

One part of making sure that there were more “diverse” firefighters in her district was obvious. “I am super inspired,” she told one interviewer.

What by, you may ask? Why, a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity, of course. Specifically to increase the number of female firefighters. Because it seemed to horrify Crowley and California media that out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 were women.

“People ask me, well, ‘What number are you looking for?’ ” she claimed, before answering her own question. “I’m not looking for a number. It’s never enough.”

True. One of the things that residents of California were definitely thinking this week as they were chaotically and incompetently ordered to leave their homes was: “If only we had more lady firefighters. After all, you can never have enough.”

Amid the shattering of actual glass, some people even now seem to think that the fact Crowley ticks another diversity box (“proud member of the LGBTQ community”) is worth celebrating. A publication called Pride yesterday ran the headline “Amid Palisades fire, Los Angeles’s first LGBTQ+ fire chief is proving lesbians get it done.”

Personally, I suspect Chief Crowley will have set back the cause of lesbians in fire departments by about a hundred years.

Because the truth is that nobody has time for this rubbish anymore. Things are too serious — in California and across this country — to keep playing these stupid games. Whole neighborhoods can’t burn to the ground because remembering to actually collect water and fire trucks is your second-order priority.

There was a time when liberals — not least California liberals — pushed diversity into everything. Conservatives warned that there would be consequences, and there were, and are. All around us. Because DEI makes excellence a second-order priority.

Its proponents treat it like a game. But plainly, it is a game that even California can no longer afford.