“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?”
This was the question posed by tech tycoon Elon Musk on X, after a piece of fuselage was ripped from an Alaska Airlines passenger jet in the skies above Oregon last Friday.
“People will die due to DEI,” Musk also warned.
The frightening Alaska Airlines incident took place just seven minutes after takeoff, forcing the depressurised Boeing 737 Max 9 plane, carrying 171 passengers and six crew en route to California, to return to Portland International Airport.
According to Fox 12 / KPTV,
“One passenger we talked to at the airport said that a kid had to be held in his seat by his mom, and people lost their phones, which were sucked out of the plane.
“That same child closest to the damaged part of the plane lost his shirt due to the violent and sudden depressurization, but otherwise everyone on board appeared to be OK.”
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has since ordered the immediate grounding of similar Boeing jets for inspection, affecting some 170 aircraft globally.
Ideology over safety
Musk has come under fire for his comments, with critics arguing that DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hiring policies merely remove unwanted barriers impeding minority applicants from employment.
However, Musk’s critics are the ones in need of correction: it is already unlawful, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to practice employment discrimination against minorities.
What DEI has achieved is not a broadening but a narrowing of the hiring pool, making it less likely — and, in some cases, impossible — for the best applicant for a position to be hired if they are straight, white, able-bodied and/or male.
It is, of course, a stretch to suggest that DEI hiring practices are to blame for last week’s Alaska Airlines incident — nor was that Musk’s argument.
However, it is indisputable that life-threatening accidents will become more commonplace in the aviation industry, so long as woke corporations prioritise diversity over pure merit in their consideration of which professionals to hire — especially for high-stakes roles.
And it is hard to image an industry with more high-stakes roles than aviation — whether pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, safety inspectors or cabin crew.
Fear of flying is a common anxiety, making aviation the last industry the public would want to see overrun with DEI nonsense, yet airline companies and even the FAA itself are riddled with this ideological poison.
Just two days after the Alaska Airlines incident, Fox News reported that the FAA “is actively recruiting workers who suffer ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website”.
The FAA, which is overseen by superwoke Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and employs some 45,000 people, is especially interested in recruiting workers whose disabilities include “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism”.
Flight risk
On its website, the FAA argues that its Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan, which was last updated in March 2022, is “integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel” — though exactly how that sentimental square is circled has been left unexplained by the agency.
Meanwhile, in 2023, both Alaska Airlines and Boeing Co. achieved the much-coveted Human Rights Campaign’s Equality 100 Award, earning a perfect 100-point score by jumping through a maze of hoops to make them leaders in “LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion”.
Alaska Airlines has long been noted for its commitment to wokeness, as early as 2021 sacking two Christian employees for questioning the company’s public support of the controversial Equality Act.
For its part, Boeing bragged in a 2023 report, “Our goal was to achieve diverse interview slates for at least 90% of manager and executive openings,” with an actual “92% of interview slates being diverse, resulting in 47% diverse hires.”
United Airlines is another “industry leader” when it comes to wokery, its CEO Scott Kirby recently boasting that race and gender are among the key considerations United uses in deciding who pilots its planes.
Did I mention that Scott Kirby also likes to dress in drag? No, I’m not joking.
The downfall of the aviation industry would be hilarious if it weren’t so deeply concerning.
The plane crashed, but at least it was flown by a drag queen is not a consolation most customers would welcome, if that day ever comes.
But it’s one they might soon expect — until and unless the DEI industrial complex is splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds.
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This article was originally published on Mercator under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Image credit: Pexels
5 comments
5 Comments
Swissarge
January 23, 2024, 10:06 amThe United States experiment will come to a crashing end as people in the idealistic branches of Academia and Government ignore the facts of nature trying to prove "equality",
REPLYAnonymous Human
January 23, 2024, 8:15 pmI work for a major American airline and have witnessed the largest downgrade in qualified talented hiring these last few years (since covid) in all of my career. The in-your-face equity & diversity idiocy we are required to endure are nails in the coffin. It is disturbing and frustrating to witness the wholesale explosion of authorized discrimination against the true working class.
REPLYTionico
January 23, 2024, 8:21 pmI personally don't care a fig if the creature up front driving that airliner is a purple rhesus monkey that is a hundred twenty two years old. The ONLY thing that matters to me is that that creature is COMPETENT at what is bring done, and can effectively COMMUNICATE with the others involve.
Obviously the second, at least, would eliminate the monkey. But would it eliminate the human import who is barely able to converse intelligibly with his cohorts? Under DIE it likely would not. And there's the rub, eh?
I am in a minority because I know how to drive an elephant. Perhaps they should hire ME do drive those 737's. ?
REPLYMichael J Landry
January 24, 2024, 6:29 amI saw somebody came out with a great line — since Scott Kirby likes to dress in drag, United needs to change its name. It should bring back that of defunct legacy carrier Trans World Airlines.
REPLYAllen Roth
January 30, 2024, 2:35 pmDiversity Uber Alles. Or/ Insanity endangering the lives of innocents
REPLY