In keeping with the far Right’s declared strategy of turning every last TV show, home appliance, or video game software update into part of the Culture Wars, rightwing disinformation operatives are now fulminating about the supposed threat to airline safety resulting from nonwhite people in commercial aviation.
Because after all, that emergency exit door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737, and wouldn’t you know it, Boeing also has a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program, just like Woke Universities do!!! Then again, Boeing also offers employees a “winter break” from the last weekday before Christmas until the first weekday after January 1, just like Woke Universities, so maybe that’s why the door plug took an evening off from the rest of the fuselage.
Now, this weird attempt to link corporate diversity initiatives with airline safety didn’t materialize in a vacuum: The 737 incident came barely two weeks after the culmination of the rightwing campaign to force Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard because of a fake plagiarism ‘scandal’ cooked up by rightwing Zelig Christopher Rufo, who openly bragged about how that would help taint “diversity” with a whiff of incompetence, returning America to a white male meritocracy like it should be.
The DEI Crashes Planes stories popped up everywhere in rightwing media right after the January 5 incident, especially on Fox News and Fox Business. On “The Big Money Show,” which is somehow not a game show, Fox Business host Brian Brenberg, Just Asking Questions, said on January 10 that “Boeing seemed to be particularly interested in sustainability and DEI” and asked, “Does that come at the cost of something?”
Also, as we were just reminded on Twitter, the Culture Warriors also kind of missed that the steely-eyed Missile Man who landed the Alaska 737 with the hole in its side was actually a steely eyed woman, although it appears her name still hasn’t been released.
That night on the Fox Homeworld, Laura Ingraham couldn’t help but wonder, too, even as she acknowledged she was speculating on the basis of no evidence, explaining that “we can’t link the diversity efforts to what happened,” but golly, it sure is “worth asking at this point is excellence what we need in airline operation or is diversity the goal here?” As everyone knows, you can’t have both, and doesn’t it make more sense to blame not having an all-white workforce? Otherwise, you might dig up ancient history — the 737 MAX crashes of a few years ago — which stemmed in part from a culture of cost-cutting and indifference to safety.
In the most extreme example, Ben Shapiro’s most extreme hack writer Matt Walsh published a piece condemning “DEI rot” in the airline industry that piled racist insinuations on top of each other so brazenly that Lee Atwater — pre-deathbed conversion even! — might tell him to tone it down a bit. Walsh stopped just short of insisting that women and people of color simply aren’t capable of building or flying airplanes, because it’s just obvious that if the voice coming over the intercom doesn’t sound like Chuck Yeager complete with a bit of a drawl, you’re not safe. Why, United even recruits employees from HBCUs! He has a crabtastic snit over a feel-good news feature about “Sisters of the Skies,” a group that seeks to inspire Black girls to pursue careers in aviation, and How. Dare. They, because the little elementary-school girls aren’t even given the briefest introduction to wind shear, transponders, stick-shakers, NOTAMs, or other stuff it’s crucial to know if, in 15 or 20 years, they pursue actual pilot training. Sure, just let the little kids think flying is cool, without even once warning them that if they screw up, they could KILL PEOPLE.
“This isn’t training, really. It’s like a kindergarten classroom. [It’s literally a fun event for elementary school girls — Dok] At no point are these people concerned about safety or competence. They want to put Black women in the cockpit because they want to inspire more Black women, and that makes them feel good — not because they think they’re getting smarter or better pilots.”
REAL pilots are white and male, and the best of them got to grope women at the Tailhook convention for years, because flying is serious business and that’s what professional excellence is about. Also, Walsh points out, the group’s name is abbreviated “S.O.S.,” so they’re basically admitting they want to crash planes or something.
Mind you, the rightwing grifters pushing that nonsense don’t really believe it, with perhaps the exception of Walsh, who clearly enjoys the racism too much to be faking it. As one rightwing “influencer” on Xitter happily acknowledged, there’s no need for there to be any real connection between safety and DEI, as long as people can be made to fear there is. Calling attention to a rightwing tweet blaming a recent airliner engine fire on DEI, the CHUD Xweeted (and was retweeted by Rufo):
The @realchrisrufo strategy works here even if DEI has zero to do with an airplane event or airport near miss or aircraft manufacturer error.
Why? Bc they can’t prove it doesn’t. But we can and will hang DEI like an albatross around the necks of every single corporation entrusted to prioritize human life and safety who chooses to waste time on this absolute nonsense.
We don’t need proof, we’ll just say it a lot!
And indeed, Ms. Chud there is right in crediting Christopher Rufo, who ginned up national panics about “critical race theory” and the very existence of transgender people — even while announcing out loud that was his goal back in 2021:
“We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
The hell of all this isn’t only that it’s so transparently dishonest, or even that the grifters are very open about the fact that they’re cynically manipulating people. It’s that so many mainstream media sources keep lapping it right up. The Bloody New York Times ran 62 stories about Gay’s supposed academic crimes — before we stopped counting — blissfully helping spreading the rightwing smear, even as Rufo bragged about how he’d helped make the smear go mainstream.
Coincidentally — certainly not as penance — the Times this weekend broke a major story about how a small group of rightwing creeps worked to engineer the current war against DEI, which is simply the old old war against affirmative action, which was itself plain old backlash to the partial end of segregation. They want to replace you. They’re getting that job you were counting on. They are going to wreck America because they’re not evolved enough to take part in democracy, just like William F. Buckley said. Or in the case of the womenfolk, that’s because “independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” thanks to letting them vote and work outside the home.
It’s a good article and you should read the whole thing, because it explains in part why the entire far Right is, like a flock of dumb racist birds, suddenly blaming DEI for everything, like for instance the brainless son of the brainless former president, who Xweeted just this morning about a Delta 757 that lost one of the two tires on its nose landing gear yesterday,
“I’m sure this has nothing to do with mandated Diversity Equity and Inclusion practices in the airline industry!!! People are going to die and no one regulating these things give a [poop emoji]!
“Wheels don’t just fall off planes without gross incompetence in the equation!”
Yup. Just as no one ever died of a heart attack in their fifties before the COVID vaccine, there have never been mechanical problems with airliners prior to DEI. When white men with crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses ran the aerospace industry, everything worked just fine, apart from a few of the first jet airliners blasting themselves to pieces over the ocean because of metal fatigue from pressurizing and depressurizing. Or the Apollo 1 fire. Or the two airliners that collided over New York City in 1960. Or the Hindenberg. Or…
Oh, wait, there was Amelia Earhardt! See? Diversity leads to disaster.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Media Matters / NYT (gift link)]
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