This is just ridiculous.
Source: Anadolu / Getty
When the news first broke about an American Airlines regional jet carrying 64 people and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter tragically and horrifyingly colliding in mid-air, it was reasonable for a person to think: “Well, at least they can’t blame this one on DEI.”
After all, how could they? The aviation world is overwhelmingly white and male, with fewer than 4% of pilots being Black and fewer than 5% being women.
Well, anyone who thought this tragedy would fly under the anti-DEI radar had forgotten one thing: President Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGAs are insufferable and can turn literally any major news story into a reason to be racist.
In fact, Trump, a sitting president speaking in the wake of a tragedy that left no survivors, took the opportunity while making his first in-person public statement on the crash to politicize what happened by blaming both his predecessors, Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which he claimed, without evidence as usual, contributed to the incident by practicing — yep, you guessed it — DEI.
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump said during his first press conference following the collision. “Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychological aptitude that were allowed to be qualified for air traffic controller.”
“And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before,” he continued. “Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”
Trump didn’t just start pointing wayward fingers at random ex-presidents and DEI, he stood there, on stage, during a press conference regarding a deadly tragedy, and he read from right-wing articles critical of diversity efforts at the FAA.
He also reminded us that his anti-DEI nonsense isn’t only about racism, it’s also about sexism, ableism, and, well — actually, it would probably take less time to list the “isms” that don’t apply. During his impromptu “I hate that people who aren’t able-bodied white men can get good jobs” diatribe, Trump highlighted language from the FAA’s website about the government placing special emphasis on hiring people with “targeted disabilities,” including partial paralysis, severe intellectual disability, and psychiatric disability.
CNBC noted the language Trump quoted “has been on the website since at least 2013 — a time period that includes Trump’s entire first White House term.” (Not that Trump is going to let a little thing like verifiable facts get in the way of a good MAGA lie.)
Again, Trump presented zero evidence that the standards at the FAA were lowered under Obama or that they were re-lowered under Biden. Of course, none of that should be surprising since Trump and the MAGA-fied GOP’s entire anti-DEI warpath has been presented without a shred of unambiguous evidence whatsoever that any entity’s DEI efforts have resulted in a lowering of standards in any industry. (The same goes for the white-and-eternally-fragile war on Critical Race Theory and Trump’s election fraud propaganda. These people never cite evidence, they just repeat these lies as frequently as possible until they’re normalized enough to be accepted as plausible “truth.”)
Trump isn’t the only one pulling “DEI” nonsense out of his white nationalist hind parts. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) — who, last week, proposed a constitutional amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term in office — also wondered out loud whether DEI “played a role” in the crash.
“I think you have to look at this with eyes wide open, see what happened,” Ogles said on Fox Business. “Human error. Was it some sort of equipment failure? Did DEI play a role in this type of thing?”
Similarly, Vice President JD Vance backed up Trump’s unfounded DEI claims.
“When you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government,” said Vance. “But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there and I think that is a core part of what President Trump is going to bring and has already brought to Washington DC. We want to hire the best people because we want the best people at air traffic control and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.
He continued,
“If you go back to just some of the headlines, over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away. Because of the color of their skin that policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership because safety is the first priority of our Aviation industry.”
Oh, brother.
It’s as if these people wake up in the morning, take a sip of Noose Folders (I heard that’s their secret Klan coffee that gets them ready for another day of white supremacy enforcement), and think: “What’s in the news and how can I spin it into a reason to keep oppressing marginalized people?”
It’s going to be a long, exhausting four years of unbridled caucasity, y’all. This is just the beginning.
English (US) ·