Cue the "INTOLERANT!" chorus.
Leftists live in the Land of Overreach. Their love of shortcuts and top-down solutions ruins everything. If you're at a grocery store and you call a progressive to see if he wants you to pick up some Oreos, he'll say he wants the entire cookie aisle, along with an ownership stake in the company that now owns Nabisco. If you say that's unrealistic, he will condemn you as a dessertophobe.
A classic example of the Left's horrible, want-it-all approach to everything is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rage. There aren't a lot of people in the United States who are opposed to the spirit of any of those three things. We're a diverse country, and we want everyone to have a shot at the American dream.
Where the proggy Democrat approach quickly goes awry is that they want to immediately shoehorn DEI into a variety of organizations, rather than foster a cultural change that organically creates a new environment. The Left wants to guarantee equal outcomes for everyone, while the right wants equal opportunities.
In order to get from point A to point Z while only hitting D,E, and I on the way, merit has to go out the window. That's not as much of a shock to the system as it should be, because the Left has been softening up the American public for this ever since the shift to participation trophy, feelings-based education (which I wrote about in my classic "Don't Let the Hippies Shower"). It's not unreasonable to think that DEI was the endgame all along.
Playing the "square peg in a round hole" DEI game is annoying enough in any situation, but it becomes utter insanity when industries that should be prioritizing safety make it the focus.
Corporate DEI folly is under a burning spotlight after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX-9 plane that was just a little over a year old blew out a fuselage panel while in the air. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
This time.
Elon Musk — the fly in all the leftists' ointment — took Boeing to task for its woke-first business practices.
Elon Musk is dead right: Boeing’s insane commitment to DEI could literally kill people.
“People will die due to DEI,” he thundered on X.
The tech titan was slamming the aeronautics firm after one of its planes blew a fuselage panel out in midair, with a tragic disaster only narrowly averted.
Specifically, he pointed out that Boeing in 2022 began rewarding execs financially for hitting climate and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion targets — shifting sole focus away from safety and quality, where it had been before.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” Musk asked.
A lot of anti-Musk, DEIsplainin' articles immediately showed up in the mainstream media, which means that Musk was, once again, over the target.
The gist of the "Musk is wrong about Boeing and DEI" narrative building was that the company really wasn't prioritizing it that much and, even if it was, safety wasn't being affected.
Then things like this began popping up:
👀
— James Lindsay, anti-Fascist (@ConceptualJames) January 8, 2024
Reddit's Boeing subforum is banning any commentor who talks about Boeing and DEI and its effects on safety. They don't want us to talk about it or look into it. pic.twitter.com/iDeMofUHew
Why so nervous?
It's not racist or sexist to posit that a focus on what a company's employees should look like rather than on what they can do could lead to a host of problems. The only "-ist" one is for saying that is a "realist."
The ultra woke champions of DEI would rather accumulate leftist social credit for themselves than think about life and death consequences for others. Sadly, the upper echelons of the corporate world are filled with executives who have moved leftward out of fear of being publicly shamed by corrupt progressive media.
If anyone is wondering whether the Boeing incident might have begun a shift away from DEI cheerleading, here's the latest from the FAA, via Rick:
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is recruiting workers who suffer from “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric disorders, and other mental and physical conditions under a new DEI initiative.
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
Come to think of it, incarcerated violent felons are underrepresented in the corporate ranks. Can the celebrants of diversity for diversity's sake get these people released from prison and put in charge of some things already? Don't be felonist.
As someone who has been flying all over America — and sometimes the world — for decades, I've had to put my faith and trust in everyone involved in the safety of the aircraft and the journey. The modern airline industry has, for the most part, earned that faith and trust. Now it seems as if it's trying to see how quickly that trust can be eroded.
None of us can afford to have misguided wokeness prevail in the skies.
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