Could DEI Be Deadly?

With industries across the board (including airlines) no longer prioritizing qualifications in their hiring, this 'deranged right-winger' has a few opinions.

I was ten the first time I flew by myself. It was 1979 and back then your parents could waltz you right up to the boarding gate and pass you off to the nearest sexy stewardess without a care in the world. (Yes, stewardesses were sexy AF back then—all of them because they literally had to be—and yes, you called them stewardesses and this didn’t even make you a sexist asshole.)

Sharon would give you a warm hug and a fancy plastic airplane pin before leading you by the hand onto the plane and straight to your seat. She’d make sure you were cozy, comfortable, and had an ice-cold soda and a fat stack of popular magazines to enjoy and as soon as that seatbelt sign went off, it took you about five minutes to forget you were 35,000 feet in the air without your mom.

Stewardesses in the 1970s had to fall within a certain height, weight, and age range and even have the “right smile.” True story.

At the risk of sounding old, crotchety, or excessively nostalgic, air travel used to be marvelously civil.

“Fear of flying” wasn’t even in my vocabulary back then. My uncle Jack was a pilot and had his own single-engine, 4-seater Cessna and I would beg him to take me cloud-surfing. Maybe on some level I knew there was an inherent risk in this, but my own uncle would never put me in harm’s way. If there was an anxiety scale, I was a solid zero on it. The only things that could have made those airborne adventures any cooler would have been a frosty Coke and maybe the latest issue of Cosmo in my lap.  

And then nine-eleven struck and the era of trouble-free air travel went the way of Pet Rocks and pogo sticks. Overnight, icy runways and overworked air traffic controllers were the least of any tourist’s worries. Now we had to wonder if the guy in 3B had smuggled a box cutter onboard in his shoe or had plans to sneak into the lavatory to mix up a Molotov cocktail or was quietly plotting to storm the cockpit, take over the controls, and steer us all straight into the nearest skyscraper. And no offense to any TSA agents reading this, but the newly “beefed-up airport security” wasn’t exactly overwhelmingly reassuring. Mind you, this was long before the Department of Homeland Security found a “disturbing” ninety-five percent failure to detect literal weapons packed in scanned bags in an undercover sting operation.

You did not misread that last sentence.

This is an actual, only slightly hyperbolized story from my post “terror attack” (y’all know that was an inside job, right?) life:

TSA agent (very somber and smug): Sorry, ma’am, I’m going to need to confiscate these tweezers.

Me: Seriously? Why?

TSA agent: It’s for the safety of the other passengers.

Me (furious and imagining a week’s worth of rogue eyebrow growth ruining my vacation pictures): You miss ninety-five percent of the weapons and explosives that pass through here, but you sniffed out those brow pluckers like a drug dog on a kilo of blow? You do realize I could still fuck someone up do some serious damage with the keys, curling iron, or ball point pen I’ve got in there if I wanted to?

TSA agent: Valid points.

Me: Thanks. So, can I have my $28 tweezers back?

TSA agent (mouth drops): Twenty-eight-dollar tweezers?

Me (unapologetic): They’re Tweezerman. Limited edition.

TSA agent (slips worth-every-penny tweezers into pocket): Sorry, ma’am. Passenger safety first.

Me: I hate you.

TSA agent: Have a safe flight.

You’d have thought the possibility that your seatmate might be a suicide bomber would have been rock bottom as far as air transit worries went. Hahahahaha, you silly, shortsighted thing, you.

And I’m not even talking about all the force-jabbed captains keeling over on the ground and even in the air.

Enter Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the trendiest (read: most woke) possible way to staff your business, enterprise, or aircraft. Forget about recruiting the pilot who graduated at the top of her flight school class or promoting the avionics technician with the longest and most impressive resume. Today, airlines like Virgin Atlantic make ready-to-trend TikTok videos bragging about their “diversity hires” and expect people to be dazzled by the fact that they don’t judge job applicants on superficial things like skills or experience, but instead play a dangerous game of employment bingo that aims to create a workforce that’s as colorful as a box of crayons—but who may or may not be particularly qualified for their positions. It’s sort of like your blind date boasting about how many beers he pounded before picking you up: not even a little bit confidence inspiring.

Airline after major commercial airline has announced politically correct initiatives to hire this many women or that many people of color by roughly a week from Wednesday. United has an entire webpage dedicated to “flying with pride” (because the gender identity of the person you choose to do your kinky shit with matters deeply to job performance and should thus be celebrated make it make sense). But even suggesting that actively not hiring based on qualifications *could maybe possibly* prove a dangerous move instantly gets you branded a “deranged right-winger.”

Journalist: What should we call the DEI-bashers?

Editor: Ooh, I know! Deranged right-wingers!

Journalist: Yeah, we used that for Covid anti-vaxxers.

Editor: Use it again! It sells papers!

Just this week, a New York-bound Virgin Atlantic flight was cancelled on the tarmac when a passenger spotted several missing screws on the aircraft’s wing. A passenger noticed this. From his seat on the same not-quite-fully-assembled plane. A plane operated by the very airline putting out promotional videos that look more like drag shows than safety-in-aviation endorsements. But how dare you assume for a flying nanosecond that the crew doing that day’s safety check wasn’t made up of the industry’s best and brightest. Do you kiss your dog with that racist mouth?

Let’s take an informal poll: Would you rather have an average-looking, middle-age guy from Michigan—let’s call him Frank—with 30,000 hours of captaining under his belt and a boringly happy home life piloting your plane, or some handsome dude in a dress—I’m naming them Fancee—whose pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirs and who just yesterday hit the 1,500 hour mark necessary to command the cockpit (right after parading around town in a thong to promote nonbinary identity awareness)?

Paging Frank to the flight deck, stat—am I right?

Now flip it around: Suppose Frank’s the complete newbie (maybe he even has a part-time drinking problem and is going through an ugly divorce), and Fancee has flown around the globe six times, is as sober as a nun at a Cardi B concert and was actually a flight instructor in the Air Force. Unless you’re patently prejudiced or seriously suicidal, Fancee is clearly the better bet.

But we no longer live in an old-timey meritocracy where employees are hired and promoted based on virtue or deservedness. Today’s super skewed society values inclusiveness above literally anything and everything else and is packed with folks so loathe to be labeled homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, ableist, ageist, racist, classist, elitist, or partisan that it’s become acceptable to discriminate against qualified job candidates for the single sin of being conventional, an ideology that is about as rational as marginalizing vanilla ice cream for not having enough marshmallows.  

Obviously, the Dumbing Everything-down Insanity isn’t only dangerous in the context of aviation. Name a task where you honestly wouldn’t care if the person performing it was there solely because of their skin color, where they were born, or what they are or aren’t packing in their panties. Surgeon? Pharmacist? Architect? Manicurist? There’s not a position on the planet where merit doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter. I don’t want my cat being groomed by a hermaphrodite who doesn’t know how to wield a pair of shears but checks some obscure diversity box. I expect the worker stocking the shelves at my grocery store to be able to distinguish parsley from cilantro, and I don’t care if ze is purple and has six nipples or shops at Talbots and carries a Stanley cup. And I sure as shit don’t want the pilot flying my family around to be the person who graduated dead last in his class but got the job because he does a smoky cat eye better than any Kardashian.

Most mind-blowing of all, at least to me, is that this is somehow a controversial stance to take.

Did you know I’ve written lots of other books besides The War on Ivermectin? You can find most of them here.