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January
16
2024

DEI, Airplane Crashes, and Bad Medicine
J. Robert Smith

How safe are you nowadays on commercial airliners? How safe will you be tomorrow? Are airlines sacrificing safety at the altar of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)?” Who do you want piloting the jetliner you’re on, the best, most experienced pilots or box-check hires?

Flipping the page, medical schools will graduate bevvies of DEI doctors as the decade unwinds. What if you need open-heart surgery? Cancer treatment? Won’t you need a sound diagnosis for starters? Will the most capable physicians attend you? Or will you have to settle for the right color, right gender, right sexual orientation, pick-your-pronouns person in a white lab coat?

The nation is being plagued by incompetence. Plenty of that is from lax parenting, subpar education, trophies for just showing up, and a debauched culture that discounts hard work and competence. Forget excellence.

While that’s bad enough, DEI adds another corrosive layer. People are receiving degrees and certifications for superficialities. Merit is shunned. Standards re being dropped in too many instances and exceptions made. Victimhood is ginned up and fobbed off as part of progressive social reform.

Incompetence resulting from DEI policies may sour your shopping experience at Lululemon, but it won’t cost you your life.

Not so in other ways.

Fox News reported on January 14 that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) believes that passenger safety is best served by hiring from “special emphasis” categories. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

United Airlines is a DEI leader in the airlines industry. A hard landing incident in Houston last July may have resulted from pilot error. Significant damage was done to the United 767’s fuselage. No passenger injuries were reported. Suspicions abound.

As BPR reported on January 7:

Was it the airplane acting up, or was the pilot at fault? According to conservative activist Ashley St. Clair, it may well be the second one.

In a tweet posted Friday [link added], she claimed the pilot was a DEI hire who’d “failed multiple trainings” but been hired anyway because he or she had checked the right identity boxes.

“Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a list to not return to United?” St. Clair wrote in her tweets.

“Am I correct that this individual failed multiple trainings including simulator training? Am I also correct that United has covered up this DEI disaster and many others?” she added.

United devotes a full webpage to its efforts at being “purpose driven and action oriented in building a culture of greater inclusion and belonging to better reflect the diversity of the communities we serve.” Nowhere on the page is merit mentioned.

Peachy Keenan, a journalist and author, posted at X on January 9:

Getting DMs from pilot world confirming that things are bad, but this one is really scary. The Boomers really are our thin veneer of civilization. As they peel off, so will the veneer.

Keenan reports that airlines have informal programs teaming “unfireable DEI problem children” with seasoned pilots. As those pilots retire, “every flight will be a roll of the dice.”

Writing for the Jerusalem Post last December, Shelia Nazarian, a plastic surgeon, reported that “44% of medical schools boast tenure and promotion policies that ‘specifically reward’ faculty scholarship on DEI.” Seventy-nine percent of schools use “equity advisers.” Ninety-six percent actively seek to “integrate DEI ‘within the curriculum as a key learning outcome.’” Nazarian’s information comes from a 2022 Association of American Medical Colleges report.

At the Free Press on January 12, Stanley Goldfarb, MD, wrote of his recent experience with DEI as “associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine” and previously, “codirector of its highly regarded kidney division.”

Goldfarb’s article is worth reading in its entirety. From the article:

The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school for maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCATs (Medical College Admission Test).

MCATs are part of a rigorous screening process for prospective medical students. Why are black candidates -- or any “of-color” prospects -- receiving passes on so critical an evaluation? Given the bias favoring admitting and graduating designated minorities, what are the chances that poor performers will be winnowed out? Isn’t it likely that generous allowances will be made to compensate for “historic racism” by passing underqualified students?

Goldfarb answers, indirectly:

[T]he university has also created a project Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education… by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidenced-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.”

Afterlives of slavery? Is Penn training long-dead slaves to be doctors in the afterlife? If so, have at it. Otherwise, what does “race-consciousness” have to do with treating the human body?

There are, indeed, aliments and diseases that disproportionately strike certain races (Sickle Cell Anemia comes to mind), but race consciousness applied to patient care is freighted with ominous meaning.

Are patients to be evaluated through a social-construct lens? Will resources be distributed based merely on color (and an ever-changing range of categories)? Is distributing health care resources about prioritizing favored populations? Isn’t that necessary to right old wrongs and achieve social justice? Mustn’t there be an “even up” before race considerations can be removed?

Resources for healthcare aren’t finite. There isn’t a fixed pie that can only be sliced so many ways. Misallocation -- poor decision-making -- and waste occur. Squeezing pennies for profits is now routine. Heavy government regulation distorts the market. New monies can be found or generated. Healthcare monies can be better utilized, the goal being to improve healthcare for all. Prioritizing some races over others is flat reverse discrimination.

The sad truth is that many corporations and institutions are being muscled into adopting DEI regimens. They’re threatened by the DEI mob if they don’t submit or stray.

Let’s return to Lululemon, which is swimming in DEI poison. Lululemon’s founder and majority stockholder Chip Wilson is under the gun for daring to publicly criticize the retailer for the “whole diversity and inclusion thing.”

Threatening or targeting enterprises like Lululemon for reprisals is the norm. Per NBC News, January 6:

“There should be a loud call to action for a widespread boycott of corporations that overtly disparage and label DEI as practices rooted in racism and discrimination,” said [Tiffany] Brandreth, an organizational psychologist who specializes in DEI. “It’s crucial for anyone who claims to be an ally for DEI to send a powerful message that these regressive values will not be supported that goes beyond mere rhetoric.”

The Heritage Foundation calls 1989 the watershed year in the rise of cultural Marxism, which DEI springs from -- in part. The other part is big government. The welfare state was supposed to lift disadvantaged minorities out of poverty. Instead, it fostered generational poverty.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, left-wing academics were free to migrate to alternative interpretations of Marxism. Communism, they believed, would stand a better chance of prevailing through Antonio Gramsci’s application of Marxism to culture. A generation later, their investment is paying off.

Explained the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez and Katherine Gorka:

The reasons [why cultural Marxism was superior] were simple: Economic classes fluctuate, especially under capitalism, where people can, and often do, change their stations in life. Race, sex, and national origin are, however, immutable. They are thus superior loci of revolutionary change.

There you have it. The game being played is for higher stakes than most folk appreciate. DEI trashes merit, which is critical to our liberties and welfare. Fellow travelers and useful idiots abound. They prattle on about afterlives of slavery. They’re paid to be mob enforcers in a protection racket. They wind up demeaning the very people they claim to help. What self-respecting person wants to advance on anything but merit?

In the process, our lives are being played with. It’s begun happening at 30,000 feet, under scalpels, and in plenty of other ways.

 

 

Contributor, American Thinker. Proprietor, Flyover. Back on Twitter after quitting 2 years ago due to shadow banning.

J. Robert Smith can be found at Gab, @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover. He’s returned to X. His X handle is @JRobertSmith1.

 

 

 

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