Michael Dorstewitz shows the racism behind the right-wing anti-DEI crusade in his March 1 Newsmax column:
Government hiring and university admission standards based on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rather than merit are now in danger of placing American lives at risk in two areas where we truly put our lives in the hands of others:
In the medical profession and the aviation industry.
Earlier this week Daily Wire co-founder and bestselling author Ben Shapiro reported in a Twitter/X thread that “top hospitals are abandoning key metrics when hiring surgeons. And it means research by whites may be disregarded.”
Later in the thread Shapiro introduced “award-winning Duke surgical resident Vignesh Raman. At an internal DEI lecture, Raman says his ‘heart sinks’ when he has patients who watch Fox News or wear MAGA hats. Then he celebrates having a majority ‘non-white’ population to treat.”
He continued, “Raman adds that post-George Floyd, Duke made a concerted effort to stop hiring so many ‘walls of white men.’ He says the team is now ‘abandoning . . . all sort[s] of metrics’ and adopting a ‘completely holistic’ application practice in order to recruit more women and non-white surgeons.”
[…]Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk reposted Shapiro’s thread, along with the message, “DEI puts the lives of your loved ones at risk.”
Dorstewitz didn’t explain why only white men should be allowed to become surgeons — perhaps he thinks it’s self-explanatory. He went on to rant:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is also openly promoted by the Federal Aviation Administration and the hiring of air traffic controllers.
The New York Post reported last month that the FAA’s push for new talent using DEI standards includes actively seeking applicants with disabilities.
“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.”
But if the image of someone suffering from vision or psychiatric issues working in the control tower to safely bring a commercial airliner filled with unsuspecting travelers into Chicago’s busy O’Hare International Airport scares the hell out of you, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Dorstewitz offered absolutely no evidence that disability equals incompetence. It seems he wants to discriminate against the disabled as well. He concluded by ranting:
The former merit-based standard of hiring “the best and the brightest” has served us well for decades.
However, if we continue to use DEI standards to admit med students, and hire and promote employees in life-and-death positions, we should at least be honest enough to rearrange the words to call it what it is: Diversity, Inclusion and Equity — DIE.
What isn’t dying, of course, is the latent racism behind the anti-DEI activism of people like Dorstewitz. It’s clear that his ide of “the best and the brightest” also includes “the whitest.”