A companion to the right-wing obsession with corporate ESG policies — which the Media Research Center has dutifully hyped — is an obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and the MRC has forwarded that narrative too. For example:
- CNN Condemns Scott For Opposing ‘Civil Rights Laws,’ DEI
- DEI Chair Reveals Woke Mind Virus at Google in Social Media Tirade
- Harvard Donor Bill Ackman: DEI ‘Root Cause’ of Harvard Anti-Semitism
- CNN Fight: Panel Dukes It Out On DEI, Claudine Gay
- Sacré Bleu! Newsweek’s Josh Hammer Rips That French Guy at NYT For Incoherent Woke DEI Babble
- Elon Musk at Auschwitz: DEI Is ‘Discrimination,’ ‘Fundamentally Anti-Semitic’
- Jonathan Haidt Says What the Media Won’t: Antisemitism is the ‘Inevitable Outcome’ of DEI
When right-wingers baselessly blamed DEI policies for issues in the airline industry — effectively a racist argument that assumes non-white people are incompetent employees — the MRC uncritically forwarded those claims as well. Tom Olohan played stenographer in a Jan. 15 post:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted the Biden Administration and woke airline companies for putting so many resources into woke diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to the possible detriment of passenger safety.
Ingraham told guest and Washington Times Opinion Editor Charlie Hurt that “people could die as a result of DEI” during the Jan. 12 edition of the Ingraham Angle. Ingraham ripped the obsessive focus of the Biden administration and Boeing on DEI initiatives, noting that both had overseen bone-headed lapses in flight safety. Ingraham asked those responsible for the safety of hundreds of people traveling hundreds of miles per hour through the sky to focus on their responsibilities and hire competent people regardless of identity politics.
[…]Ingraham made the point here that Boeing and the Biden Administration had not only lost focus on their real responsibilities by embracing DEI, but were also failing to find the best employees due to their obsession with reaching diverse employment targets.
Ingraham is also making the point that non-white employees cannot possibly be “the best employees,” but Olohan didn’t mention that. Instead, he ranted:
DEI does not promote equality. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts deify corporate and government discrimination. For example, leftist outlet Bloomberg News enthusiastically published propaganda that only 6 percent of corporate jobs at analyzed companies went to white Americans in 2021, referring to this apparent discrimination as “progress.”
As if Olohan isn’t spreading propaganda. And he served up some more the next day, relating the musings of a lying homophobe:
The Daily Wire host Matt Walsh laid bare the perverse logic of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, especially in air travel.
Walsh panned a Federal Aviation Administration Diversity and Inclusion hiring initiative during the Jan. 15 edition of The Matt Walsh Show, arguing for hiring the most qualified people regardless of their race or gender to avoid lowering standards. Walsh said that companies inevitably lower standards when they prioritize getting more of a group of people rather than finding the people with the highest qualifications. Walsh made clear that pursuing diversity equity and inclusion necessarily “means the standards are going down,” dismissing the ideology as “insane on many levels.”
Walsh went on to give free advice to the airlines: the racial or gender makeup of a qualified group of employees is “not a problem that needs to be solved.”
He added, “As long as you’re bringing in the most qualified people — whatever the demographic makeup happens to be at the end of that — [it] doesn’t matter. It’s not a problem … “As long as race is not taken into account at all, and you’re just hiring the best people.”
[…]Walsh said, “The people that have made air travel into the safest form of travel that’s ever existed—the form of travel where you’re 35,000 feet in the air and going 400 miles per hour and that’s the safest? And the people who predominantly achieved that are white males. And how do we thank them? Let’s get them out of [there].”
Olohan found another right-wing hater to spew anti-DEI venom in a Jan. 17 post:
The Daily Wire host Michael Knowles laid out the stakes of pursuing diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) in the airline industry. As expected, they are very high.
During the Jan. 16 edition of The Michael Knowles Show, Knowles made clear that embracing DEI always means sacrificing “candidate quality” and “merit” to other considerations, thus making it harder for employers, universities and other institutions to do quality work. “DEI in restaurants means that you value diversity more than your dinner. DEI in universities means that you value diversity more than your education. That’s not good, that’s a little scary. DEI in the cockpit means that you value diversity more than your life. And I do not,” Knowles warned. He further referred to DEI initiatives in the airline industry as “actual suicide.”
[…]Knowles’ comments follow an airline disaster where a door fell off a Boeing jet mid-flight. Near-miss air collisions have risen 63% during the DEI-obsessed Biden administration’s time managing the Federal Aviation Administration.
Knowles panned the “logically impossible” arguments that DEI “accentuates quality and merit.” He insisted that this was not possible because DEI initiatives specifically subordinate quality and merit to other factors.
Olohan didn’t mention that Knowles is a transphobe who has called for the elimination of transgender people. Olohan found a right-wing so-called comedian to parrot in a Jan. 22 post:
Actor Rob Schneider put a wokeism-obsessed United Airlines CEO on notice after a dangerous incident occurred on his watch.
Schneider called for United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby to be fired in a Jan. 21 X (formerly Twitter) post after a flight nearly crashed into the ocean. Schneider verbally mauled Kirby, writing: “I cannot tell you how many @UnitedAirlines employees have personally thanked me for my valid criticism of your careless and life-threatening leadership. I look forward to your swift dismissal by UA’s board of directors before your inane actions cause the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children.”
[…]The actor promised that he and his family were done flying with United Airlines, referencing Kirby’s obsession with “diversity” and the recent near-crash. Schneider said, “You have clearly placed ‘diversity’ of pilot hiring above safety of passengers and crew. As evidenced by the near aviation catastrophe of UA Boeing 777 flight 1722 from Maui to San Francisco [Dec. 18, 2022], where your diverse but incompetent flight crew didn’t know which flaps were causing its near disastrous dissent, coming within 750 feet of killing every one aboard your United Airline.”
Neither Olohan nor any of the activists he uncritically quoted offered any direct evidence that DEI policies caused any of the issues they are complaining about — they’re all simply spouting things that align with their predetermined partisan narratives that they couldn’t be bothered to fact-check beforehand. It seems they’re all just buying into the racist view that only white people can be competent employees.