The tragedy in Washington D.C. this week was horrible, and a shocking incident. There should and will be an investigation into what went wrong here, but every politician and official who spoke at the White House today explicitly blamed DEI programs for this crash. The message may as well have been, "we're going to do an investigation, but we already know it was unqualified minorities."

Here's Phillip DeFranco on this coordinated talking point:

Now with everything that we've talked about and shown, you might think that DEI programs may have affected who was hired to be an air traffic controller. But to be clear, from everything we can see, DEI programs at the FAA do not affect who was hired to be an air traffic controller, despite Trump making it seem like the FAA was letting people with intellectual disabilities apply. We're talking about a job that requires a ton of classes and exams to be passed in order to get the role. And then, on top of that, you generally need to work in the field for years before getting assigned to a major airport like Reagan. None of those requirements change because of any DEI-related criteria.

I mean, I don't know how much the general public knows about this space, but it is not uncommon for entire classes to fail the exam sometimes, and it is considered one of the hardest gigs to get into both in the private and public sectors. And that's probably because one fuck-up leads to dozens or even more deaths.

Right, and so TLDR here, if you are an air traffic controller, it's either because you passed a hard-as-fuck exam and course, or you have years of experience because of a job in the military and then still had to pass a hard-as-fuck exam. It's such a tough field to get into that the FAA actually has a major shortage of air traffic controllers right now. And actually, this incident manned up being a prime example of that. But it's now seeing the FAA releasing a report that there were staffing issues at the control tower last night that possibly led to the controller doing the job of two people at once.

The investigation needs to happen because it's unacceptable for this sort of thing to ever happen, and those findings should inform how we change processes to make sure this doesn't happen again. The entire aviation industry is built on strict adherence to rules that we don’t have disasters, and when we do, we never have the same disaster again. But to jump to the conclusion that this was surely the fault of some minority employee who didn't deserve to have the job despite there being zero evidence that was the case is at best a blindingly dogmatic belief in your own agenda or at worst plain-as-day racism sneaking out with the buzz words of the day.

As more information comes out in the coming weeks about what happened and what caused the incident, I’ll happily update the blog post to correct myself if Trump’s claims turn out to be true, but I don’t expect that will be the case. He just jumped straight there all on his own, and his lackeys fell in line.