The right lives on hate, racism, and bigotry. They can not allow other religions, minorities, people different from them to have the same rights and opportunities. For some reason they feel that others having the same rights they have makes them less than, makes them lessor as people. They take no joy in the happiness and success of others. They hate the inclusion of anyone slightly different from them, and they react with temper tantrums. Look at the meanness towards and smug superiority they think they have over others. Instead of admiring the skill of the flight crew, the pilots and the plane stewards that saved lives, these people mock and slur others. Hugs. Scottie
They’re blaming airline safety issues on disabled people, Black people, women, and drag queens to gin up anti-diversity sentiment.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Conservatives are angry that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been, for at least a decade, trying to expand the diversity of its workforce, and they’re blaming gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
A terrifying video of a door blowing off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 went viral earlier this month. No one died, but the Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to return to the airport and make an emergency landing. Some loose bolts around doors were found when other planes of the same type were later inspected.
She didn’t hesitate to launch homophobic attacks on the out Transportation Secretary and his husband, but now that she wants some of that cash for her district, she’s trying to play nice.
“The FAA is the latest victim of the radical [diversity, equity, and inclusion] agenda,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on social media this week. “Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with ‘severe intellectual disabilities.’ How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being hired based on DEI rather than qualifications for the position?”
DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” workplace policies that seek to hire and support candidates from diverse backgrounds. Right-wingers have increasingly targeted these policies as a “woke” form of “identity politics” while ignoring the workplace disparities that they seek to address.
The FAA is the latest victim of the radical DEI agenda.
Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with 'severe intellectual disabilities.'
How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being…
Boebert was likely referring to a story that spread like wildfire on conservative media. The conservative New York Post ran a story about the FAA policy – which the Post stressed is “overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation” – with the headline, “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”
The story noted that the FAA has a diversity statement on its site that says it recruits people with disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
X CEO Elon Musk shared the Post’s story and wrote: “Just had a conversation with some smart people could not believe this is happening.” He also shared a post that claimed that Black airline employees lower the “average IQ of US Air Force pilots.”
The problem with their explanation? The policy has been on the FAA since at least 2013, during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration didn’t do anything to remove it. The Post’s story didn’t mention the fact that the policy is from 2013 and instead just noted that the FAA’s website was updated in 2022, which isn’t a relevant fact to the story but may have been intended to imply that the policy was put in place during Buttigieg’s tenure.
“The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions,” the FAA said in a statement. The FAA has 45,000 employees. “Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that, of course, will vary by position.”
Snopes noted that the rightwing “media coverage provided no evidence linking any DEI initiative with the Alaska Airlines incident” and that the investigation into the Alaska Airlines flight is still ongoing.
But disabled and Black people aren’t the only group that conservatives are blaming for the incident. Hate influencer and former realtor Chaya Raichik – whose Libs of TikTok account has been massively influential in spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and has led to hospitals getting bomb threats and queer and trans teachers getting death threats – decided it was women’s fault.
That’s because Southwest Airlines made an innocuous post about an all-women flight crew shortly after the Alaska Airlines incident.
“All female flight crew? Go off, queens!” the Southwest Airlines’s X post read. The post included a picture of six smiling women in a plane.
“They’re openly mocking us,” Raichik wrote, sharing the post. “They know what they’re doing.” The implication was that supporting women in the workplace was somehow inappropriate following the incident in the Alaska Airlines flight.
Her post was viewed around 300,000 times and widely shared on the platform. Southwest later deleted their post celebrating the women.
Later in the week, Raichik raged at United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby doing drag at a Halloween party in 2011. Kirby is married to a woman and has seven children with her, but being a stereotypically masculine, straight, cisgender white man wasn’t enough to protect him from the right’s grievances about diversity in the workforce.
“This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into United,” Raichik wrote. “This video should tell you everything you need to know.”
This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of @united. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into @united.
Anti-trans activist and fifth-place swimmer Riley Gaines responded to the video, writing, “It’s time to bring back shame.” She also wrote that people “fly United at your own risk,” not explaining exactly how she connected the video to flight safety.
Cisgender, heterosexual white men on the right have donned drag in the past without controversy, including Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) boyfriend, rightwing media personality Brian Glenn. Greene, who has protested drag queen shows in the past, laughed off claims that there was anything inappropriate about her boyfriend doing drag because it happened “years ago.” The same grace, though, apparently doesn’t apply to CEOs of airlines that support diversity in the workplace.
Buttigieg, for his part, assured travelers that he has confidence in the FAA’s ability to keep flights safe, noting that they grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets for further inspection following the Alaska Airlines incident. He explained that FAA staff is putting in extra hours to get to the root of the problem.
“I have confidence in any aircraft cleared by the FAA,” he told reporters last week. “The FAA’s doing a great job and [FAA Administrator] Mike Whitaker’s doing a great job.”
He added that, as a father, the images of the plane with the door blown out affected him.
“Anybody looking at those pictures has to be thinking about what you’d do in that situation,” he said, explaining that he was just on a flight with one of his children. “That is what’s on our mind.”
I am an older gay guy in a long-term wonderful relationship. My spouse and I are in our 36th year together. I love politics and news. I enjoy civil discussions and have no taboo subjects. My pronouns are he / him / his and my email is Scottiestoybox@gmail.com
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7 thoughts on “Lauren Boebert & other conservatives rage at Pete Buttigieg over FAA policy promoting diversity”
Boebert lost the right to comment about anything when she made that blasphemous statement about Christ carrying a gun.
She is not fit to hold public office.
Hello Roger. I agree. I often say that anyone holding public office should be someone that you can point at to your child and say that is someone to admire, be like, or is a decent person. If you can not do that, if they can not be that, they shouldn’t be in office. Hugs. Scottie
Hi Scottie.
That is an excellent yardstick. Since politics is an imperfect business, I would add ‘And they are trying to do the impossible,’
There are never simple solutions to any of the issues. Any populist who claims so is either a dunce, liar or snake oil merchant.
I’m going to say something that may seem to be diverging from the subject, but it needs to be said.
People need to be paid a living wage. Some people think airline construction/engineering employees make lots of money, and at one time, they had good paychecks with decent benefits, and sometimes even pensions. It used to be one of those American Dream jobs. That all changed during the 80s, 90s, and still into the 2000s. I know this because I live 30 mi. South of where people make these airplanes; many used to live here. Their very livelihoods have been given the death by a thousand cuts for so many years now, that some of them can get better benefits working at Applebees, as one example of where some work while they’re laid off or on the weekends when they’re not doing mandatory OT for a little more, not time and a half more, than their wages. There is a union, but it’s been decimated over the years. If people want airplanes to be safe, they need to make sure that the builders and engineers are being paid to make safe airplanes. Otherwise, same as it always is, we get what we pay for.
Same for FAA employees. Excellent work has has everything to do with doing excellent work for decent pay, not with the presence or lack of diversity policies. I’m in favor of diversity policies and diverse work forces; as we know, quality was excellent when women of all nationalities were building airplanes while men were off defeating fascism.
Well said Ali. 100% correct. That is the truth, and as you say has been going on for 40 years. It has been a systematic attack on the workers / working class. It started with Reagan firing unionized workers, companies slashing or stopping retirement benefits like the defined benefit plans. Those retirement packages are what kept my parents generation comfortable or very well off in retirement, every working person has some type of retirement savings. Now no one has retirement other than social security. Which republicans are trying to destroy. I can not figure out why, but they want to. 401 worker plans were designed to be a rip-off to workers, with workers every year getting too poor to contribute so employers were getting away doing nothing. The health company Ron and I used to provide anyone who had been there for 20 years lifelong health benefits. That went away even before Ron was retired. He had like 16 or 17 years in and was working for that, and bang, they just stopped it. So it is all profit and greed. In the US profit is king, people are worth only what profit they can raise for their employer. Hugs. Scottie
Yup, that’s exactly correct. And before it’s inferred that people do substandard work because they’re unhappy with their pay/benefits, I’ll add that most working people are fulfilling the duties of more than one position. Obviously that’s a recipe for omissions and mistakes, especially if someone thinks someone else has done a task, but it turns out no one did. Like inspecting door bolts on a passenger airliner.
HI Ali. The goal of managment is to load as much work on a person as they possibly can do, until things start not getting done or done so badly the system will fail. At that point management will back off for a bit before trying again. Owners / managers always try to get a person to do one more task, do the work of one more pereson. If the worker makes it work then the manager / owner feels justifed and so asks for even more. They will keep asking until they get told no. One way or the other. Hugs. Scottie
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Scottie's Playtime 
Boebert lost the right to comment about anything when she made that blasphemous statement about Christ carrying a gun.
She is not fit to hold public office.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Hello Roger. I agree. I often say that anyone holding public office should be someone that you can point at to your child and say that is someone to admire, be like, or is a decent person. If you can not do that, if they can not be that, they shouldn’t be in office. Hugs. Scottie
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Scottie.
That is an excellent yardstick. Since politics is an imperfect business, I would add ‘And they are trying to do the impossible,’
There are never simple solutions to any of the issues. Any populist who claims so is either a dunce, liar or snake oil merchant.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m going to say something that may seem to be diverging from the subject, but it needs to be said.
People need to be paid a living wage. Some people think airline construction/engineering employees make lots of money, and at one time, they had good paychecks with decent benefits, and sometimes even pensions. It used to be one of those American Dream jobs. That all changed during the 80s, 90s, and still into the 2000s. I know this because I live 30 mi. South of where people make these airplanes; many used to live here. Their very livelihoods have been given the death by a thousand cuts for so many years now, that some of them can get better benefits working at Applebees, as one example of where some work while they’re laid off or on the weekends when they’re not doing mandatory OT for a little more, not time and a half more, than their wages. There is a union, but it’s been decimated over the years. If people want airplanes to be safe, they need to make sure that the builders and engineers are being paid to make safe airplanes. Otherwise, same as it always is, we get what we pay for.
Same for FAA employees. Excellent work has has everything to do with doing excellent work for decent pay, not with the presence or lack of diversity policies. I’m in favor of diversity policies and diverse work forces; as we know, quality was excellent when women of all nationalities were building airplanes while men were off defeating fascism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well said Ali. 100% correct. That is the truth, and as you say has been going on for 40 years. It has been a systematic attack on the workers / working class. It started with Reagan firing unionized workers, companies slashing or stopping retirement benefits like the defined benefit plans. Those retirement packages are what kept my parents generation comfortable or very well off in retirement, every working person has some type of retirement savings. Now no one has retirement other than social security. Which republicans are trying to destroy. I can not figure out why, but they want to. 401 worker plans were designed to be a rip-off to workers, with workers every year getting too poor to contribute so employers were getting away doing nothing. The health company Ron and I used to provide anyone who had been there for 20 years lifelong health benefits. That went away even before Ron was retired. He had like 16 or 17 years in and was working for that, and bang, they just stopped it. So it is all profit and greed. In the US profit is king, people are worth only what profit they can raise for their employer. Hugs. Scottie
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yup, that’s exactly correct. And before it’s inferred that people do substandard work because they’re unhappy with their pay/benefits, I’ll add that most working people are fulfilling the duties of more than one position. Obviously that’s a recipe for omissions and mistakes, especially if someone thinks someone else has done a task, but it turns out no one did. Like inspecting door bolts on a passenger airliner.
LikeLiked by 1 person
HI Ali. The goal of managment is to load as much work on a person as they possibly can do, until things start not getting done or done so badly the system will fail. At that point management will back off for a bit before trying again. Owners / managers always try to get a person to do one more task, do the work of one more pereson. If the worker makes it work then the manager / owner feels justifed and so asks for even more. They will keep asking until they get told no. One way or the other. Hugs. Scottie
LikeLiked by 1 person