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.”
Thanks again to Ten Bears for the link. If you ever run out of news and informative stuff to dive into, then seriously check out Ten Bears posts. He puts a ton of links on a page, enough to last a day of reading if you are interested in them all. https://homelessonthehighdesert.com/2024/01/19/frigsday-finally/
When the right attacked people supporting the Palestinians who had used the phrase from the river to the sea, claiming it was a saying to wipe out all Israelis. They got people fired over it. However when Netanyahu (Bibi) demands it for Israel which means genocide of the Palestinians, the right is quite fine with it. See it was not the phrase nor what it stands for that bothered the right, it was that some people defend the poor down trodden people being abused around the world. The right doesn’t like the left and they hate their supported right wing leaders / countries justly attacked, so they lash out to destroy any complaints against their right wing abuse and tyranny. Hugs. Scottie
The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports on the press conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He vowed to continue the war on Gaza and vowed to attack Iran. “Who says we won’t attack Iran? We will attack it.”
At one point Netanyahu insisted that in any foreseen arrangement for the future, “Israel must control all the lands west of the Jordan.”
(It is worth noting that such a massive annexation of Palestinian territory would expand Israel from the river to the sea, and would permanently destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state.
When supporters of Palestinian rights use this phrase, Zionists allege that it is murderous toward Israelis. They are wrong — it is a demand for political rights for Palestinians. Marc Lamont Hill was actually fired from CNN for using this phrase in a pro-Palestinian speech at the United Nations. The odious Rep. Elise Stefanik got Claudine Gray fired as president of Harvard because she would not categorize the phrase, used in pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, as Antisemitic.
But when Netanyahu says it, we should in fact understand it to be murderous toward Palestinians, since no one in history has killed as many Palestinian civilians as Netanyahu.)
Netanyahu said, “Complete victory requires the return of our hostages to their homes, the disarming of Gaza, and security oversight over what enters Gaza.” He emphasized that “ending the war before achieving our goals will harm the security of Israel for generations.”
He said that his government had passed an enormous military budget that would help the army realize its war aims and achieve victory. He cautioned, “Victory will take more long months, but we are determined to accomplish it.”
He “completely rejected” the repeated assertions by present and former Israeli political officials in television interviews that victory is impossible. Faced with protests over his failure to bring back Israeli hostages, he insisted that it was military pressure that would free them. He said that ending the war would broadcast a message of weakness and it would then be only a matter of time until there was another bloodbath. He was referring to the sickening Hamas attack of October 7, the bulk of whose victims were innocent civilians.
Regarding reports that he had rejected the American suggestion of establishing a Palestinian state, the embattled prime minister, who is deeply unpopular, attempted to tie his fate to that of the nation, replying, “What the political parties call in Israel ‘the day after’ means for them ‘the day after Netanyahu.’ . . . Whoever speaks of the day after Netanyahu in reality is speaking of the establishment of a Palestinian state via the Palestine Authority. That isn’t the day that follows Netanyahu but is the ‘day after’ for the majority of Israeli citizens.”
He said of US influence in Israel that the Israeli prime minister must be able to say “no” even to the dearest of friends.
Barak Ravid reported this week at Axios that US President Joe Biden is deeply frustrated with Netanyahu’s intransigence and has not spoken with him in nearly a month. Ravid says during that last conversation, Biden was pressing Netanyahu to restore the funding he had cut from the Palestine Authority (the West Bank rival of Hamas). Netanyahu rejected all of Biden’s suggestions for a workaround. Biden allegedly said, “This conversation is over.” And, it has been over ever since.
On Sunday, some 400,000 protesters demonstrated in Washington, DC, against the ongoing war, alleging that Biden is facilitating genocide. Democratic Party leaders such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have expressed anxiety about the impact of Biden losing the Arab and Muslim American votes, which have sometimes been swing votes in Michigan and some other key states.
Netanyahu is on trial for corruption and fears going to jail if he loses his current position. Opinion polling suggests that he and his coalition partners would be crushed at the polls if the government fell and new elections were held now. Some polls show that only 15% of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain at his post once the war on Gaza ends. Many Israelis blame him for the security failures attendant on the October 7 terrorist attack. He in turn has represented himself as the only one who can stand up to pressure for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Ten Bears again has posted a must watch short historical video.I did not know a lot of the information in the video, and it so closely matches what some are trying to do today.I think that might be because the same people now older and wealthy enough to fund this grew up during that time believing in that idea.They couldn’t get it done then, they think they can now. We must not let them, we must stop them as they were stopped then.Hugs. Scottie
Discussing the incredible speech given by academic, activist, and BET host Marc Lamont Hill at Saint Sabina over the recent protest (and subsequent reaction) to Joe Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel AME.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just said the quiet part out loud, in complete rejection of what the Biden administration has been trying to accomplish while at the same time taking all the money & aid the U.S. has been providing.
By my dogs that love gravy … damn, damn, damn, fucking bastards, goddamn swear word swear word. I can not even think of enough vile words to say about this. This is a sickening example of how the Israeli government see the Palestinians, including children. I watched a video this morning of an Israeli government official justifying this mass slaughter and genocide saying they were not causing it, Hamas was. They hit us (why because we were mistreating their people) hurting / killing 1,200 hundred of our so we can kill over 23,000 of them 10,000 of them confirmed children, and force the others to live in worse conditions than abandon animals. Oh, and Israel took over a university / school system in Gaza, used it as their headquarters, “interrogated” Palestinians there, then proudly blew it all up, so no Palestinian could come back and someday be educated there. That is a war crime. All of this is.
13 year old children trying to be the parents of 7 siblings because their parents are dead, with only other refuges to help. They have nothing, and Israel gloats over this. I am angry. Hugs. Scottie
As Israel presses on against Hamas in Gaza, children there are facing growing misery. Richard Engel reports on a 13-year-old who is now raising his seven siblings after his parents were likely killed.
I am way behind in reading and replying to comments. But I am supper glad I saved them for getting to when I could. This comment from Suze is outstanding. I will first post the link she left it on, then her comment. Hugs. Scottie
I have visited Palestine twice….both in the early 2000’s. Kids were on the streets of Ramallah and Raffa everyday selling whatever they could for tourists spare change. I bought street food (falafel) for about ten kids one day…garnered a LOT of interest from Israeli police who seemed to think it was a strange activity. Those kids watched out for me though and led me to some truly wonderful shops where I could easily bargain. I made it a priority to purchase food every day in a Palestinian area to bring back to my hostel or hotel. On my last day in Rafah I was saying goodbye to a few kids and a funeral procession started down the street. One of the kids, a boy of about six, grabbed my hand and pulled me into a shop. I asked if he was okay and he said “missy, you stay off street, men are angry. I keep you safe” That little boy, if he has survived is a man now and I wonder about him every day. I get that Israel is all about their “homeland” but frankly it is the Arabs homeland too and they are treated like fourth class citizens. Apartheid is alive and well in the land.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
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