@realDonald Trump The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn't the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn't the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!! (Geller Report, Jan 31, 2025)Reporters at the press conference were apoplectic after President Donald Trump blamed DEI as a possible cause of the Washington airplane and helicopter collision that took 67 lives.Here’s what he said.He acknowledged that he has no proof that the affirmative action policies that have been pushed so hard during both the Obama and Biden administrations caused the accident, but he claimed that it is only “common sense” that hiring policies that don’t rely on merit — selecting job applicants based on immutable qualities, like skin colour and sexual preference, instead of merit- will inevitably result in accidents and poor performance. Trump pledged to have a full investigation of the accident, where his suspicion that DEI might be involved will be put to the test.Trump’s remarks were met with both incredulity and scorn by many of the reporters covering the press conference. Incredulity that a president would actually question one of the Democratic Party’s sacred cows — namely, the belief that different racial, gender and sexual groups should get preference in hiring over white, heterosexual males, because “white privilege” and “systemic racism” are supposedly responsible for their lack of progress, and scorn because it is almost unheard of that anyone in a position of power would dare to question one of the left’s core beliefs. Anyone doing so is accused of racism, misogyny and transphobia, among other things. But Trump and his supporters have done it before. In social media discussions about the recent Los Angeles fires, where it was revealed that all three top fire officials were black lesbians, both Trump, and his son, Donald Jr. pointed a finger at DEI. This accusation was also met with outrage — leftist journalists insisting that all three just happened to be black and lesbian was just a coincidence.The progressive American media is shocked and outraged by Trump’s accusations. It is almost beyond belief to them that a president would say such things. But it shouldn’t surprise them at all. Trump made ending DEI a major part of his campaign. And when elected he immediately moved to end DEI. And with this latest airplane crash he is promising even more. His vice President, J.D. Vance announced plans to get rid of DEI. Vance vowed that “safety” would be the overriding consideration when hiring airline personnel. In recent interviews Trump has expanded on his remarks that criticized DEI. He explained that under his previous administration he had put in place an order that only the best qualified people would be considered for such vitally important positions as air traffic controller. However, Biden immediately revoked that order upon taking office in 2020. Under Biden’s administration a person’s race, gender, sexual orientation gender would replace merit as the only hiring prerequisite. Under Biden even people “with severe psychological problems” were to get hiring preferences. Trump is removing all of those Biden DEI policies. In Trump’s America it won’t matter what a person looks like, it only matters that the person is the most qualified applicant.The elimination of DEI will be a painful and complicated process in America. In Canada, it hasn’t even started.But it might be useful to take a look at where such a policy came from in the first place. How could we have reached a point where it actually became government policy to sacrifice merit when hiring such vitally important people as air traffic controllers, airplane and helicopter pilots, or top fire officials, and base their hiring instead on their melanin level and sexual practices? Or even more outrageously, hire people with known psychological disabilities to perform jobs where human lives are at risk?Not surprisingly, the origins of DEI are found in the civil rights movement that transformed America in the 1950s and 60s. No one who lived through that era can forget Martin Luther King’s incredibly powerful “I Have A Dream” speech.Even hardened segregationists, like George Wallace, were forced to renounce their racist views.In fact, by the end of the 1960s, the true white supremacists had been relegated to the fringes of society. Racist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, which had enormous political power in the days of segregation, became almost completely irrelevant.The MLK message that skin colour was irrelevant — that people should be judged on the content of their character, and not on the colour of their skin — was almost universally accepted.The civil rights movement was one of the most transformative movements in world history. Affirmative action programs that allowed black people to enter jobs and careers that had been denied to them because of segregation, were a natural result of the MLK movement.But those reasonable efforts to achieve racial justice began to change into something else — particularly after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and the BLM and Antifa protests and riots that followed. The MLK movement was effectively renounced by activists. In its place came a radical, Marxist revolution that had at its aim the tearing down of existing institutions. It blamed “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” for all of modern western civilization’s ills. This was a fringe theory of radical academics, and poorly informed students, but somehow it captured the Biden presidency.Here is how some critics have described DEI in the post-George Floyd days:“The words that the acronym ‘DEI’ represent sound nice, but it is nothing more than affirmative action and racial preferences by a different name, a system that features racial headcounts and arbitrarily assigned roles of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ groups in America,” Ryan P. Williams, president of The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, said in an emailed statement. “If we continue to do democracy this way, it will only end in acrimony, strife, resentment, and American collapse.”And this:“These are not neutral programs to increase demographic diversity; they are political programs that use taxpayer resources to advance a specific partisan orthodoxy,” outspoken DEI critic Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a 2023 New York Times op-ed.So, by the end of the Biden term, what had begun as a perfectly reasonable policy to correct the discrimination and segregation of the Jim Crow years had degenerated into policies that sacrificed safety in the interests of an extreme ideology. These are policies that do inevitably lead to deadly airplane crashes, and massive fires. They are the dangerous, and enervating policies that Trump is trying to end. He is trying to restore the only hiring policy that makes sense — meritocracy.Clearly, incompetence was involved in both the Washington and Los Angeles disasters. Did the Biden DEI “diversity” hiring policies contribute? We don’t know, but those are clearly relevant questions to ask. Hiring preferences that give people with “severe intellectual disabilities and psychiatric problems” as Trump quoted Biden FAA hiring policies is just a recipe for disaster. This is not a criticism of people who have those problems, it is just to note that positions like air traffic controller demand only the most capable people — skin colour etc is irrelevant. Trump has vowed to find out if those insane policies contributed to the disaster. He has also vowed to eliminate all anti-meritocratic policies. In Canada, we have not even started down this road. We live in a country that encourages mediocrity with its hiring programs. We have universities that are trying to “indigenize” or “decolonize”, and policies that actively discourage our brightest and best from succeeding. We reward mediocrity instead of merit. In fact, many of our best and brightest are now leaving to join the new dynamism that is emerging to the south of us. Maybe it’s time for us to ditch the DEI policies that are making us weak. Maybe it’s time that we think about making Canada great again. Brian Giesbrecht is a retired Manitoba judge. He was recently named the 'Western Standard Columnist of the Year.'
