Nah, the Trump Deranged aren’t losing their frickin’ minds…
That’s the most recent cartoon from Ann Telnaes, that witty, subtle, objective and non-partisan political cartoonist who quit the Washington Post who didn’t think her juvenile submission was worth publishing. So now she’s operates from her substack, issuing brilliant art like that. Incredibly, one of my oldest and most accomplished friends posted that crap—it’s the equivilent of a schoolboy drawing of the unpopular kid with blacked out teeth and horns—with approval on his Facebook page, where his decision was roundly praised as he revealed that he subscribed to her visual hate-fests. This is the equivalent of someone announcing that he has decided to subscribe to the “Turd of the Week” service. Another equally rational, intelligent Facebook friend until he went bonkers posted a long, irrelevant quote from the Nuremberg trials about the nature of fascism, and everyone metaphorically nodded and applauded as if it has anything to do with current events.
These people are poised on the brink of literal insanity, which includes entering a state of mind where you see a doorknob and think it’s a Triceratops. So many of their posts are counter-factual that it is emotionally painful for me not to respond with the easy rebuttal, easy in the sense that reality is a complete rebuttal. But I know doing so will 1) be futile, 2) cause a cognitive dissonance crisis with old friends and relatives deciding I have been possessed by Satan and 3) end up making me feel worse than I already do.
Just now, I saw a post where another freind linked with approval to Jennifer Rubin’s website and wrote, “Mainstream Media sold out years ago. They are a large part of why we are in this current disaster. [This is ]where I’m getting my news now.” Being convinced that the mainstream media has been backing Donald Trump is in the same category as believing a Labrador Retriever is telling you to shoot people in their cars. Admitting that one pays attention to Jen Rubin is like proclaiming “I am Marie of Romania!” What has happened to these people?
The trigger yesterday seems to have been President Trump’s idiotic speculation that a cause of the Reagan National Airport collision may have been DEI hiring policies. Immediately politicizing a tragedy has now become a disgusting habit on both sides of the political divide, but this one was particularly odious as it was far too close to saying, “I bet the air traffic controller responsible was colored.” Naturally, much of that mainstream media that always supports Trump immediately made that the main focus of its coverage yesterday, with talking heads deciding their duty as journalists was to condemn and rebut the President’s implication.
They would have been wise to let Trump’s bad taste speak for itself. Yesterday emerging details made it appear likely that control tower error was a factor in the collision. What is the Trump-Deranged media going to do if the supervisor responsible for assigning only one controller to what is usually a two-controller job is “of color,” female or “differently abled”? What if the controller in question is? What if they both are? Will the mainstream media try yo cover it up? In terms of proving or disproving the wisdom of DEI policies (that is, good discrimination), a single incident is statistically useless, but now the Axis’s now-reflex tendency to make every dumb thing Trump says the News of the Day is locked an loaded to backfire again.
And that will drive more once rational Americans to the edge of madness.
Ethics Alarms 
If a minority hire is responsible for the incident, this story will no longer be number one in the news cycle. It will simply be old news that no one wants to hear about anymore. Meanwhile, the media has had liberal opportunity to take its potshots at the President.
I don’t know what to tell you about your friends as a whole. I have the same problem myself. They are too obtuse to admit that their side bears any responsibility, has made any mistakes or can make any arguments that won’t fit on a pithy meme wrongly attributed to Morgan Freeman or Willy Wonka as played by Gene Wilder.
I will repeat my statement from yesterday that I thought that Trump’s comments about DEI were inappropriate. However, I don’t think statistical analysis would prove anything either. Only a realistic evaluation of each actors qualifications and the alternate candidates qualifications can assess the validity of the claim. There will never be enough accidents (hopefully) to get a statistically significant result. There is the problem with having a control group as well.
What I heard from Trump was his condemnation of Biden’s policy to employ people with various mental disabilities, dwarfism, or other non racial characteristics in high risk jobs. It was a bad decision at a time when he needed to comfort those associated with the victims. Responsibility will come later.
It is unfortunate that he learned that politicizing crisis is SOP in DC.
The current DEI aspect of the disaster seems to be focusing on the pilot of the helicopter who was on a check ride. It’s way too early to tell, of course, but I don’t think the air traffic controller did anything outside of SOP and the helicopter was a hundred feet too high (and perhaps off course, i.e., out over the Potomac rather than over its eastern bank). The plane had been reassigned to the shorter runway, which was SOP.
My question is why was the Army doing a check flight in controlled airspace at night. Was there a risk vs. reward analysis done? Don’t they have simulators?
Not shown on the framing of the cartoon is the Democrats responsible for cutting off her arm still holding her blindfold, who just had their hatchet taken. A paper bag now sits on Justice’s head.
DEI’s involvement in ATC is a given–the diversity initiatives influencing that workforce are well documented. Linking the correlation to actual causation is a exercise in futile finger pointing and splitting hairs. We didn’t need a disaster to know it’s wrong.
My concern about the helicopter pilot is that the crash was intentional. This feels like the FedEx pilot who took down his fellow pilots, or the last flight of Craig D. Button.
(I had the same horrible thought.)
Ugh.
Me, too. It’s hard not to think those things when there are people out there ready and willing to do them.
We need to be careful with speculations here. Whenever an airline accident happens pilots (retired and active) will post YouTube videos with their analysis. These videos are way more insightful than the regular news media.
A number of things that emerge from the fog are:
It’s understandable to have that reaction given the last four years, but basic accidents and human error still happen.
Remember that the helicopter was ascending (meaning its nose and windscreen were facing downwards because of how helicopters gain altitude), the American Airlines jet was descending, and the Blackhawk was coming into the jet’s path from the side where its lights would have been difficult to see. There is also absolutely no radio report of conflict in the Blackhawk’s cockpit, as one would assume would happen should the pilot be deliberately taking his fellow crew with him on a suicide mission. And even if we assume somehow all three personnel aboard the Blackhawk were willing kamikazes, for whatever reason, there’s none of the last-minute course correction that would be required in that kind of a deliberately targeted flight — the videos and radar tracks show the aircraft flying straight into one another’s paths.
It can rightly be noted that the loss of trust which makes suspicions like this even briefly plausible is problem enough in itself. But we don’t need to worsen that loss of trust by suggesting that this particular incident justifies it, I think.
One seemingly calm, sensible, well-informed speculation about the helocopter pilot: https://x.com/tshugart3/status/1884944144704954681
Now that we know that there appeared to be a staffing shortage, the DEI impact issue may not be due to an unqualified DEI hire making a mistake but the policy itself to select applicants based on non-merit based attributes to promote diversity.
FAA embroiled in lawsuit alleging it turned away 1,000 applicants based on race
If the FAA decided that it must diversify its workforce but could not recruit a sufficient number of minority applicants for a fixed number of open positions, and chose not to fill them until they had sufficient numbers of qualified applicants that met the diversity goals, then DEI as a policy could be considered a proximate cause of the accident as it impacted the staffing at DCA.
Newsweek decided that it was going to blame Trump for his hiring freeze of January 20, 2025 for the lack of personnel on duty. This is despite the fact that an earlier article discusses the lawsuit referenced in the above link.
Still, I would have preferred that Trump had waited to bring up DEI.
Steve Sailer has an enlightening piece about how the FAA’s DEI policies led to shortages of air traffic controllers. https://www.stevesailer.net/p/die-in-the-sky
Essentially, as Chris speculates, they rejected white men who applied to the program that trained air traffic controllers but didn’t pass enough DEI candidates to fill the ranks. But the DEI candidates who did pass the course were competent.
Sailer’s article is behind a paywall, but here are some excerpts:
“White House officials decided in 2013 to purge the hiring list of over 1,000 graduates of the air traffic control course at colleges like Arizona State who had also passed the cognitive exam for hiring. Instead, it made air traffic control job-seekers start over with a new ‘biographical’ test to ‘add diversity to the workforce.’”
***
“The Obama administration’s new biographical test was blatantly rigged to boost blacks and hurt whites by leaning into anti-black stereotypes. From the lawsuit against the FAA filed by the Mountain States Legal Foundation:
“…a candidate could be awarded 15 points, the highest possible for any question, if they indicated that their lowest grades in high school were in science…. In contrast, an applicant was awarded only 2 points if they had a pilot’s certificate and no points were awarded for having a Control Tower Operator rating or having Instrument Flight Rules experience…. In addition, one question on the Biographical Questionnaire awarded an applicant 10 points, the most available for that question, if the applicant answered s/he had not been employed in the prior three years. Another question awarded 4 or 8 points if the applicant had been unemployed five or more months in the prior three years. Statistics from the Department of Labor indicate that African Americans had the highest unemployment rate in 2010–2014.“
***
“This is an example of a traditional problem with affirmative action programs: somewhere up the ladder, the folks in charge say: No, we have to draw the line here. For example, the law profession has long had affirmative action for getting into law school but not for passing the bar exam. Similarly, it has affirmative action for getting hired to an entry-level associate position, but typically not for making partner. This means that a lower percentage of people chosen under affirmative action make the grade at the higher, more meritocratic level, which can lead to shortages.
“So, the Obama Administration threw out a lot of white air traffic control job applicants for the training program and hired more blacks. But, prudently, it didn’t make it easier to pass the training program. Not even second term Obama Administration true believers want to die in a plane crash. So, the second order effect of lowering the initial standard but not final standard was fewer air traffic controllers: quality stayed up but quantity went down.”
IF the ATCer at the helm was non-white/non-male, that alone would not necessarily mean that DEI hiring was to blame. Just consider — it IS possible that someone who is not white and not male MIGHT be qualified for any job where DEI was a factor in hiring decisions. One has to admit that this IS in the realm of possibilities.
Also, IMNSHO, DEI isn’t the problem. Quotas are the problem. Applying a quota system to basically ANYthing is stupid and will lead to problems. Having goals is one thing, but quotas are evil.
When my late husband was trying to hire singers for his production of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the grants he had accepted specified DEI if possible. He did his best to hire DEI singers, but he was not going to tank his production with unqualified people.
Requiring a quota of DEI hires will not solve racism, sexism, or any other bigotry. But, this begs the question of whether or not the average capitalist HR department, left to its own devices, would act like my husband did or just fall into unfair hiring practices. Jack knows what I would answer on this point. But I still don’t believe in quotas. They are a cheat on effective fair hiring. AND on solving the underlying problems of racism, sexism, and all the other bigotries running rampant right now.
In theory, I do not object to recruiting personnel from areas populated by under represented groups. That is the best avenue for equal opportunity. I would not bet that there are no qualified persons in any particular group but distribution of ability or preference of career path cannot be assumed to be aligned with demographic distribution. If it were the case we should see more doctors with Anglo Saxon names.
Quotas are more than wrong they are illegal. The problem with DEI is not that it seeks to include underrepresented groups the problem is in its execution whereby practitioners vilify one demographic group to rationalize ithe existence of DEI.
DEI’s problem is in its execution which seems to demand quotas while blaming others for choices others have made for themselves long ago and now want to use oppression as an excuse for their own decisions.