Forget the Art of Scapegoating
Reading Time: 6 minutesConservatives Had to Get Weirdly Racist Even When It Comes to the Airplane Freakout, Huh?, Conservatives are perfecting a totally new strategy for their anti-DEI efforts—inventing problems wholesale., Plane problems: How conservatives are taking advantage
These types of news cycles move fast, but if you take a look into the internet circus right now, you might find conservative discourse dominated by the most out-there question that the ecosphere has homed in on in a long time: Are Black people to blame for America’s aviation safety crisis?
Charlie Kirk, a good barometer for what conservative influencers are focused on at any given moment, told his listeners on Wednesday: ‘I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ ‘ Rob Schneider, a good barometer for what internet-addled conservative adults think, said on Sunday that a United Airlines crew responsible for his flight had been ‘incompetent’ in diagnosing a flap issue. Presumably, at least one person on said flight deck was Black or a woman or looked gay to Schneider, because Schneider blamed ‘diversity’ in hiring for the incident. In the letter he posted to United’s CEO, Schneider wrote that once United’s board of directors fired him, he could ‘get back to your true passion, your Drag Queen performances.’ The fixation, in other words, is not limited to those who actually fly the planes. Conservative critics are obsessed with trawling the identities of anyone in any position of power, or even employment, in the airline industry right now. A benign Southwest Airlines tweet about an all-female flight crew, attendants and all, prompted a conservative harassment beacon to post, ‘They’re openly mocking us. They know what they’re doing.’
At first glance, all of this amounts to a car wash running as intended. Conservative media needs to cycle through different artifacts of cultural grievance to keep business booming. Today it’s the airline industry paying lip service and even instituting some recruiting changes to increase the pool of candidates who are not white men. Tomorrow it could be immigrants infecting the country with a drug problem. The next day it could be a social studies teacher trying to turn children into queens. Par for the course, right?
Not exactly. What is happening with the conservative freakout over diversity in aviation is different from the normal outrage cycle in an echo chamber. Conservative commentators, politicians, and the followers who take cues from them have a long-established pattern of how they do business. The first step is what happens: Crime goes up, maybe, or at least a spate of high-profile crimes gets a lot of attention. Conservatives then funnel that into racist resentment, maybe with loosely coded language, or maybe without even needing that. Or the national deficit exists, and Republican political campaigns blame it on the ‘welfare state,’ fully aware that their voters think that means ‘Black people.’ Or a large number of Americans succumb to drug addiction and overdoses, and conservatives make it into a rallying cry about the danger of immigrants, as if they’re the ones introducing heroin into our communities. They’re always deploying barely disguised racism to ensure anger, right?
The new conservative outrage machine is different because it skips a step. It used to be that first, something had to happen. Sure, instigators might exaggerate about that thing. They might spin it to sound like more than it was. But something happened somewhere, and the race to pin it on a group they didn’t like could commence. In 2024 nothing even has to happen. The current punching bag of diversity in the airline industry shows how the conservative internet-industrial complex has shifted. The apparatus is no longer limited to drumming up causes for real-world situations. It can now merely invent the problems themselves. And this burst of creativity is useful to the conservative movement against all kinds of adversaries, not just Black airline pilots.
Because here are the current facts: There is no ongoing crisis in American aviation safety. U.S. commercial planes have gotten into exactly three fatal accidents since 2009, making flying by far the safest way to get around the country. Flying sucks, but we are extremely safe when we do it, at least if we can tolerate people sneezing near us and reclining dangerously far into our laps. (As a matter of fact, I am working on this story from the comfort of an American Airlines economy seat. I have not yet gotten a look at my pilot but am remaining calm.) The inability of Boeing and Alaska Airlines to keep a door from flying off one of their planes midflight was not a great tribute to the Wright brothers’ move to put motor vehicles in the sky, but it does not make an industrywide crisis any more than a bad part on a Honda spells doom for car safety.
Is everything plane-wise totally hunky-dory? Not quite. Boeing, one of two companies that make the planes we fly on, has been derelict in its quality control. Air traffic controllers have presided over a series of way-too-close dustups on runways the past few years, and Federal Aviation Administration appointees made the case in November for ‘urgent action’ to staff up and modernize technology. But staffing shortages leading to exhausted air traffic controllers aren’t a case against building diverse hiring pools. These shortages are in fact an excellent argument in favor of cultivating those candidates, as the FAA clearly needs to find more people who might be good air traffic controllers and be willing to stay in these positions. Then maybe they’d be staffed enough that fewer of them would get tired on the job, and fewer planes would almost run into each other. In the same vein, United Airlines’ efforts to find more diverse candidates to fly planes are a sensible way to unearth additional talented pilots who might not have found their way to a cockpit in another era. Every pilot an airline hires has to pass the same certification checks. Even if they didn’t, and even if United’s leadership were all woke liberals seeking to establish the left’s dominion over the skies, the incentives wouldn’t line up. A single plane crash would cost a major carrier much, much more money than any of them have ever dreamt about spending on a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative.
Besides, conservatives are wrong to feel not only that any pilot who is not a straight white man has made planes less safe, but also that the airlines have made flying less safe at all. They’ve conjured not just a group to blame but a thing to blame them for doing. And this playbook has become in vogue on a host of issues.
The conservative panic over trans athletes in amateur sports is a sad example. Right-wing talking heads and legislators have urged outright bans of trans women and girls in female sports, despite scant evidence that such bans are necessary to ensure competitive fairness. But more than that, they’ve drastically overstated the extent to which trans girls are competing in girls’ sports at all, much less that they are lapping the field because of their supposed far-superior masculine strength. So much of the conversation conservatives have pushed around this issue centers on literally one Ivy League swimmer who went on a dominant run at the end of one season in 2022. When Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, vetoed a bill to curtail trans participation in 2022, he pointed out some exhausting numbers: 75,000 high school kids were playing school sports in Utah. Four were trans. Only one was a trans girl playing girls’ sports.
In other words, the ‘problem’ of boys declaring themselves trans so they could sign up for the girls’ swim team the next day and inexorably corrupt the competition was entirely made up. It was not happening in large enough quantities to constitute even the tiniest local trend anywhere in the country, much less a national threat to the sanctity of girls’ sports. There’s no indication it was happening at all, anywhere, ever. The uproar remains a panic over a problem that has not materialized, much the same way that Black airline workers have not ushered in a dangerous new world of aviation anarchy.
This sort of creative license is useful in other contexts, some of which seem more absurd on their face than others. (For example, that Jan. 6 wasn’t just not an insurrection attempt but was, in fact, a Democratic false flag operation. A setup from the start! Another false problem.) In other contexts, conservatives have been direct about the plan to create something from nothing or at least from something unrelated: Political shit-stirrer Chris Rufo was bold enough to take a victory lap in Politico after conservative media, politicians, and activists teamed up to paint Harvard’s president first as antisemitic (dubiously), then realized they could also peg her as a plagiarist (legitimately, though they don’t hold their own to the same standards).
Naturally, that story is connected to the airline story in that the people who centered it in the public discourse are the types to find inspiration in the fight against ‘DEI.’ Conservatives have had a very easy time ginning up failures that don’t exist, conflating tiny problems with large ones, and generally doing whatever they have to do to rally their troops. When there’s an opportunity to put a group of people conservatives don’t like in its place, this cohort’s power to tell a good story—any story—takes flight.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/01/planes-pilots-unnerving-conservative-trend.html
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG