Wednesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson opened his show questioning the drive for so-called equity by elite institutions in the United States.
Carlson pointed to the lack of a definition of “equity” but also noted how it justifies policies that could be perceived as “racism.”
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: You know what people care about most by what’s at the top of their to-do list, and on his very first day in office, Joe Biden signed something called an Executive Order on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities. You ought to go read it. Go ahead and see if you can figure out what it means.
The document uses the term “equity” a total of 21 times and yet, revealingly never defines the word. So what is equity? Joe Biden never tells us, never even hints. He sort of proclaims that America will be getting, quote, “an ambitious whole of government equity agenda.”
So whatever it is, equity is ambitious, and it will be everywhere, but we’re not allowed to know what it is. That’s odd.
For three months, we’ve been trying to guess: what is this equity that is now our country’s main reason for existing? We know it’s not the same as equality or even closely related. In the name of equity, for example, the Biden administration supports open discrimination against Asian college applicants. They’re Asian, therefore they can’t get into school. It is that simple.
We used to call that kind of behavior, racism. We had laws against it. Now, we call it equity, and we have laws demanding it. It turns out that racism and equity are pretty much the same thing. Who knew?
Here’s the latest illustration of the principle and it comes not from the Biden administration, but from United Airlines. United used to be a conventional commercial air carrier. It flew airplanes from place to place, most of the time uneventfully. That was the old United Airlines.
The new United is very different. It’s a combination of a hyper-aggressive corporate H.R. Department and a left-wing Political Action Committee. The new United Airlines is big on moral pronouncements and mandatory social engineering. United has embraced equity.
Here is its latest directive spelled out yesterday on Twitter, quote: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people onboard our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” End quote.
United Airlines is mandating affirmative action quotas in its flight schools and that’s a big change for the country. When Coca-Cola embraces some equity scheme, you’ll understand why they’re doing it. They’re hoping that by hiring more black executives, no one will ask just how many black Americans have gotten diabetes from drinking Coke. For Coca-Cola, equity is a purely defensive PR move, and it makes sense.
But airlines are different. An airline pilot transports hundreds of people at a time in a thin-walled metal tube going nearly 600 miles an hour 35,000 feet off the ground. Flying a commercial airliner is dangerous. Like performing heart surgery, no matter how many times you’ve done it, it is inherently high stakes. People die if you screw up.
In the airline business, as in Medicine, not killing people is all that matters.
So how will racial and gender quotas make United Airlines safer? That’s the only question that matters. The company CEO went on CBS News recently to explain.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Only 7% of United Airlines pilots are women. One of the highest%ages in the industry, and 13% of its pilots are people of color.
SCOTT KIRBY, CEO, UNITED AIRLINES: They simply don’t have the access or the opportunity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): In an exclusive interview with CBS News, United CEO, Scott Kirby, is announcing a new effort to bring balance to the flight deck.
KIRBY: We are excited at United to be announcing the United Aviator Academy to address the structural issues with the makeup of our pilots.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So only 7% of United Airlines pilots are female, fretted CBS, only 13% aren’t white. Okay. But why exactly should we care about those numbers?
An airline pilot’s job is to land the plane safely. Everything else is irrelevant. If a hundred% of United Airlines pilots were black women or Malaysian Muslims, or for that matter, white men from Alabama, not a single sane person would complain about it as long as the airplanes didn’t crash. Safety is all that matters.
But you’ll notice the CEO of United didn’t mention safety. Safety is no longer that airlines’ top concern, identity politics is.
Now, United will dispute that characterization, of course. In a statement to the show two hours ago, they already have disputed it. “United Airlines will continue to uphold its high standards,” they told us, but they’re lying. We know they’re lying and you know it, too, because in the airline business, there is only one standard that matters and it is not race and it is not gender, it is competence.
The way people look is totally irrelevant. How they perform is all you should care about.
Once you forget that, airplanes tend to crash. Everyone knows that’s true, very much, including the people who run this country. Many of them don’t fly United, they don’t fly commercial at all. They use NetJets, the largest private airline in the world.
Has NetJets embraced equity or hiring quotas? Of course. Check out the NetJets’ website, if you have a minute, and they’ll tell you exactly what they’re looking for in the airline pilots they hire. Here’s the first line: “We seek individuals who demonstrate an unwavering dedication to safety.” That’s the first requirement on their list. We couldn’t find any mention of race or gender and that should not surprise you. Because once again, race and gender are literally irrelevant to who flies your airplane.
Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry and the rest of our private jet dependent ruling class know that perfectly well. They will not be demanding quotas at NetJets anytime soon. Their families fly on NetJets airplanes.
So if hiring on the basis of irrelevant criteria, will overtime get people killed, and it will, why are they demanding it? Because they don’t care. They are ideologues. They are suffering from an incurable brain disease called wokeness. Reality means nothing to them, it’s merely an impediment to their plans.
Watch the new head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, ironically, a black supremacist called Kristen Clarke admit as much. She told us a few years ago, equity is more important than safety.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Do you think that airlines should apply the same diversity rules you’re calling for here? That they shouldn’t take the people who score the highest on the pilot tests, but that they should hire also on appearance: the way people look?
KRISTEN CLARKE, AMERICAN ATTORNEY: Every workplace, whether you’re talking about airlines or Federal agencies …
CARLSON: Oh, so pilots to heart surgeons, too?
CLARKE: … should hire the best but should place a premium on diversity.
CARLSON: But which is more important?
CLARKE: And Secretary Zinke’s —
CARLSON: The way that you look or what you do? What you’re capable of doing? So like when you’re flying the plane, how important is it what you look like? Your appearance?
CLARKE: Incredibly important, and it’s also important …
CARLSON: Appearance is incredibly important.
CLARKE: … that we have. It is also important that we place a premium on diversity.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What you look like is an essential quality. It’s incredibly important in an airline pilot.
What are we watching here exactly? Well, it is deluded, but it’s also pretty clearly a racial attack. Kristen Clarke is saying, the CEO of United Airlines is saying that we need to replace the pilots currently flying airplanes because they’re the wrong skin color.
Only diseased people think like this. Imagine if we applied the same standard to other professions. How about professional sports? African- American men account for roughly six% of the American population, and yet about 75% of the players in the National Basketball League are black men. That doesn’t sound like equity. It sounds like what Kristen Clarke refers to as disproportionate representation.
So what if to remedy that lack of equity, the NBA announced tomorrow that going forward, at least half of its players, 50% had to be white, Asian, Hispanic or female to better represent the fans in the stands? How would we respond to that? We would understand immediately, and we would say so that that is a racist policy.
No one even alleged that NBA players are doing a bad job. We had all assumed correctly, as we do with airline pilots, that they were hired in the first place because they were the best that company could find.
But nevertheless, they had to be replaced because they were the wrong race and gender. It’s sick. You think it couldn’t happen? Why wouldn’t it happen?
By the logic of identity politics, it has to happen.
NBA players make a whole lot more than airline pilots. At some point, someone is going to notice that. And that’s the whole problem with this way of thinking, this diseased way of thinking.
You do not want to live in a completely racialized country, where a person’s genetics are the most important thing about them, where you will reduce to your DNA, dehumanized, but that’s exactly the society they’re creating.
And what’s the result of what they’re doing? Every action provokes a reaction. That’s the most basic principle in Physics. When you attack people for qualities they can’t control, over time, you will make them radical. That is guaranteed.
You’ve got to wonder if it’s ever occurred to the morons pushing this equity garbage that everyone on Earth has an identity. If you make identity politics mandatory, and they have, how long until you get white identity politics? Ever consider that, you reckless fools? How long before there is no national identity at all in this country? Only warring tribes fighting each other for the spoils.
Does anyone want to raise children in a society like that? Only the racist want that. But that’s exactly where they’re pushing us and at high speed.
A couple of years ago, we reported the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards in order to bring equity to air traffic control. As part of that initiative, the FAA began administering something called a biographical questionnaire to applicants. This is significant for all the people tempted to believe United or the U.S. Military when they say that by bringing equity to the process, they’re not lowering standards. They are by definition.
Candidates were asked in the case of the FAA, whether they got mostly A’s in high school, if they said they did, yes, they got five points for A’s. Candidates were also asked if they had been unemployed for the past three years, and if they answered yes to that question, they got 10 points. They get double the points for three years of unemployment, as they did for getting straight A’s.
How does that make us safer? That’s a rhetorical question, obviously. It divides and endangers us. But that’s equity.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor