DEI is on the retreat. Efforts to force so-called “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” have long been a staple on far-left college campuses, “positive discrimination” to rectify some kind of imbalance according to race, sexual orientation, or another favored class. It’s also rampaged through Democrat-run governments. The Los Angeles Fire Department has long made diversity its No. 1 focus – instead of, well, fighting fires – and we’ve all seen how that’s worked out for them.
In recent years, under threat from pressure on social media, corporate America has followed suit – prioritizing identifiers rather than qualifiers. But now company after company is ditching DEI efforts, or at least scaling them back. This is what happens to trends that once-fashionable, become legally actionable.
Scaling back all this “progressiveness” feels like progress. So then why is a DEI acolyte in contention to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s Federal Aviation Administration?
Starting in December, Alex Wilcox’s name has been circulated as a possible leader of the FAA, which oversees safety regulation standards for civilian air travel. Wilcox has had leading roles with JetBlue and other airlines, most recently JSX. It’s at the last one where his experience is drawing ire from conservatives, as he spearheaded the company’s misguided DEI initiatives.
Diversity efforts disincentive merit, punish achievement, and foment resentment. They invent high-paying jobs for individuals who have otherwise no capabilities, thereby stealing resources from worthier initiatives (or simply driving up costs for consumers).
And yet – under Wilcox’s “leadership” – DEI efforts soared at JSX. When JSX received its third perfect score from the far-left Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, Wilcox called it “one of the great honors of my 30+ year career in aviation.” Part of achieving this score was dedicating corporate resources to transition-related “coverage” for transgender employees and their dependents.
Wilcox also offered his company’s support for the violent, unpopular, long discredited Black Lives Matter movement. “We are actively listening and learning every day and realize there is still so much work to be done, but we can state very clearly and confidently, without hesitation, that Black Lives Matter and, we stand in solidarity as allies against racism, social injustice, and inequality," Wilcox wrote in a statement that’s still listed on JSX's website (and archived here if he finally takes it down).
JSX has even been offering new hires the chance to take “unconscious bias training” – which is basically POW brainwashing that ends up creating more animosity than it undoes.
Air travel is a luxury of the modern era. When most of us get in a plane these days, we think about what movie we’d like to watch or if we’re going to sleep. Flying in America is so safe, we don’t even think about the incredible people who enable that. No one wants pilots, aeronautic engineers, or air traffic controllers hired for anything other than their capabilities.
Boeing’s misguided efforts to “lead” the airline industry in diversity efforts have caused so many disasters there’s a Wikipedia page about it. The company (finally) realized they needed to return to hiring on merit rather than box-ticking, but some are saying the problems they created for themselves are “beyond fixable.”
And we’re going to consider someone at the FAA who hasn’t figured this out yet?
When Wilcox had the opportunity to fix an actual safety issue as an executive, he instead punished the messenger. When Wilcox was CEO of Jetsuite Air, pilot Colin Yates warned him about an “awful braking system” following a crash in 2011. There was a problem with a certain type of plane’s air brakes that made it incompatible with a certain type of runway. Instead of rewarding Yates for blowing the whistle on a life-threatening issue, Wilcox reprimanded and ultimately fired him. In 2019, the Department of Labor sided with Yates against Wilcox.
Beyond this, Wilcox has a history of donating to Democrats like Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Rick Larsen (both Democrats from Washington state). Larsen likes to causally use incendiary rhetoric like calling Trump “The greatest threat to US democracy.” There’s value in forgiving and forgetting, letting bygones be bygones, but when someone would eagerly hand your executioner his axe, don’t hire his friends.
DEI is on the retreat. The Democrats are on the retreat. Conservatives have the opportunity to move government in the right direction unlike any time since Reagan. Let’s not hire people who don’t want to help.
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