by James A. Bacon

Here in Virginia, conservatives are making principled arguments against Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in K-12 schools, higher education, and government.

DEI bureaucracies cost millions of dollars and crowd out spending for other priorities. DEI compels speech in some instances (pronouns and diversity statements) and suppresses it in others (through fear of microaggressions). DEI labels some groups as victims and others as oppressors, feeding a sense of grievance, victimhood and division. Far from fostering a sense of “belonging,” DEI feeds alienation. And far from creating broad-based opportunity, it undermines the principle of meritocracy.

But DEI is not the cause of everything that goes wrong. Given the polarization of our society today, it is vital for critics to be careful when indicting the ideology. Blaming it for tragedies, mishaps and abuses for which it bears no fault provides ammunition to its defenders, who don’t hesitate to label the entire anti-DEI project as racist, misogynist, transphobic, or whatever.

Unfortunately, that’s what happened last week when a helicopter collided with an American Airlines jet in Arlington, causing the deaths of 69 passengers and crew. President Trump pinned some of the blame for the tragedy on DEI in the Federal Aviation Administration.

During the press conference, the president spoke at length how the previous week he had issued an executive order reversing Biden-era policies. Motivated by DEI considerations, he said, the Federal Aviation Administration had actively recruited “workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions.” (Conservative websites later cited a lawsuit claiming that the Air Traffic Office had excluded hundreds of qualified White job candidates on the basis of race, but Trump did not make that claim in the press conference.)

Most Americans would agree that it would be troubling to hire employees with emotional and intellectual disabilities for the high-stress job of air traffic control where lives are on the line. While it may be true that the FAA hired people with emotional and mental disabilities (I don’t know), no evidence has surfaced that any such employee was connected to the crash.

News reports have noted that there was only one air traffic controller on the job at Reagan airport when two were called for. Other media accounts have pointed out that Congressional mandates have aggravated air-traffic congestion at the airport, the FAA has been chronically understaffed, and FAA communications systems are hopelessly antiquated. Many people, including Senator Tim Kaine, were saying that it was only a matter of time before a calamity occurred.

All these issues will be sorted out in the FAA investigation into the mid-air collision. If the air traffic controller on the job was a DEI hire, presumably that will come out. (We can be reasonably assured that the Trump administration will not suppress the fact.) Until recordings can be recovered from the aircraft black boxes, however, we won’t get a definitive view of what went wrong. At this point, connecting the collision to the personal limitations of a DEI hire — either the pilot or he air traffic controller — is raw and inflammatory speculation.

Trump’s press-conference digression into DEI smacked of the never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste political opportunism we became accustomed to from previous administrations. For good measure Trump trashed former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with the sarcastic aside that he was “a real winner.” (I remain unimpressed by Buttigieg, but there was no cause for such a comment in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy.)

Predictably, Trump’s assault on DEI prompted furious pushback.

Trump sparks outcry with implication that DEI policies are at fault in D.C. midair collision. — NBC News

Trump baselessly blames diversity hiring for deadly D.C. plane collision — PBS.

I could go on. For more reaction, consult Google. Delve deeper than the headlines and you’ll find commentary like this from Michele Norris, senior contributing editor at MSNBC:

It is shameful that Trump and [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth are politicizing a tragedy that killed all 67 people aboard the two aircraft. The real focus should be on the victims, the cause of the crash and air safety in America. But here we are with Hegseth looking straight into the camera to declare “the era of DEI is over at the Defense Department” — a non sequitur that upstaged the condolences and empathy those suffering a grievous loss deserve right now. Indeed, the compassion the entire country deserves — because who in America isn’t rattled by the collision of two aircraft just miles from the Pentagon and the White House?

After waxing indignant about Trump’s lack of compassion, the author leapfrogs to a full-throated denunciation of any criticism of DEI:

Words such as diversity, inclusion, quota, affirmative action and equity have been demonized and then weaponized and fully aerosolized in carefully constructed and well-funded campaigns to make people believe undeserving applicants are snatching opportunity away from hardworking Americans.

In such commentary, any nuanced criticism of DEI (see the second paragraph above) is dismissed as if it doesn’t exist. That matters because, as much as legacy media dominance is eroding, it still has the power to frame narratives.

What Trump should have done was tell the American people that FAA investigators were going to examine the causes of the crash — not just the proximate cause of how the military helicopter pilot happened to crash into the American Airlines plane but the broader institutional forces at work. The dangerous level of air traffic. Understaffing among air traffic controllers. Antiquated FAA technology. And, yes, the effect of DEI policies, if any, on the caliber of air-traffic controllers.

If DEI policies were incidental to the crash, the report would say so. If DEI policies contributed an additional risk factor, the report could say that as well…. but with evidence. The struggle to excise DEI from our institutions is too important to compromise with political grandstanding.