My friend was very flustered as he told me recently about how he fell asleep on a Chicago public transit train, and when he woke up, his wallet was gone. In fact, the pocket of his pants that had held his wallet was also gone. It seemed that somebody had quietly slipped into the seat beside him and meticulously cut away his entire pocket with a razor to make it easier to remove the wallet.
I think this same mentality is behind the aggressive attack by the squatter currently occupying the White House on “wokeness,” as some like to call it. The squatter wants us all to view it as his heroic war against the grave threat posed by all this talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But whatever he wants to call it, it’s just another way to frame the same stupid grievance.
I can see why the squatter feels threatened by people who are woke, because the opposite of being woke is being asleep. And they want us all to be asleep, because they figure we won’t fight back when they steal our wallets, which is all they want to do anyway.
People with disabilities are caught in the crosshairs when the squatter demonizes DEI with such glee. He made that abundantly clear when he spoke at a press conference in the aftermath of a fatal plane crash in January, when an American Airlines jet collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport outside of Washington, D.C., killing sixty-seven people.
The squatter started off the press conference just fine as he called for a moment of silence and said, “Today, we are all heartbroken.” But before long, he had blamed the fatal crash on the DEI policies of the Democrats who both preceded and succeeded him in office.
The squatter said that when he took office for the first time in 2017, “I changed the Obama standards [for the U.S. aviation system] from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. And then when I left office and [Joe] Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”
He was referring to federal policies and initiatives promoting DEI that were in place when Barack Obama was President.
But when the squatter moved into the White House after Obama, he tried to undo all of that by issuing an Executive Order in 2020 ironically titled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” The order declared that “this ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.” It instructed all federal agencies to eliminate anything in their policies and practices that promotes DEI and to withhold money from any of their private contractors that fail to do the same.
When Biden took office in 2021, one of the first things he did was rescind the squatter’s Executive Order to halt DEI initiatives by issuing his own Executive Order encouraging the federal government to “pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all,” including people of color, people living in poverty, and other marginalized groups. The order instructed federal agencies to “recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.”
When the squatter moved back into the White House earlier this year, on his first day in office he issued yet another Executive Order instructing all federal agencies to end their DEI initiatives, calling them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
A few days later, the squatter was at that White House press conference grumbling about how the effort by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to recruit and hire more workers with disabilities was an example of the kind of warped thinking that might have led to the fatal airplane disaster.
Organizations representing people with disabilities were quick to howl. Maria Town, president and chief executive officer of American Association of People with Disabilities, said in a statement, “The President is deliberately spreading falsehoods to demonize the quarter of American adults who live with disabilities rather than directing federal resources toward ensuring such a devastating tragedy never happens again. This is part of a broader coordinated attack on civil rights and equal opportunity across government. These attacks do nothing to keep Americans safe.”
Scott Thornhill, executive director of the American Council of the Blind, said, “We strongly denounce any insinuation that hiring individuals with disabilities had any part in this horrific event.”
Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, added, “One of the biggest factors keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce is baseless stigma around our ability to do our jobs.”
The day after the plane crash, the squatter’s administration issued what it called an “Immediate Assessment of Aviation Safety.” The memo stated that “problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations . . . minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration.” It claimed that during the squatter’s first term, his administration “raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence. But the Biden Administration egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all executive departments and agencies to implement dangerous ‘diversity equity and inclusion’ tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA.”
The squatter went on to order the Secretary of Transportation and the Administrator of the FAA to “review all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols made during the prior four years, and to take such corrective action as necessary to achieve uncompromised aviation safety.”
The squatter said that this review was consistent with his Presidential Memorandum of January 21, which was entitled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation.” This memo said that “all so-called DEI initiatives, including all dangerous preferencing policies or practices, shall immediately be rescinded,” and ordered the Secretary of Transportation and the FAA Administrator to “immediately return to nondiscriminatory, merit-based hiring, as required by law.”
The order also said that during the Biden Administration, “the FAA betrayed its mission by elevating dangerous discrimination over excellence. For example, prior to [Trump’s] Inauguration, the FAA diversity and inclusion website revealed that the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.”
It added that “illegal and discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring, including on the basis of race, sex, disability, or any other criteria other than the safety of airline passengers and overall job excellence, competency, and qualification, harms all Americans, who deserve to fly with confidence. It also penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”
Notice the stark departure that the squatter took from the usual type of rhetoric used to dehumanize people with disabilities. Traditionally, the propaganda that has been employed to justify screwing over disabled people has been sugarcoated in faux sympathy that says we have to be locked away in nursing homes and other such oppressive institutions for our own good. We have to be protected from becoming victims of our own inherent incompetence. It’s sad and unfortunate, but it’s inevitable.
But the blunt wording of the squatter’s memorandum on aviation, and all of his grousing about the hiring priorities of the FAA, directly vilifies people with disabilities. It equates being disabled with being so grossly inept that we pose a grave threat to the safety of all.
That sounds to me an awful lot like the harsh government rhetoric that was used to demonize disabled folks in Nazi Germany. In 1933, the German government passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” which mandated the forced sterilization of certain individuals with physical and mental disabilities.
In 1939, Adolf Hitler launched the Euthanasia Program. The codename for it was Aktion T4, because the address of its headquarters in Berlin was Tiergartenstrasse 4. The goal of T4 was the genocide of disabled people living in Germany and the German-occupied territories in the name of purifying the Aryan race. T4 had an estimated 70,000 victims, many of whom were killed in gas chambers that were disguised as showers.
The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda provided indispensable support for all of this by pumping out a steady stream of lies that depicted people with disabilities as nothing but parasitic burdens to society. A film produced by the ministry says disabled people live “life only as a burden.”
The squatter’s attack on DEI casts such a broad net that it can’t help but snare people with disabilities, too. In his zeal to steal everyone’s wallet, disabled people are bound to be collateral damage at best. And it’s a lot easier for the squatter and his thugs to steal our wallets when we are all asleep.